Political Quotes

“I am proud of what we were able to accomplish in the nutrition title of the Farm Bill. It achieves important reforms in SNAP, but also protects food assistance for families, many of whom never dreamed that they would need help putting food on their table. We are adopting important reforms to clarify the law or rules in a few places where members had legitimate concerns. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, we are rejecting many draconian proposals that would have caused serious harm to program participants by slashing benefits or kicking families off of SNAP, undermining the primary purpose and the basic framework of the program. Let's start by reviewing some of the improvements we made to SNAP to address concerns around minor eligibility issues. In Michigan, we discovered two lottery winners were continuing to receive benefits after winning a million dollars. In a program with 46 million participants, this really is an example of a very rare problem. Nevertheless, we want to make absolutely clear in federal law that individuals who win the lottery are not eligible for SNAP. So we tightened rules in a way to ensure that not even one lottery winner can get SNAP. But we also wanted to make sure that this prohibition does not result in a burdensome new requirement to ask all applicants and participants if they had recently won the lottery.…”