Spending reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often referred to as food stamps, could be on the table to pay for a major fiscal overhaul passed through reconciliation. Here’s what that might mean.

Republicans plan to pass the fiscal bill in question, one that extends expiring provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and includes other tax priorities of President Donald Trump, through budget reconciliation, a legislative process that allows bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate.

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Of note, the resolution does not explicitly call for cuts to SNAP, and the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee has said he does not expect reductions to SNAP benefits. However, some say that the committee finding billions of dollars in savings might at least result in adding increased work requirements to the program, which could be viewed as a cut.

There are still big questions about reconciliation more broadly, including what tax provisions will be included, whether the tax priorities will be made permanent, and how will Republicans pay for all of this. Fiscally conservative members of the party have also demanded spending cuts, and it appears Medicaid and SNAP could be among the programs that might be targeted for reductions.

Backdrop

To start crafting the actual tax legislation and spending cuts, Republicans need to agree to a budget resolution framework.

The Senate was the first to pass such a framework, but crucially, that framework did not provide for extending the Trump tax cuts. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was pushing for reconciliation in two bills, the first focused on border security and defense and the second on taxes.

Trump has suggested he would rather take the approach of bundling all of the reconciliation priorities into “one big, beautiful bill.” Still, the Senate approved its smaller resolution without taxes as a Plan B in case the one-bill strategy fell through.

The House passed its budget resolution on Feb. 25. As passed by the House, the budget resolution includes a $1.5 trillion floor for spending cuts with a target of $2 trillion in spending cuts and would allocate $4.5 trillion in net tax cuts for the House Ways and Means Committee, which will be tasked with the tax provisions.

On the spending reduction side, the House resolution calls for the House Agriculture Committee to find $230 billion in savings. While, again, the resolution does not say that means cuts to SNAP, some experts and lawmakers expect that the program could be targeted.

What is SNAP?

SNAP is a government program that has been around since 1939 and is designed to help low-income individuals afford food. It is administered through the Agriculture Department, which is why the Agriculture Committee is the relevant committee.

SNAP is designed to supplement the grocery budgets of households. The benefit levels are determined based on net income and household size, operating on the assumption that 30% of a household’s net income is spent on food.

The program has grown over the years, and now over 41 million people in the U.S. are SNAP recipients.

Work requirements

While reducing SNAP and Medicaid benefits might be too risky politically for some swing-state Republicans, increasing work requirements appears to be the most likely way that lawmakers will attempt to prune back spending associated with the program.

Notably, SNAP already has work requirements. Those were first imposed in 1996 on a subset of those who received the benefit who were “able-bodied adults without dependents.”

Those “capable” and aged 18-54 without dependents must meet a 20-hour-per-week work requirement unless they live in an area in a state that has a waiver based on higher unemployment.

But those requirements could be expanded in a variety of ways, according to Lauren Bauer, fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and the associate director of The Hamilton Project.

She told the Washington Examiner that one option Republicans might be looking at is raising the upper-band age of able-bodied adults required to work from 54 to 65. They might also expand the population affected by work requirements to parents with children aged 7-18.

Bauer said there could be other proposals based on how waivers for areas with higher unemployment are done, but that would be less of a legislative action than an executive one that the Trump administration could undertake.

Proponents of beefing up work requirements see it as a way to reduce federal spending on SNAP in a fair way by reducing the number of people who might not be trying to find work and coasting off the program.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and an expert in welfare programs, said when even a soft work requirement is added, an overwhelming number of people simply drop out of enrollment.

Maine tried implementing a program in which nearly all able-bodied workers were given work requirements, including an infrastructure of community service jobs and job training sites. But then instead of showing up at the sites, many simply dropped out of enrollment, Rector said.

Rector said that if there were some sort of new national program like Maine’s that required people to come in even to spend hours doing something such as a supervised job search, some recipients would come in, “but the overwhelming majority of the recipients will just never come in because they have other alternatives, and because they have other sources of paying or getting food.”

But others disagree and argue that those dropping out of enrollment following work requirements are not because they do not actually need SNAP, but because of the paperwork involved.

In an email to the Washington Examiner, Lily Roberts, the managing director of inclusive growth for the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said raising work requirements can cause errors that result in people dropping out of enrollment.

“The bureaucracy and paperwork is a central issue here, because it costs the state or federal government a ton of money to hire people to administer and track down all of the paperwork,” she said. “It’s important to remember that 3 out of 4 people who are on SNAP who can work are already working.

“So ‘work requirements’ are really requirements to document your job search, using old-fashioned approaches to finding a job like putting in paper applications and then filling out a form every week that says that you put in 10 paper applications,” Roberts added.

Bauer, at Brookings, said it is difficult to predict what increasing work requirements would look like because of all the unknowns. She said work requirements are ineffective at increasing work but effective at reducing program participation.

“Our best research evidence is that participating in SNAP increases labor supply, and so if your goal is to increase work, then you actually would want people of working age to be able to receive benefits to which they are currently eligible because SNAP is, in fact, a work support,” Bauer said.

While there might be some resistance to big cuts to SNAP, some conservatives argue that Republicans should swing for the fences and do even more than just beef up work requirements.

Chris Edwards, of the libertarian Cato Institute, said increasing work requirements would be a modest change and that he is in favor of doing so but thinks it is “an excuse” for Republicans not to go even further and cut the program.

WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT MEDICAID WORK REQUIREMENTS

He noted the growth of the program itself, from 17 million beneficiaries under President Bill Clinton to 42 million today. Edwards said that before the pandemic, the program cost $63 billion a year, and now it costs over $100 billion a year.

“We have giant deficits, we can’t afford it anymore, so the Republicans should do major cuts like simply reduce the benefit levels and reduce the number of people on the program,” he told the Washington Examiner. “That’s what they should do.”