shut in the nuthouse

Bryce Covert at The Nation:

M, the mother of two young children living in Tucson, Arizona, works full-time but has been relying on about $700 a month in food stamps to make sure her children are fed ever since they were born. Keeping access to the benefit requires recertifying her income and eligibility every six months, so last August she got her paperwork ready for the renewal process. She sent her documents every way possibly except for by fax—online, through e-mail, through the mail, and in person at an office—to make sure her family stayed enrolled. But then M—The Nation is referring to her by an initial to protect her from a past abusive partner—received a letter from the Arizona Department of Economic Security saying she hadn’t included some of the required documents, even though she had sent in what was typically sufficient: her pay stubs, her rental agreement, the rates for her children’s childcare. “I was quite surprised,” she said. In March, she tried again, reapplying for food stamps. This time, after she turned in the paperwork, the state requested documentation from a job “that I’ve never heard of,” but that the state claimed she is doing on top of her actual job, which put her income above the eligibility threshold. When M went to a state office to report that she doesn’t work for that company, she was told to file an identity-theft report.

So she took time off work to not only submit paperwork to the Social Security office but to file both a police and an FBI report. Despite sending in what she was told was necessary to fix the problem, she hasn’t received a response from the state. When she calls for an update, she can’t get through to anyone. “There’s not a lot of employees that can assist you,” she said. The people working at the offices tell her she to just keep calling. “I feel like it’s very disorganized.”

In the meantime, her family hasn’t gotten any support through the food stamp program, leaving her trying to make ends meet on her income of $18 an hour. It “has been really, really hard, because I have to manage my whole life around my paycheck,” she said. She’s cut down on her own meals to give her kids more to eat. She feels constantly torn between getting them healthy food and the cheaper food she can buy more of. “They’re very smart and they have noticed. They’re like, ‘You know mom, we used to get strawberries and blueberries and raspberries,’” she said. She often tells them “no” when they request food items at the grocery store. “It’s hard as a parent because you do want to give them everything but it’s also like, OK. those five dollars are going to be toward diapers or gas or rent.”

[...] M is one of millions of Americans who have lost food stamps since last summer. Republicans passed HR1 last July, or the One Big Beautiful Bill, entirely along party lines, enacting the largest cut to food stamps, also known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, in history. The legislation reduced SNAP by about $187 billion over the following decade.

The bill achieved that cut through a number of changes. It tightened the program’s existing work requirement by applying it to people up to age 65 and to parents with children 14 and older. It also narrowed exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth, and barred undocumented immigrants. Starting next year, states will have to cover 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs, instead of the 50 percent they have been covering. If states are found to have high payment-error rates—meaning they underpaid or overpaid too many recipients—they’ll have to chip in even more to cover the actual SNAP benefits, too.

Since the bill was enacted, more than 4 million people have fallen off of SNAP’s rolls, a 10 percent decline. That includes more than 800,000 children—and that is only from the 13 states with available data. While the number of people enrolled in SNAP had been declining before HR1 went into effect last July, the trend has “accelerated significantly in the months after that,” said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The reductions have occurred in every state across the country, and participation has dropped by 10 percent or more in 21 states. But some have seen even more significant drops. Arizona is so far the worst: Half of all people who had been enrolled are now going without food stamps.

[...] HR1 already added more administrative burdens to the program, requiring states to verify immigration status and compliance with the work requirement. They have received no extra funding to increase administrative staffing, and many agencies, including Arizona’s, were already understaffed. Last summer, Arizona cut department staff by 5 percent. “It creates this mountain of paperwork that state agencies have to act on,” Llobrera said. Staff simply may not be able to review all of it in time. That can sometimes mean that, even when someone has submitted everything required of them, their case gets closed before someone even reviews their application.

☝️🤔

Dead-dead from the beginning.