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Millions of taxpayers dollars trafficked through food stamp fraud went to terrorists who funded their activities at home and abroad, according to an explosive report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI). The report from GAI, where Breitbart News Senior-Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer serves as president, highlighted several instances where money obtained through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits fraud went to fund acts of terrorism, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Although this method of using food stamp fraud money for terrorism has been around since the 1980s, it gained notoriety when New York...

The House and Senate are negotiating a farm bill, and for once the stakes are more important than subsidies for wealthy sugar farmers. Republicans are debating reforms to a food stamp program that is divorced from work and economic advancement. Allow us to illustrate how a current waiver process has corroded even minimal requirements. The House farm bill includes a requirement that adults aged 18 and 59 work or train for 80 hours a month (20 hours a week, or part time). Seniors, the disabled, pregnant women and anyone caring for a child under 6 is exempt. The Senate’s bill...

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration may have declared it over, but a new War on Poverty is coming anyways. It will be fought largely over the "work requirement" -- should the government require welfare recipients either to get a job or to train for one? It's a philosophical as much as a practical question. A work requirement addresses a dilemma of all welfare programs. If you make eligibility and benefits too generous, you destroy the incentive to work. People will just collect their welfare checks. But if the program is too stingy and strict, many genuinely needy people may lack...

Food stamp participation dropped below 40 million for the first time in eight years, according to the latest numbers on food stamp enrollment from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The most recent USDA data reveals that 39,604,428 people were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the program that administers food stamps—as of April 2018. The last time enrollment dipped below 40 million was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people received SNAP benefits. The latest data on enrollment shows that overall enrollment in the food stamp program has reached historic lows, reaching its lowest point in eight years. But...

( Full Title )While Everyone Was Focused on SCOTUS Pick, US Judge ELIMINATED Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Over the last month or so, people have been wondering who Trump would appoint to replace Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Obviously, that’s an incredibly important news story to follow and it’s nice to know that Trump ultimately picked a solid conservative in Brett Kavanaugh. However, there’s still a lot of other stuff going on that Americans should be paying attention to. For example, an Obama appointed judge recently ruled against work requirements for welfare programs. Here’s more on that. From...

Overall enrollment in the nation’s food stamp program has dipped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The latest USDA data reveals that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the federal government program that administers food stamps—dropped to 40,083,954 in March 2018. The last time enrollment in the food stamp program reached that level was February 2010, when 39,588,993 people participated in the nation’s food stamp program. Although overall enrollment has reached its lowest point in eight years, food stamp enrollment has been declining steadily since...

Food companies have embraced a controversial tactic in their quest to sell more soda, a new study says: timing advertisements for sugary drinks to the days states distribute food stamp benefits. On any given day, grocery shoppers are likely to see soda displays in stores, researchers found. But they are two to four times as likely to come across them when food stamps go out. The study, which relied on 2011 data from the New York State Department of Health and which will appear later this year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is the latest to suggest there's...

Republicans and members of the Trump administration must keep up the pressure and focus on achieving welfare reform. When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, many believed that the law would indeed “end welfare as we know it.” It’s what we intended when Congress created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and implemented work requirements to restore welfare to its original intent as a springboard to self-sufficiency. These policies were intended to be the beginning of welfare reform – the beginning of a nationwide policy focused on ending dependency. Instead, President...

President Trump’s new executive order on welfare reform has laid the groundwork to get more Americans get back to work while protecting and strengthening the safety net for the truly needy. Federal agencies must take advantage of this opportunity to roll back harmful Obama-era policies that have trapped families in dependency and cost taxpayers billions. Right now, America combines near-record-low unemployment with near-record-high welfare dependency — the result of state-level eligibility exemptions, federal loopholes and policies that put work on the back burner. Many of these policies created incentives for able-bodied adults to sit on the sidelines — even though...

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen existing work requirements and introduce new ones for low-income Americans receiving Medicaid, food stamps, public housing benefits and welfare as part of a broad overhaul of government assistance programs. The order directs federal agencies to review all policies related to current work requirements as well as exemptions and waivers and report back to the White House with recommendations within 90 days. “Welfare reform is necessary to prosperity and independence,” said Andrew Bremberg, assistant to the president and director of Trump’s domestic policy council.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to promote economic mobility, strong social networks, and accountability to American taxpayers, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose. The United States and its Constitution were founded on the principles of freedom and equal opportunity for all. To ensure that all Americans would be able to realize the benefits of those principles, especially during hard times, the Government established programs to help families with basic unmet needs. Unfortunately, many of the programs designed to help families have...

President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday for a government-wide review of welfare programs, with a goal of putting more people back to work, White House officials said. The order directs all federal agencies involved in providing more than $700 billion in low-income assistance annually to study programs that are “failing Americans,” and to report back in 90 days with recommendations, said White House domestic policy council director Andrew Bremberg. “Our country still struggles from nearly record-high welfare enrollments,” Mr. Bremberg said in a conference call with reporters. “President Trump endorses reforms that ensure those in need receive assistance, while...

Lawmakers are poised this month to wage a major battle over the House version of the Farm Bill, which will call for work requirements in the federal food stamp program that serves the poor. ( the vast majority of Farm Bill funds spending is on food stamps) Democrats are staunchly opposed to Conaway’s plan to add a 20-hour work or job training requirement for some able-bodied recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal name for the food stamp program............In the 2014 legislation, SNAP’s 10-year cost was $756 billion, or 80% of the entire $956 billion bill. The federal...

Food stamp usage has declined every month since President Trump took office in January, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics on food stamp enrollment. Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dropped to 41,310,785 in June 2017, the latest data available from the USDA, from 42,691,363 in January 2017. Food stamp usage has been on a steady decline since Donald Trump began his presidency in January 2017, with the latest data showing that SNAP enrollment decreased by more than 1.3 million, or 3.23 percent, since the beginning of his term in office.

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) The contractor that maintains EBT services for Virginia's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is experiencing multi-state service problems. This has resulted in an EBT System outage. It is unknown when the system will be restored. SNAP clients can call (866) 281-2448 to check on the status of the system restoration. Clients can also call 2-1-1 to learn of food resources that might be available to supplement their needs during the temporary outage. Also, clients can call the Enterprise Customer Service Center at (855) 635-4370 with any additional questions related to their benefits.

Roughly 22 million Americans -- 8.9 percent of the adult population-- have impulsive anger issues and easy access to guns. 3.7 million of these angry gun owners routinely carry their guns in public. And very few of them are subject to current mental health-based gun ownership restrictions. Those are the key findings of a new study by researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Duke University. "Anger," in this study, doesn't simply mean garden-variety aggravation. It means explosive, uncontrollable rage, as measured by responses to the National Comorbidity Survey Replication in the early 2000s. It is "impulsive, out of control, destructive, harmful,"...

After the food stamp rolls swelled for years under the Obama administration, fresh figures show a dramatic reduction in states that recently have moved to restore work requirements. [Snip] Alabama began 2017 by requiring able-bodied adults without children in 13 counties to either find a job or participate in work training as a condition for continuing to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. According to AL.com, the number of those recipients declined from 5,538 to 831 between Jan. 1 and the beginning of May – an 85 percent drop. Similar changes were implemented in select counties in Georgia and...

NEW YORK (AP) — A crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump has driven some poor people to take a drastic step: opt out of federal food assistance because they are fearful of deportation, activists and immigrants say. People who are not legal residents of the U.S. are not eligible to take part in what is formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But many poor families include a mix of non-legal residents and legal ones, such as children who have citizenship because they were born in the U.S. In those cases, it is often an adult...

From our file named "Duh." The Alabama Department of Human Resources says 13 counties that reinitiated a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program, saw an 85% drop in recipients. The counties had been exempt from the work requirement due to high levels of unemployment. But with the economy recovering, the state of Alabama restarted the work requirement on January 1 this year, which resulted in the massive drop in SNAP participants. ... Nationwide, there are about 44 million people receiving SNAP benefits at a cost of about $71 billion. The...

More than half of food stamp recipients in 21 Georgia counties have been dropped from the program after the state instituted work requirements. State figures released this week revealed that 11,779 people considered able-bodied without children were required to find work by April 1 to continue receiving food stamps, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Sixty-two percent were dropped after the deadline, whittling the number of recipients to 4,528. State officials began enforcing the work mandate in 2016, and plan to expand work requirements to all 159 counties by 2019. About 1.6 million Georgia residents use food stamps, which are funded with...