Action Alert: Urge Congress to Support the Thrifty Food Plan
In May, the House and the Senate both released summaries of proposed Farm Bill drafts after several months of inaction! The House draft, released by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glen Thompson (PA), has some good things and some bad things in it, which is a great place to begin negotiations. We are now much closer to a finished Farm Bill than we have been for most of the last year!
However, the Farm Bill has hit some road blocks over the last month. In the House as lawmakers are debating the future of the SNAP program. In the Senate, the ranking member of the agriculture committee has also released an alternate draft of the bill.
Recently, the ELCA Advocacy Office in Washington, DC has been working to celebrate the positive provisions in the draft and negotiate amendments to include the things that are missing. Today, we wanted to offer you a quick rundown on this newest draft. ELCA Advocacy has also put together a webpage full of real-time updates on the Farm Bill; it can be found here.
You can find the proposed bill text here.
Our most significant concern has to do with the Thrifty Food Plan. This draft does make sure to provide SNAP with funding, but it limits the Thrift Food Plan’s ability to update SNAP requirements. The Thrifty Food Plan is cost of groceries needed to provide a healthy, budget conscious diet for a family of four. This is calculated based on the price of groceries in a given area, nutrition science, and other factors. The Thrifty Food Plan is periodically adjusted to reflect new nutritional information, inflation, and all kinds of other information that informs our understanding of a healthy diet. Whatever cost is calculated is then used as the baseline to figure out how much assistance a given family in a given area needs from the SNAP program. This, in turn, helps determine how much funding the program as a whole will need.
As it is written, this draft would limit what factors can be used to adjust the plan; the Thrifty Food Plan can only raise the base cost of a meal to keep up with inflation, and not for any other reason. This poses a significant issue, as studies have recently found that SNAP benefits already don’t currently cover the full price of a meal in approximately 98% of counties. The authors of this change estimate that it will save about $30 billion over the next 10 years, but we are concerned that a $30 billion cut to the program will leave millions of hungry people without assistance.
This week, we are encouraging you to write to your congressmembers and advocate for the importance of the Thrifty Food Plan. Without the ability to be adjusted, SNAP will fail to meet the needs of participants in the future.
You can find contact information for your House member here.
Thank you for your advocay!
