Free Republic

(Cartoon by Glenn Foden) Where do food stamps come from? They come from taxpayers—certainly not from family farms. Yet the “farm” bill, a recurring subsidy-fest in Congress, is actually 80 percent food stamps and other government nutrition programs. The food stamps sweeten the farm deal for lawmakers, who admit that the combination works for their political purposes. As Heritage experts Daren Bakst and Diane Katz explain: The food stamp portion creates a reason for urban representatives to support farm subsidies, and for farm-state lawmakers to support food stamps. Talk of de-politicizing agriculture programs and welfare policy is met with...

Documents Reveal that Mexican Government Encourages Maximum Participation in U.S.-Funded Program (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released documents detailing how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program. The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. Emphasized in bold and...

Welfare: As if being "food stamp president" weren't enough, Barack Obama's administration is partnering with the Mexican government to make sure Mexican nationals living in the U.S. don't miss out. Ay caramba! On Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who's been pushing for reform of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asking for details of our partnership agreement with Mexico to promote food stamp use, including whether we are looking the other way in cases of illegal aliens. The partnership agreement goes back to 2004, so Obama administration...

Welfare: Not content with having more Americans on food stamps than people in Spain, the Obama administration is ringing the dinner bell for illegal aliens. We'll feed you and not check your status. As we wrote last July, just as food stamp use has skyrocketed here under President Obama, so have marketing efforts to Hispanics under a partnership with Mexico. We dubbed the program "Fat and Furious" after the administration's gun-running program that also seemingly had worthy goals but had unclear motives and pernicious effects. "USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible...

The New York Times reported Friday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has likely enabled massive fraud in the Pigford series of legal settlements, in which black, Hispanic, female and Native American farmers have claimed to be victims of past discrimination. The cost of the settlements, which could exceed $4.4 billion, is the result of a process that "became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees," the Times notes. Among those influential members of Congress was then-Senator Barack Obama, who...

A plan to drop a recognizable logo in this part of the country — the Forest Service’s iconic shield — generated so much outrage among the agency’s retirees that the idea has been dropped. In early January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly introduced a policy to phase out all of its sub-agencies’ logos, including the Forest Service’s, and replace them with the USDA symbol. But that policy was kept so under wraps that not even Pacific Northwest forest supervisors were told. Some of them only heard about it in retrospect late last week — after the USDA had decided,...

It is an old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but a record 18.7 million American schoolchildren would not have learned that lesson when they attended school in fiscal year 2012. That is because U.S. taxpayers—via the U.S. Department of Agriculture—were picking up the tab for their lunch. According to new data from the USDA, during the average school month in fiscal year 2012, 18.7 million students in U.S. high schools and grammar schools were given completely free lunches, courtesy of the department’s National School Lunch Program. That was up from the record of 18.4...

The federal government is tapping experts for its “B-24 Project.” It may sound like a new jet fighter, but in this case, “B-24” pertains to nutrition advice for infants and toddlers up to 24 months old. The project will produce “unified federal dietary guidance for children from birth to 24 months based on the best available science,” said Kevin Concannon, the Agriculture Department’s Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. Concannon noted that current federal dietary recommendations are designed for people two years and older, and therefore the B-24 project “will fill an important gap.” …

(WASHINGTON) -- The sequester likely won’t cause meat and poultry shortages for a while — thanks, in part, to union negotiations and USDA inspectors’ lack of email access. Furloughs to Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors at the U.S. Department of Agriculture could force meat and poultry plants to stop production — with no inspectors to approve products, they can’t be sold — but Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee that those furloughs probably won’t happen until later this year. “We are looking at a several-month period, if you will, before a furlough will be imposed,”...

Letter at link.

In an early strategic preparation for the struggle to avoid the fiscal cliff, the president and several Democratic luminaries decided to redefine as essential several entitlement programs. In an old fashioned way of manipulating the public, they began to redefine commonly held beliefs. In the interest of time, we will share only one example. Last December, Newark Mayor Cory Booker spent a much-publicized week trying to live the life of a food stamp recipient. And after a nationwide media tour, we learned many valuable lessons. First of all, we learned that giving up your daily Starbucks causes headaches, and...

Additional clips of a United States Department of Agriculture sensitivity training class feature USDA employees being told to recite, “If we work for a federal agency, we’ve discriminated in the past.” The clips, released by the conservative government accountability group Judicial Watch Thursday evening, are the second installation of revealing footage obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request the organization made last May. According to Judicial Watch, the documents reveal the sensitivity training was delivered to USDA employees at least 16 times last year in an attempt to boost employees’ “emotional intelligence.”

Wednesday night on The O’Reilly Factor, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, broke a series of previously unreleased US Department of Agriculture Videos featuring required “Cultural Sensitivity Training.” The program required employees to chant, “The pilgrims were illegal aliens,” never to use the word “minorities” and to replace it instead with “emerging majorities,” and other similarly leftist tripe. The sensitivity training sessions taped here were held on USDA premises, and is part of what Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack termed the department’s “new era of Civil Rights” and “broader effort towards cultural transformation at USDA.” The training sessions were created by...

On Friday, the White House warned that federal spending cuts could force the US meat industry to shut down for two weeks or longer. Spending cuts set to take effect on March 1 may lead to the two week furlough of every US meat and poultry inspector. Without inspectors, the industry would be shut down. Meatpackers and processors are not allowed to ship beef, pork, lamb and poultry without an Agricultural Department inspection seal. They also warned that the cuts could lead to effects on everyday life, while meatpackers said it would likely devastate the industry. The "fiscal cliff" has...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Most candy, high-calorie drinks and greasy meals could soon be on a food blacklist in the nation's schools. For the first time, the government is proposing broad new standards to make sure all foods sold in schools are more healthful. Under the new rules the Agriculture Department proposed Friday, foods like fatty chips, snack cakes, nachos and mozzarella sticks would be taken out of lunch lines and vending machines. In their place would be foods like baked chips, trail mix, diet sodas, lower-calorie sports drinks and low-fat hamburgers.

47 percent of their crop, to be precise. It’s J.J. Abrams’ world. We’re all just living in it.Luckily, the Supreme Court decided to take the case of the Horne family, so they may end up retaining the right to freely sell the raisin crop they’ve duly produced, but how is it that they must appeal to the highest court in the land for that right? Well, it all started in 1937, as so many good things do, when the federal government began requiring raising farmers to lay aside a tribute portion of their crops in order to control supply and...

One in four children in America participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, in fiscal year 2011, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture and U.S. Census Bureau. The USDA’s “Characteristics of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Households: Fiscal Year 2011” shows that in 2011, 19.9 million children, or people under 18, received food stamp benefits. The Census estimates there were 73.9 million children living in the United States in 2011, meaning that 26.9 percent of children, or approximately one in four, were on food stamps in 2011. The USDA notes that children constituted 45...

During fiscal year 2012, the U.S. government spent a record $80.4 billion on food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a $2.7 billion increase from FY 2011. (Fiscal year 2012 ran from Oct. 1, 2011 through Sept. 30, 2012.) According to the Monthly Treasury Statement that summarizes the receipts and outlays of the federal government, $80,401,000,000 went towards SNAP during FY 2012, which was a $2.7 billion increase from $77,637,000,000 in FY 2011. …

Police: Woman tried to buy iPads with food stamp card • Tracy Browning taken into custody LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Police say a Kentucky woman was arrested after she tried to buy iPads with her food stamp card. Tracy Browning, of Louisville, KY, attempted to buy two iPads at Walmart with her Electronic Benefit Transfer card. When the card was declined, police said Browning grabbed the items, ran from the store and assaulted a store clerk on her way out of the store.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture improperly inflated the numbers of jobs created or saved by the 2009 economic stimulus, according to the agency’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG). “[We] identified job numbers that were inflated because award recipients reported cumulative job numbers instead of the number of jobs created or saved during the quarter being reported. In other instances, job numbers were under-reported,” according to an OIG audit released Dec. 13. The report claims that without accurate job figures, it is “difficult” to know whether the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was effective in creating or saving jobs....