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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Oregon Food Bank, a network of food pantries and meal sites in The Beaver State, has issued a warning against what they see as a proposal to cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits making its way to the House of Representatives.
The Republican-proposed policy, part of the House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson's farm bill proposal, threatens to rollback the Biden administration's 2021 changes to the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP). It would calculate SNAP benefits increases based on inflation alone, rather than dietary cost studies.
Historically, the maximum amount that SNAP beneficiaries can receive every month is based on the TFP, a basket of food representing a healthy diet. This is then adjusted every five years based on the overall cost of food inflation, or Consumer Price Index (CPI).
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In 2021, for the first time in decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated the TFP to account for real purchasing power. The Biden administration had instructed the agency to look into how much the cost of a "balanced, healthy and frugal" diet would have changed since the early 1960s, as well as how much time parents could spend cooking nowadays. This new approach added an extra $36 per month per person to SNAP benefits.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan think tank, wrote that Thompson's farm bill proposal "would reportedly freeze the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), the basis for SNAP benefits, outside of inflation adjustments." This would lead to "harmful" cuts to SNAP benefits that would "weaken the program's ability to meet its core mission" of fighting hunger among the most-vulnerable Americans.
"Thompson's proposal would return SNAP to the situation in place before 2021, when the cost of the TFP was adjusted only for inflation, resulting in SNAP benefits becoming increasingly inadequate over time," the center wrote. "USDA had to assume that people purchased an extremely unrealistic set of foods in order to claim that SNAP benefits were nutritionally adequate."
The CBPP added: "Congress should not return to a policy that left many low-income families experiencing food insecurity and hardship."
Thompson said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates his proposal would result in about $30 billion SNAP cut over the next 10 years, the CBPP writes. The cuts will increase over the long term.
More than 40 million Americans are estimated to rely on SNAP benefits to put enough healthy food on the table every month.
Oregon food banks said that a rollback of the changes and the expected cuts to SNAP benefits would be disastrous for struggling Americans.
"We are consistently seeing and hearing from our communities and seeing in the data that the hunger crisis in Oregon isn't going away, and in fact, it's increasing," Jacki Ward Kehrwald, a spokesperson for the state's main food-bank network, Partners for Hunger-Free Oregon, told Portland-based television station KATU on Thursday.
"It (SNAP) is the number-one most-important thing we can do to support Oregonians, and it's pretty frightening to see this proposal going through right now," she added.
The Oregon Food Bank is now urging Oregon Reps. Andrea Salinas and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who are both Agriculture Committee members, to vote against the proposal.
Newsweek contacted Oregon Food Bank and Salinas' office for comment by email on Friday morning, while Thompson's and Chavez-DeRemer's offices were contacted by phone.
In a written statement shared with KATU, Salinas, a Democrat, said: "I am so disappointed to see Republicans pushing these and other partisan demands in a poorly thought-out proposal that has no chance of becoming law."
In a written statement to the news channel, Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican, said she was supportive of SNAP and "proudly helped lead legislation that's expected to be included in the Farm Bill to speed up the processing of SNAP applications."
Chavez-DeRemer added that food banks were stoking unjustified fears against the bill. "To be clear, the House's pending Farm Bill proposal would simply ensure that no drastic changes—including future potential efforts to slash benefits—can be made to the program by unilateral executive order while also protecting continued adjustments for inflation," she wrote. "Spreading politically motivated rumors about cuts is irresponsible and a disservice to Oregon families who rely on the program."
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