Free Republic

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...

An African-American woman filed a civil rights lawsuit Monday, April 10, against Albertsons and its parent company, Safeway, alleging that its managers took no steps to correct or apologize for the actions of a checkout clerk at an Irvine store who incorrectly assumed the woman was on food stamps. Jenna Watkinson, a spokeswoman for Safeway, said company officials have not seen the lawsuit and “do not comment on pending litigation.” “However, any time we interact with a customer, our goal is to ensure that they are treated with the utmost respect and courtesy,” she said Wednesday. Deirdre Harris, 42, who...

Helen Agbapuruonwu “fraudulently obtained public assistance in excess of $100,000 under false pretenses” police allege, and she has been charged “with felony welfare fraud and document forgery,” according to a police report. Fidelis Agbapuruonwu, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria in the 1990s, worked as an associate at Mayer Brown in D.C., according to his LinkedIn profile. A spokesman for Mayer Brown told NBC 4 that Agbapuruonwu no longer works there. Agbapuruonwu received a Paul & Daisy Soros Scholarship for New Americans, which he used to pay for law school at Ohio State University. Court officials believe that Agbapuruonwu...

Republican Governor Paul LePage dared to begin enforcing Maine's volunteer and work requirements for food stamp (SNAP) recipients to keep their benefits. The end result was more than 9,000 non-disabled adults getting dropped from the program. As CNS News' Eric Schiener reports, a Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) spokesman tells the Associated Press that 12,000 non-disabled adults were in Maine’s SNAP program before Jan. 1 - a number that dropped to 2,680 by the end of March... The rules prevent adults, who are not disabled and do not have dependents, from receiving food stamps for more than three...

Now, this will do more to eliminating illegal immigration than anything else, including a wall that costs American taxpayers billions of dollars and increases the size of the central government in border patrol agents. A leaked draft of an executive order by President Donald Trump indicates that he is looking to eliminate the welfare state for illegals, which is nothing more than dangling a carrot in front of them to cross the southern border on the American taxpayers' dime. The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is considering a plan to weed out would-be immigrants who are likely to require...

A rabbit hole is a scary place. You never expect to find it, and when you do, it starts from the unlikeliest of places. Who knew that the globalist push for a worldwide Islamic Fundamentalist Caliphate started at a small market in Irvington New Jersey? An Irvington man on Monday admitted in federal court to running a food stamps-for-cash scheme that cost the government more than $800,000 over two years. Miguel Antonio Azcona pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Mary L. Cooper in Trenton to a single count of theft of government funds, according to the office of U.S. Attorney...

Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama have been lecturing us (or at least those among us who use food stamps, aka SNAP) to no avail when it comes to sugary soft drinks. Anahad O’Conner of the New York Times reports: What do households on food stamps buy at the grocery store? The answer was largely a mystery until now. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the $74 billion food stamp program called SNAP, has published a detailed report that provides a glimpse into the shopping cart of the typical household that receives food stamps. The findings show that the No....

What do households on food stamps buy at the grocery store? The answer was largely a mystery until now. The United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the $74 billion food stamp program called SNAP, has published a detailed report that provides a glimpse into the shopping cart of the typical household that receives food stamps. The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. The category of ‘sweetened beverages,’ which includes fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas, accounted for almost 10...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to launch a two-year pilot program this summer with seven retailers to allow food stamp recipients the ability to purchase their groceries online. More than 44 million Americans participated last year in federal government's low-income food assistance program, called SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Last year, the average benefit each person received was just over $125.50 per month. "Online purchasing is a potential lifeline for SNAP participants living in urban neighborhoods and rural communities where access to healthy food choices can be limited," USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a release. "We're...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5, 2017 - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced the seven retail firms selected to take part in a pilot designed to enable Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants to purchase their groceries online. The two-year pilot is slated to begin this summer. "Online purchasing is a potential lifeline for SNAP participants living in urban neighborhoods and rural communities where access to healthy food choices can be limited," USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said. "We're looking forward to being able to bring the benefits of the online market to low-income Americans participating in SNAP."

The state of Missouri took a stand against the generational dependence upon the government, forcing welfare recipients to get a job. Approximately 41,000 Missouri residents no longer have access to the welfare food stamps program after a new time limit law went into effect in 2015. The new state law was actually a reinstatement of welfare reform enacted during President Bill Clinton’s administration. The 1996 welfare law, which has now been reinstated, limited food stamps for able-bodies and childless adults to only three months out of every three years, America Now reports. Participants would continue to receive the taxpayer-funded benefits...

An Arizona Democratic lawmaker was indicted for illegally getting food stamps and falsifying her application to the program in June. . . . An Ohio millionaire descended from Iranian royalty was indicted for welfare fraud in December after prosecutors allege he fraudulently took $45,000 in Medicare benefits and received $8,400 in food stamps. Mahvi, 65, insists that he is innocent, that even though he has an 8,000-square-foot home, complete with horse stables, a swimming pool, and a garage where he parks his Lexus, his family gets very little income and lives off of loans from friends.

Walker has long supported drug testing food stamp recipients, a policy he and Republican lawmakers approved in 2015 that has since been blocked by a federal court. Federal law does not allow states to impose drug tests on recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, better known as food stamps. "We have been forced to delay our implementation and are optimistic your administration will give states like Wisconsin the flexibility to provide the accountability the taxpayers demand," Walker said in his letter.