"I am a big fan of the McGovern-Dole Program, which has been in operation now for slightly over a decade."
"I appreciate the innovation as well as the willingness to make the necessary adjustments to make the program as effective as it possibly can be."
"It is one of the great success stories in our foreign aid programs, especially with regard to food assistance, and we ought to do more of it."
"But there is a lot of talk in this Committee and in Congress about the need for more flexibility when it comes to SNAP. And I always worry that flexibility is a code word for block grants. That would ..."
"opening statement"
"I still have a lot of questions as to where all this is headed."
"Improvement is code for cuts. It makes me nervous that we are going down a path that I worry could actually make hunger worse."
"SNAP is working, and my hope is that this Committee will look for ways to strengthen it so that we can continue to give families a hand up when they need it."
"I wish, within the Federal Government, all the relevant agencies that deal with issues of hunger and poverty were better coordinated, would meet on a regular basis, and talk about how they can work be..."
"That is one of the reasons why I have been urging the White House to do a White House conference on food, nutrition, and hunger to try to bring everybody who has a role in this together."
"I am all for evidence-based evaluation, but we are talking about a program, in SNAP, that has one of the lowest error rates of any Federal program."
"It is a program that is actually run pretty well."