Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Examining Issues Before Congress

House Agriculture Committee Farm Bill Would Cut Nearly 2 Million People Off SNAP

The farm bill, to be considered by the House of Representatives this week, would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) by almost $21 billion over the next decade, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, mostly working families with children and senior citizens.

The bill’s SNAP cuts would come on top of an across-the-board reduction in benefits that every SNAP recipient will experience starting November 1.
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Benefit Restrictions Beyond Those in Senate Immigration Bill Would Jeopardize Legalization for Many and Risk Severe Hardships for Others

Some senators have proposed changes to the bipartisan immigration bill that would make it much more difficult for large numbers of undocumented workers to convert to legal status and would discourage or prohibit legal immigrants, and in some cases their U.S. citizen family members, from receiving needed assistance. These include proposals to:

Require workers seeking to legalize their status to prove they have paid all taxes owed since they entered the United States, which could preclude millions of workers and their families from obtaining legal status.
Deny immigrants access to health insurance even after they have converted to “lawful permanent resident” status.
Deny the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to people working legally in “registered provisional immigrant” status.
Make it hard, or even impossible, for low- and moderate-income workers to show they will not become a “public charge.”
Change long-standing rules for the treatment of Social Security and Medicare taxes that workers paid while undocumented.

Such changes would not only harm immigrants converting to legal status but also imperil millions of children, an important part of our future workforce. Read more

More: Food Assistance analyses

Facing Our Fiscal Challenges

Too Little to Go Around:
House Appropriations Plan to Increase Defense and Homeland Security Requires Even Deeper Cuts in Other Programs

"The House Appropriations Committee on May 21st approved, on a party-line vote, a plan to apportion discretionary funding for fiscal year 2014 among its 12 appropriations subcommittees in a way that would override a key provision of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) and shift tens of billions of dollars from domestic programs to defense and other security programs.

"The plan, crafted by Chairman Harold Rogers, is designed to largely reflect the priorities in the budget resolution that the House passed in March. Total discretionary funding under the Rogers plan would equal the total amount that the BCA allows in 2014 if sequestration remains in effect. But defense would receive substantially more funding — and non-defense programs would receive substantially less — than the BCA allows under sequestration."

The Rogers Plan: