Bridging the gap

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Thursday the 30th of October.

This is WORLD Radio and we thank you for listening. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up on The World and Everything in It: hitting pause on food stamps.

With no agreement for government funding in sight after a nearly month-long shutdown, federal programs are sounding alarms.

MAST: The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that by Saturday, it won’t have the money to help buy groceries for families enrolled in SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. What happens if lawmakers don’t make a deal before the deadline?

Washington Bureau reporter Carolina Lumetta has the story.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Food banks in Washington, D.C., and across the country are expecting a surge in demand after this weekend.

MILLER: Our pantry is a non -perishable emergency style pantry…

That’s Julie Miller. She’s the director of operations at Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill. The church runs a food pantry only a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building.

MILLER: Because it's an emergency style pantry it's meant to be a stopgap as folks find other regular food pantries that operate more frequently than we do.

While food pantries are a helpful resource, Miller told WORLD’s Josh Schumacher they aren’t designed to feed the public at large.

MILLER: They are supposed to you know provide help in in gaps of life if if, you know, something were to happen…

Our bag of food that we hand out is created to be able to support a family of four for about like two days as they look for other resources.

Long-term public assistance is where programs like SNAP, better known as food stamps, come in. Families in the program get electronic benefit transfer cards that work like debit cards to buy groceries. SNAP deposits money onto the cards each month for recipients to buy certain kinds of food. Audio here from a USAFacts video online:

USA FACTS: It's got to be groceries and can't be items such as alcohol, tobacco, or foods that are hot at the point of sale.

Republican lawmakers updated eligibility rules earlier this year to set more strict work requirements. They also made sure illegal immigrants aren’t allowed to enroll. Roughly 42 million people used the program last year… That’s 12 percent of the U.S. population.

HAWLEY: My view is that no child in this country oughta go to bed hungry because a bunch of politicians in Washington can’t decide what they want to do.

Last week, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri proposed legislation that would keep SNAP funded without ending the shutdown.

Vermont Senator Peter Welch is the lone Democrat to co-sponsor Hawley’s bill. I asked him about his support.

WELCH: The point is to protect healthcare for people who have it. It's not to take food from people who need it. So that's why I'm co -sponsoring.

LUMETTA: Are you concerned it might prolong the shutdown?

WELCH: I'm really concerned about people not getting fed.

But other Senate Democrats say it isn’t that simple. In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, 46 Senate Democrats say that the U-S-D-A has money in reserve that could fund SNAP. It’s just refusing to use it. Twenty-five state governments and the District of Columbia have sued, making the same argument. So far, the agency insists that is not the case.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons from Delaware told me that if SNAP funding is cut off, it will be Republicans’ fault.

COONS I think that Republicans should be negotiating with us about reopening the government so that millions of Americans aren't hungrier, less healthy, and poorer.

And he said that the blame goes all the way to the top:

COONS: President Trump ran on reducing people's costs and making America healthy again. His decisions so far as an administration have gone in the wrong direction on both.

Every Democrat in the Senate has thrown their support behind a different bill also aimed at funding SNAP through the shutdown. But on the Senate floor yesterday, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he won’t bring this bill up for a vote.

THUNE: This bill is a cynical attempt to provide political cover for Democrats to allow them to carry on their government shutdown even longer. And we're not going to let them pick winners and losers. It's time to fund everybody.

Meanwhile, Republicans say they’ve been trying to get SNAP funded, and it’s Democrats who aren’t cooperating with them.

Here’s what Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told me.

LANKFORD: We've literally tried three different ways to be able to get onto something. The CR, just to be able to make sure it happens. The full year appropriations bill, that was blocked. And then Senator Hawley’s proposal, but right now it's, ‘Why can't we get resolution on this?’

Debate over the dueling bills got heated yesterday, as Majority Leader Thune and Democrat New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Lujan yelled at each other across the chamber.

THUNE: SNAP recipients shouldn’t go without food. People should be getting paid in this country. And we tried to do that 13 times! And you voted no 13 times!

LUJAN: When you have to negotiate, when you hold power, when you’re in the majority, you meet people. You pull them in. You don’t tell them, “you know where my office is.”

While lawmakers wrangle over funding, private sector food banks are bracing for the shortfall. Here’s Julie Miller from the Lutheran Church of the Reformation’s food pantry again.

MILLER: The need is definitely going to increase so we're trying to figure out how we can best support those who you know may need to come more frequently or you know come up with we other resources that folks can use in addition to us… Hunger is something that affects everything and should not be taken lightly.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta in Washington

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