Page 80 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

stamp administrator, argued that about half of the cuts made by the 1996 welfare law were still in
place despite the 2002 and 2008 farm bills.

The 2013 farm bill crackup
The House Agriculture Committee’s 2012 bill, which was never debated on the floor of the
Republican-controlled chamber, would have cut nutrition spending by $16 billion over 10 years,
according to estimates at the time, largely by tightening categorical eligibility and the utility
allowance. The Democratic-controlled Senate, refused to go that far, passing a bill that was
estimated to cut $4 billion from nutrition.

The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Frank Lucas, R-Okla., couldn’t talk the GOP
leadership into finishing the farm bill in 2012, forcing Congress to pass a short-term extension of
the 2008 law, and setting up new battle over food stamp spending in the 114th Congress in 2013.

The Congressional Budget Office almost immediately threw a new hurdle in the way by
issuing new estimates of the 2012 bills that sharply lowered the estimated savings from nutrition
programs. In talking to state welfare directors, CBO analysts decided that tightening the utility
allowance wouldn’t save nearly as much money as they thought. Their revision wiped out the
projected $4 billion SNAP cut in the Senate bill and reduced the estimated nutrition savings in
the House bill to $11.7 billion.

Lucas knew he had to sharply increase the cut to SNAP
if he had any chance of winning enough GOP support
to get the bill through the House by the summer, with
enough time to work out a compromise version with
the Senate before the temporary farm bill extension
expired. So, in May 2013, his committee passed a new
version of the bill that the CBO estimated would slash
nutrition spending by more than $20 billion. Savings
were primarily achieved by further tightening the
eligibility and utility provisions.

But even that wasn’t enough. Conservatives were
determined to do something to increase the work
requirements, and they got a decisive last-minute boost
from Majority Leader Eric Cantor. When the bill was
headed toward a final vote in the House, Cantor threw
his support behind an amendment offered by then-
Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., to allow states to
impose work requirements on SNAP beneficiaries and Rep. Frank Lucas to
keep some of the money that would be saved.

For the small number of Democrats who were willing to stomach the bill’s $20 billion SNAP
cut, the Sutherland amendment was the last straw. The farm-SNAP coalition literally snapped.
The bill failed, 195-234. Only 24 Democrats voted for it. Sixty-two Republicans, many of them
hardline conservatives who were skeptical of farm programs as well as SNAP, voted against it.

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