The Cruelest Cuts

The line for food starts forming at 7:30 each morning. Mostly women, many small children and some single men are shaking off daybreak's chill hoping to be one of the first 100 people let into the Storehouse, New Mexico's largest emergency food pantry. It isn't that this free food distribution center, located just off Albuquerque's historic Route 66, is stingy; it's just that the Storehouse has enough donated food to feed only 100 families per day.

"In 1999, we served the equivalent of 200,000 meals each year," says Lee Maynard, the Storehouse's executive director. "Right now, we're serving 1.4 million meals per year, 45 percent more than last year. Things are getting worse." And if the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has its way with essential safety net services like the food stamp program, things will be getting much worse for Maynard and thousands of his counterparts at emergency food sites across the nation.

To comply with President Bush's budget proposal, which includes tax cuts for the wealthy and more money for the Iraq war, both houses of Congress issued separate budget resolutions that prescribe how much money each of its committees must cut. Where those cuts will come from is up to the respective committees. For instance, the House and Senate agriculture committees oversee tens of billions of dollars in expenditures for programs like conservation, food stamps and crop subsidies for commodities like corn, wheat and cotton. According to their respective resolutions, the Senate Agriculture Committee is required to cut $2.8 billion over five years from these programs while the more aggressive House must chop $5.3 billion. Whatever differences emerge between the two committee's budgets--and there will be differences--will be resolved by a House and Senate conference committee.

So where will the cuts come from? The president's budget showed uncommon courage by proposing a much-needed limitation on crop subsidies, considered sacrosanct by American agriculture's commodity producers. Republican congressional leaders don't appear to be so bold. Rather than face the ire of the likes of the American Corn Growers Association, House and Senate leaders may find it easier to meet their budgetary reduction quota by cutting food stamps, a program whose recipients don't have access to the well-heeled lobbyists of "Big Ag."

Bush did propose a $600 million cut in the food stamp program over five years. While not a kingly sum by Washington standards, it's still enough to eliminate 300,000 lower-income Americans from the nation's most important nutrition program. But Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, may not be content with making only 300,000 people hungrier. Both chairmen have made statements to the press indicating that a disproportionate amount of agriculture program cuts will come from food stamps, especially if a conference committee favors the House's higher budget resolution figure.

The impact of such cuts on lower-income families would be enormous. Created by executive order in the early days of the Kennedy administration, the Food Stamp Program is far and away the nation's most important safety net. For millions of households, food stamp benefits--now encoded on an electronic card that can only be used to purchase food at retail food outlets--are literally the only thing that stands between them and hunger. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of people who receive food stamps now stands at 25.5 million--2 million more than just a year ago. Are these freeloading welfare cheats? To the contrary, about half of all food stamp recipients are children and about two million are elderly. The average food stamp benefit equals $1 per meal per food stamp recipient. Hardly enough for that filet mignon food stamp shoppers are so often accused of purchasing.