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A peek at White House budget wish list
Story Date: 2/16/2018
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Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 2/15/18
The White House Office of Management and Budget wants Congress to hand over more money now that there's more in the kitty. On the wish list: $30 million to test and evaluate the USDA's controversial "America's Harvest Box" concept, Pro Ag's Helena Bottemiller Evich reports.
The requests, outlined in a document obtained by POLITICO, asks for funding for a line item called "SNAP Food Basket Grants." The OMB writes that the money would provide grants to "a small number of states to design, implement, and evaluate the provision of a package of USDA Foods in combination with the traditional Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" that provides funds on electronic benefit cards for use at grocery stores.
Such a program could save $12 billion in 2019, and $129 billion over 10 years, OMB contends. "These grants would provide important policy and administrative lessons to inform efficient and effective nationwide implementation," it says.
Harvest box dreams: It's not clear how likely it is that Congress would grant such a funding request after the harvest box proposal was excoriated by the anti-hunger groups, Democrats, retailers and the media.
Political gambit: The New York Times reported this week that administration officials acknowledged that the concept had little chance of being implemented anytime soon (we already knew that - Congress is still in charge). But there was another tidbit in the story that got at what many in Washington are debating behind the scenes: Is the box thing for real, or merely a distraction?
The article characterized the food-box proposal as "a political gambit by fiscal hawks in the administration aimed at outraging liberals and stirring up members of the president's own party working on the latest version of the farm bill." It would also help set the tone for other changes to SNAP, like stricter work requirements (which, as POLITICO has reported for months, is already being weighed). But farm bill watchers are all too aware of the fact that big changes to SNAP spell doom for the farm bill, plain and simple.
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