FILE – In this Jan. 12, 2015 file photo, a supermarket displays stickers indicating they accept food stamps in West New York, N.J. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) The Trump administration should get ready for a food fight.
The Department of Agriculture is preparing a rule to end a major driver of welfare fraud. Thanks to a regulatory loophole that’s existed since the Clinton years, middle- and upper-class Americans have been getting on food stamps, despite not qualifying for the low-income program. Yet once the administration rolls back this fraud-by-design, Democrats and their media allies will immediately claim that Donald Trump is kicking up to a million kids off federally funded school lunches. Americans deserve to know: This is false, and not a single child will go hungry.
If it seems confusing that a regulation on food stamps also affects school lunches, welcome to the mess that is modern welfare. The federal government allows states to let people obtain food stamps even if they exceed the program’s income or asset requirements — a policy known as broad-based categorical eligibility. These wealthier people simply have to receive a different benefit, even something as silly as a taxpayer-funded brochure. As a result, millionaires have been able to get on food stamps. My organization estimates that 5.9 million ineligible people are enrolled in the program via this loophole.
But the abuse doesn’t end with food stamps. Federal rules also say that children automatically qualify for the National School Lunch Program if their families receive benefits like food stamps. In other words, the children of Americans making six or seven figures have a backdoor way to eat for free or reduced price at public schools. The abuse of taxpayer generosity has cascaded across multiple programs.
The Trump administration is moving to close the original food stamp loophole, so that only people who qualify for the program can enroll. This reform would have a secondary effect of removing some ineligible families from the National School Lunch Program. In response, the left will tug at the most emotional of heartstrings — the fear that somewhere, somehow, a child will get hurt.
Leftist organizations are already declaring that between 500,000 and a million kids will lose school meals. But they don’t account for those who will remain eligible for the program through other means; they also ignore the slew of existing state and federal programs that guarantee free school meals for virtually everyone who currently receives them.
I estimate that 99.9 percent of children on the National School Lunch Program will still receive their taxpayer-funded meals after the eligibility loophole is closed. Barely 2,900 students will be removed—and they’re all the children of middle- and upper-class families who do not legally qualify for the program. They never needed the taxpayer’s help to eat lunch at school. The real scandal is that taxpayers were feeding them in the first place.
Yet while the effects on school lunches will be equal parts minimal and necessary, the savings for food stamps will be substantial and long overdue. Removing ineligible people from the program will save taxpayers more than $10 billion annually while preserving food stamps for those who actually need them. That’s always important, especially at a time when the food stamp program’s costs have ballooned to more than $100 billion a year.
Don’t expect to hear these facts once the Trump administration rolls out its rule. In the eyes of the left, any decline in welfare spending is by definition bad, and Democrats transparently want to move in the other direction — toward welfare for all, no matter the cost. But the safety net is supposed to be limited, temporarily helping the truly vulnerable until they can get back on their feet. It was never meant to fund millionaires, nor pay for meals for wealthier kids. The Trump administration can win the coming food fight.
Paige Terryberry is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
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