Xavier Becerra: “I come here with some reservations about this bill, but with some confidence. This bill as it will leave this House and…”

“I come here with some reservations about this bill, but with some confidence. This bill as it will leave this House and go to conference will not contain a provision which when it comes back from conference I guarantee you it will have, and that is a provision that will take, it is not clear how much, it is somewhere between perhaps $1 billion to $2 billion, from the food stamp program, which are considered administrative savings, and those moneys will be used for which programs we do not know. But the concern that a number of us have is that if we are going to take money out of food stamps, and we took a whole lot of money out of food stamps two years ago when we passed the welfare reform law, that we should put the money back into services for the hundreds of thousands of families, including mostly families with children that were now as a result of this bill denied access to food stamps. I trust that the members of the Committee on Agriculture will remember that the moneys in these savings should go into those programs from where the money came.”