On the recordMay 22, 2013
Here is what we are finding--and it is not my belief, it is the CBO scoring. The Congressional Budget Office, which we rely on, provides objective scoring--not my judgment--and it is telling us it is going down. The Senator is correct that it is slow to go down. As unemployment goes down, it takes a little longer before food help goes down, because we provide some help to people as they are getting back to work even if they are not at full speed back to work. So it does go down more slowly, but they have adjusted it over the next 10 years showing that, in fact, the spending on food assistance is going down because the economy is getting better. That comes from the CBO and is built into the dollars we have in the bill.
