Page 75 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

1994, up from $17.5 billion five years earlier, and participation had grown from less than 11
million to more than 14 million.

Clinton campaigned in 1992 on welfare reform, but the issue went nowhere until Republicans
won control of both the House and Senate in 1994. Led by Gingrich, House Republicans
immediately began carrying out the campaign promises they made in the Contract with America.
Gingrich’s plan was to radically downsize both AFDC, food stamps and other welfare programs.
The overhaul of food stamps was to be carried outside the farm bill – the normal way of altering
the program since 1973 – and the program was to be converted into block-grants so that states
could run the program as they saw fit.

The idea of block-granting the program quickly ran into opposition from farm-district
Republicans as well as Democrats. By late February, as the House Agriculture Committee
prepared to vote on the food stamp provisions of the broader welfare reform effort, Republicans
dropped the idea of block grants.

Roberts, now the Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, says the block-grant idea raised
several concerns. For one, it would remove the program from the Agriculture committees’
jurisdiction and make it harder for them to find the savings necessary to reach the targets set by
the GOP. And, he says, there were also concerns about allowing states to run the program on
their own. “If we block grant it to the states, it will be a hodge-podge of different kinds of
things that would be available in each state, so we’d probably have people moving
wherever the food stamps were,” he said in a recent interview.

Newspaper columnist Carl Rowan was among those celebrating the Agriculture committee’s
opposition to block grants. Gingrich “hit a speed bump bigger than a month-old bagel,
when it comes to plans to wipe out the federal food-stamp program,” he wrote.

“It is not that the 27 million poor people who eat off this $23-billion-a-year program have yet
staged a violent revolution; it is that the farmers, supermarket chains, bakers and bottlers of soda
pop have cried 'Foul!' They want no part of a scheme to abolish the food-stamp and other
nutrition programs and fight hunger by substituting block grants to states.”

In the end, Congress passed the 1996 farm bill, which re-authorized food stamps for two years,
and later in the year agreed with Clinton on a sweeping welfare reform bill, the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act. The block-grant idea was gone.

Clinton had vetoed an earlier version that contained it – but the legislation made
substantial reforms to food stamps that would slash participation to 17.8 million people in
just two years. That was a stunning reduction of 10 million people from the 1994
enrollment.

Among other things, the bill eliminated eligibility for most legal immigrants, reduced the
maximum allotments, required states to start providing the benefits via electronic benefit transfer
(EBT) cards by 2002, and set a limit for how long able-bodied adults without dependents
(ABAWDs) could receive benefits.

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