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SNAP Work Requirement Could Stress Food Charities

Impending changes to the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will put a work requirement in place for some West Virginia residents who rely on the program to buy groceries.

About 168,000 low-income households in West Virginia use SNAP, and the state is fourth in the nation for residents using emergency food assistance.

SNAP is a federal program and states have discretion over how they run it. The impending changes in West Virginia are due to a 2018 state law that set a work requirement that requires able-bodied adults without dependents to work 20 hours a week to receive benefits. Lawmakers said the overhaul to SNAP was to combat program fraud.

The law gave counties the ability to waive that work requirement, including rural counties with limited jobs, but under the legislation that expired Oct. 1 of this year.

The current federal health emergency under COVID-19 bans states from cutting off emergency benefits like SNAP.

But once President Joe Biden expires the federal COVID/pandemic emergency order, the work requirement goes into effect for all 55 counties regardless of their job or poverty rates.

Right now, the work requirement will impact around 24,000 SNAP recipients around the state, according to West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources data. Thousands of SNAP recipients will be unenrolled from benefits if they’re unable to prove they’re working the required hours.

Cyndi Kirkhart, director of Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, said the impending change will drive more people to already-struggling food charities. The food bank is currently serving 25 percent more people than it was pre-pandemic.

“Many of the part-time positions that are available for folks, they aren’t guaranteed hours, so folks will really be concerned about meeting those minimums,” Kirkhart said. “Historically, we’ve seen people have to work more than one part-time job so that their benefits would be maintained.”

Sen. Charles Clements, R-Wetzel, introduced legislation last session to allow counties to continue waiving the work requirement. The bill didn’t make it into committee for discussion.

While Clements said that he wants to see people that receive benefits working, he understands that it’s not an option for all state residents who rely on SNAP.

“We often have other restrictions that can prohibit it from happening. While they don’t have dependents, they may have to take care of someone like an elderly parent or something,” he said. “To just arbitrarily say, ‘No county is eligible for this thing,’ I think is not necessarily good.”

Clements plans to reintroduce the legislation in the 2023 session that would allow counties to waive the work requirement.

Some SNAP Recipients In W.Va. Could See Benefits Increase During Coronavirus Pandemic

The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Children and Families announced in a news release Tuesday that recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, may be eligible for two waivers from the federal government.

One waiver will provide an extension of the renewal period for those already receiving SNAP benefits. This waiver affects those who are due for an eligibility review in March, April or May. The release states these individuals would have their review delayed for six months.

The second waiver allows for a supplemental payment to households that were approved for SNAP benefits prior to April 1. These payments are expected to be released to Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT cards, on April 3 and May 1.

DHHR said in their release that all SNAP recipients who are eligible for either of these waivers will be notified.

New SNAP Rule Could Hit Ohio Valley Hardest

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates almost 700,000 people across the country will lose food stamps in a new Trump Administration rule announced Wednesday. Regional anti-hunger advocates and policy analysts say the Ohio Valley — and Appalachia in particular — could be disproportionately affected by this rule.

In general, the rule will make it harder for states to waive requirements that low-income able-bodied adults without dependents work (or participate in a work program) for at least 20 hours or lose their food stamps. USDA officials said the rule is to encourage SNAP recipients to find employment.

“We need to encourage people by giving them a helping hand but not allowing it to become an infinitely giving hand,” USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a conference call Wednesday. “What’s happening is that states are seeking waivers for wide swaths of their populations, and millions of people who could work are continuing to receive SNAP benefits.”

Current SNAP rules limit recipients to receiving three months of aid out of a three-year period, unless they’re working or enrolled in worker training or other education. But states can issue waivers to high-unemployment, economically distressed counties where it may be more difficult to find employment to meet this requirement. Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia are all receiving partial waivers for the newest fiscal year.

This new rule, first proposed in February and planned to go into effect in April, will raise the bar for how economically distressed a county has to be to qualify. Specifically, a county would have to have an unemployment rate that is 20 percent higher than the national average while also having an average unemployment rate of six percent or higher over 24 months.

According to the research group Policy Matters Ohio, 41 counties in Ohio currently receive waivers — most of them in the southeastern Appalachian portion of the state. An analysis of SNAP data last year by The Daily Yonder, an outlet reporting on rural issues, shows out of the top 100 counties most reliant on SNAP, about 20 of those are in Kentucky and West Virginia.

In Clay County, not far from West Virginia’s capital, nearly half of the county’s 9,000 people receive SNAP benefits. According to a 2018 USDA report, SNAP recipients in the Ohio Valley made up nearly 6 percent of all recipients in the country, totaling an estimated 2,305,000 people that year.

Advocates working on poverty and hunger issues say that means the rule change will hit harder in the region.

“You will not see food banks make this up. We cannot make up for the loss of these kinds of benefits. We just can’t,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks. “If we see a massive surge on our system, the very agencies in our communities will give away what food they have, and when the food is gone, the shelves are empty, they’ll close their doors.”

Hamler-Fugitt also said she considers “able-bodied adults with dependents” to be a misnomer, because other people including extended family members that are not legal dependents could rely on the food budget provided by SNAP.

Dustin Pugel, a policy analyst at the left-leaning research group Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, said most counties in Kentucky already qualify for waivers. But this new rule could make it difficult for states to request new waivers in the future, especially during economic downturns.

He said while more than 100 counties in Kentucky qualify for waivers currently, only around 30 would qualify under the new rule.

“There’s over 4,000 retailers in the state that accept SNAP benefits. And they’re keenly aware of people who come in each month to buy their groceries,” Pugel said. “When you start losing that, you also start losing the economic benefit it has to grocery stores and the benefit to the broader economy.”

Pugel said this new rule is only one of several the Trump administration is proposing to alter access to SNAP, including a rule that could take away benefits from more than three million people across the country.

Other analysts say the continuing collapse of the coal industry in the Ohio Valley will only increase reliance on the program. Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, points to the recent bankruptcy of Ohio-based coal giant Murray Energy as an example of that decline.

“There are entire swaths of our southern coalfields that have yet to recover at all from the collapse of the coal market. So, the impact is very simple, it just hurts people,” Distefano said. “When these federal food assistance dollars come out, they’re just pulled out of the economy, there will be parts in West Virginia where the only place to buy groceries will close.”

Census Bureau Shows Poverty Decreasing Across U.S., But W.Va. Lags Behind

The U.S. Census Bureau released data last week that showed the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line went down for the first time since the Great Recession of 2008.

Overall, the number of people living in poverty, nationwide, decreased by half a percentage point from 2017 to 2018 covering nearly 1.5 million people.

“We saw some really good news that for the fourth straight year in a row, poverty went down in the United States. But it remains unacceptable that 38 million people still live below the poverty line,” said Amelia Kegan, the Legislative Director on Domestic Policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

The national poverty line is set at about $25,400 for a family of four. The U.S. poverty rate stands at 11.8 percent. But West Virginia is still lagging behind.

“West Virginia ranked number four when we’re looking at poverty rates over 2017 and 2018. And so, it is significantly above the national average of a two year average of about 16.5%,” Kegan said.

Two of the most powerful anti-poverty programs are the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, preventing 7.9 million people from falling into poverty, including 4.2 million children according to Kegan. Another vital tool is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

“The data also showed that the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps, prevented about 3 million people from falling into poverty back in 2018,” she said.

More than 340,000 people in West Virginia receive SNAP benefits each month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The participation varies by parts of the state, however. In the first congressional district, about 13 percent of all households receive SNAP.

In the second congressional district, about 15 percent of households receive SNAP benefits. In the third congressional district, that number climbs to 22 percent of all households.

How a Proposed SNAP Eligibility Revision Could Affect Ohio Valley Recipients

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced this week a proposal to tighten the rules on who qualifies for food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). USDA estimates more than three million people across the country would lose SNAP benefits in an effort to prevent fraud. Anti-hunger advocates in the Ohio Valley say the more than two million people in the region who use the benefits would be impacted.

The department wants to change what they call “broad-based categorical eligibility” in the SNAP program. The regulation allows people that don’t have a low enough income to qualify for food stamps to get them in other ways. For example, people can also qualify if they receive assistance from other federal programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

“Eighty-nine percent of the people that we serve are what we refer to as working, poor families,” said Facing Hunger Food Bank Executive Director Cynthia Kirkhart. “So those are folks that are working one or more jobs to try to make a living. And those families usually have children.”

Kirkhart said her food bank in Huntington, West Virginia serves 116,000 people across 17 counties in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. Most of the people she serves get food stamps through categorical eligibility. She said these families often use the money they save on food because of SNAP to build emergency savings or pay other bills.

The USDA argues that by tightening SNAP eligibility rules, the department can save billions of dollars by preventing abuses of the program. The department pointed to an example of a wealthy Minnesota man who claims he collected thousands of dollars in food stamps.

But Kirkhart said without the current rules, she sees some in the Ohio Valley may lose that extra support.

“The resources they may receive otherwise — pay compensation or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — more of that goes to buy food,” Kirkhart said. “They can’t pay for rent or utilities, or fuel for their cars to get to their jobs.”

If individuals can’t get food stamps through categorical eligibility, then the traditional way to determine food stamp eligibility is through figuring out whether their gross income, along with combined assets like a car, is low enough to qualify. And that can take time to figure out.

“When I was a case worker before broad-based categorical eligibility… I would spend a lot of energy having my applicants go to the bank and prove that they had 42 dollars in the bank,” said Jason Dunn, a policy analyst with the advocacy group Kentucky Voices For Health.

Dunn is a former director of the Kentucky Division of Family Support, an agency that helps manages SNAP eligibility in the state. He said it can take a significant amount of time to determine if gross income is low enough to qualify, and that categorical eligibility speeds up this process.

With the potential of tighter rules, more people wouldn’t automatically qualify for SNAP and have to go through this “asset test”. Dunn said this could create a backlog of cases that could ultimately increase the wait time for people who need SNAP.

“When you add that for hundreds of thousands of cases, it really adds up in time and effort on the state’s part,” Dunn said.

State agencies in the Ohio Valley don’t yet know exactly how many people could be affected by this proposal. Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia combined have 2,221,188 people signed up for SNAP benefits as of April 2019, according to USDA data. And a report last year by Daily Yonder, an online news outlet that focuses on rural issues, showed rural counties — including in central Appalachia — are more reliant on SNAP.

“Probably disproportionately [people in Appalachia] would be more impacted than in urban areas because of the concentration of SNAP recipients,” said Ohio Association of Foodbanks Executive Director Lisa Hamler-Fugitt.

Hamler-Fugitt said grocery stores in rural areas that would otherwise be food desertsdepend on money from food stamp sales. She said if fewer people are eligible for food stamps, these stores could see less revenue.

“When SNAP comes under attack and results in people being unable to receive a modest benefit and to be able to stand in grocery store check-out lines, then what happens is that those retailers that rely on not only cash sales but SNAP sales are very vulnerable,” Hamler-Fugitt said. “And many of them, if you know anything about the grocery industry, they operate on very slim margins. What we’re at risk of is losing even more full-service grocery stores.”

Hamler-Fugitt said that could impact people beyond those who use SNAP benefits.

The proposed rule is open for public comments for two months.

May 29, 1961: Elderson Muncie Receives First Food Stamps in Nation

On May 29, 1961, Alderson Muncy of Bradshaw in McDowell County received the first food stamps in the nation. Muncy, an unemployed miner and father of 15, took his stamps to John Henderson’s supermarket in Welch and bought two watermelons.

The new federal program was intended to provide supplemental income for welfare recipients and families below certain income levels. Because of high unemployment and poverty rates, West Virginia has been a focus of the program since its inception.

In his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy had visited West Virginia several times and was moved by the malnutrition and poverty he saw. As president, Kennedy established a pilot food-stamp program for low-income families. West Virginia was the first of eight states to issue stamps. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent, and West Virginia became the first state to implement it statewide.

The number of food-stamp recipients has always been high in West Virginia. As of 2015, nearly one in five West Virginians received food stamps—the sixth highest per capita total in the nation.