I am interested, ultimately, in developing a strategy to end global hunger, not just to manage it or contain it or limit it, but to actually end it.

I am confident that America's outstanding academic and research institutions can made a vital contribution in the years ahead.

I support our investment in all of you, and it is important that we brag about it a little bit more.

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.

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.

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 be a terrible mistake and would lead to…

Well, thank you very much. And I want to thank the witnesses for being here.

I can tell you when we took back that food stamp generosity, when the Recovery Act monies ran out, all of us heard from constituents who complained that food prices didn't go down.

Promoting Food Security for All Children

I thank the Ranking Member for yielding me the time.

I think of SNAP as providing medicine for people, because I do think food is medicine.

I am all for flexibility, as long as it is not code for cutting the program, or eliminating the benefit.

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.

This is a program to make sure people do not go hungry in this country, and the benefit is inadequate.

Improvement is code for cuts. It makes me nervous that we are going down a path that I worry could actually make hunger worse.

The fact is that the benefit, as Mr. Weill pointed out, is inadequate.

If flexibility means block granting this program and limiting the amount of resources to go to help feed hungry people... I have a problem with that.

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.

hunger is essentially a political condition because we know what we need to do to solve it, but we, for whatever reason, don't muster the political will to do it.

I still have a lot of questions as to where all this is headed.

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 better together.

It is a program that is actually run pretty well.

We need White House leadership to convene all the agencies and the departments together.

I think that is an area we should be focusing attention on.