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Future federal funding for a key nutritional program helping thousands of Alaskans in need remains in doubt due to the partial government shutdown, according to state authorities. The state doesn’t have any funds awaiting distribution under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program according to Shawnda O’Brien, director of Alaska's Division of Public Assistance. SNAP’s latest disbursement, $12 million sent to about 33,000 Alaska households, was originally scheduled to be available by Feb. 1 – but federal officials told the state to issue it prematurely, with the funds released Jan. 20. “They had to get the money out before the end of...

The end of 2018 seemed to signal good things to come for America’s farmers. Fresh off the passage of the farm bill, which reauthorized agriculture, conservation and safety net programs, the Agriculture Department last week announced a second round of direct payments to growers hardest hit by President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. Then parts of the government shut down. The USDA in a statement issued last week assured farmers that checks would continue to go out during the first week of the shutdown. But direct payments for farmers who haven’t certified production, as well as farm loans and...

President Donald Trump has an opportunity to do what Congress should be doing, but isn’t: Help Americans who are on food stamps transition to work.The farm bill—which reauthorizes the foods stamp program for five years—would have been a prime opportunity for Congress to enhance work requirements. Under current law, certain work-capable adults must work 20 or more hours per week, participate in a supervised job search or training, or volunteer in their communities in order to receive food stamps.Most food stamp recipients are exempt from these requirements. These include people over 50 years old, the disabled, and minor children and...

The Trump administration is setting out to do what this year’s farm bill didn’t: tighten work requirements for millions of Americans who receive federal food assistance. The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday is proposing a rule that would restrict the ability of states to exempt work-eligible adults from having to obtain steady employment to receive food stamps. The move comes just weeks after lawmakers passed a $400 billion farm bill that reauthorized agriculture and conservation programs while leaving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves roughly 40 million Americans, virtually untouched. […] Currently, able-bodied adults ages 18-49 without children...

Food banks around the country said they may not be prepared to execute the Trump administration’s plan to get additional billions in food to hungry Americans...Last month, the administration set in motion a $1.2 billion program to send food to the nation’s food banks as part of its wider effort to bail out farmers hurt by the president’s trade war. Local food bank officials said they are thrilled by the opportunity to feed more Americans who need help, but worry they will not be able to process all of the newly available agricultural products that could double or triple the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is moving two agencies and roughly 700 federal employees out of Washington, D.C., to save money and improve the department’s service to taxpayers. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced Thursday that the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will be fully moved out of the nation’s capital by 2020, according to the USDA. A location hasn’t been picked yet.“It’s been our goal to make USDA the most effective, efficient, and customer-focused department in the entire federal government,” Perdue said in a statement. “In our Administration, we have looked critically at...

President Donald Trump is clearly concerned about the plight of American farmers. He pushed the Department of Agriculture to make available up to $12 billion of temporary relief to those farms caught in the middle of his tariff war – starting this Labor Day. It’s laudable that he wants to address this problem, but let’s remember that it was a problem of his own creation. America is a breadbasket to much of the world because of our exceptional farmland. We have about two-and-a-half times as much arable land as does China, for instance, with about the same landmass. That means...

President Donald Trump signaled his support Thursday for work requirements for food stamps. “When the House and Senate meet on the very important Farm Bill – we love our farmers – hopefully, they will be able to leave the WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROVISION that the House approved,” Trump wrote on Twitter. The House version of the farm bill barely passed with a vote of 213-211 and included work requirements for single food stamp recipients. Democrats voted unanimously against the bill. The House and the Senate have to take the bill to conference, however, which will likely strip the...

Live poultry in backyard flocks are linked to several multistate outbreaks of salmonella infections that have now sickened 212 people in 44 states, federal health officials warned Monday. The most recent illnesses began on June 21, with 88 of the cases reported in the last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in an advisory. The federal agency is working with multiple states in investigating several outbreaks of salmonella infections linked to contact with live poultry in backyard flocks, it said. A half-dozen strains of salmonella bacteria have sickened people starting in the middle of February,...

Alert: $4 Billion Worth Of Waste Found In Food Stamp Program It’s very hard to come up with a list of things that the federal government gets right. Government is simply too big and there’s just no way this bloated bureaucracy can be counted on to be efficient. That’s a big reason that Trump was elected. The American people are tired of the waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington. From Breitbart: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent a total of $4 billion on improper food stamp payments to those receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent a total of $4 billion on improper food stamp payments to those receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the USDA confirmed with Breitbart News on Friday. The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service announced this week that improper payments made up 6.3 percent of SNAP money in the fiscal year (FY) 2017—the latest data available from the agency. Breitbart News analyzed the USDA’s data on food stamp spending and found that $4,007,026,532 of the $63,603,595,754 the agency spent on SNAP in FY 2017 went to improper payments. The USDA told Breitbart...

The Senate today easily passed its version of the farm bill by a vote of 86-11,paving the way for a conference committee to reconcile differences with the House's version of the sweeping agriculture and nutrition legislation. The Senate farm bill attracted bipartisan support, as expected, but key differences with the House's partisan version, which passed last week, set up potentially contentious negotiations between the lawmakers who will be tasked with melding the two measures into one. The main differences relate to proposals for the food stamp program, farm subsidy caps and conservation initiatives. Congress has until Sept. 30 to get...

"Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago." That's how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today. The unequal economy that's emerged over the past decade, combined with patchy access to health care in rural areas, have had a severe impact on the people growing America's food. Recent data shows just how much. Farmers are dying by suicide at a higher rate than any other occupational group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The suicide rate in the field of farming, fishing and forestry is 84.5...

Overall enrollment in the country’s food stamp program has dropped to its lowest level in more than eight years as the economy continues to improve and the Trump administration attempts to tackle fraud in the program. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enrollment in the program dropped in March to 40,083,954. The last time food stamp participation dipped this low was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people were enrolled in the program. "As the economy continues to improve, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is...

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...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) breeds 100 kittens per year so they can be fed toxoplasma-infected raw meat, and scientists can collect parasites from their feces to use in experiments. The kittens, only 3 months old, are then killed and incinerated. Keep in mind, after the USDA has collected the parasites, the kittens are healthy and could easily be adopted out to the public. But that’s not how the USDA works. This program has been receiving tax money since 1970 — currently $650,000 a year — and has been based in Maryland since 1982. It’s much closer to home...

A Republican lawmaker wants answers from the Department of Agriculture about taxpayer-funded research experiments at a Maryland facility that have allegedly led to the deaths of hundreds of cats and kittens. Citing documents reviewed by his office, Michigan Republican Mike Bishop described a decades-old research project at the USDA's Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, in which hundreds of kittens are bred, fed meat that is infected with Toxoplasma, and later killed and discarded by "incineration." In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue dated Monday, Bishop wrote that he was "shocked to hear that the USDA, the very...

WASHINGTON — Horse meat production won’t resume in the U.S. anytime soon, a victory for animal-rights advocates under the spending bill signed last week by President Donald Trump. The $1.3 trillion spending deal, which funds the government through September, renewed the country’s horse slaughter ban. Just months ago, animal-rights activists feared the ban could be in jeopardy. The measure includes language that prohibits the U.S. Department of Agriculture from spending money on inspecting horse slaughter facilities. Without inspections, horse slaughter plants can’t operate, so they’ll remain closed as they have for more than a decade. “I think we’re all kind...

Judicial Watch Files New Lawsuit on Clinton Pay-to-Play Issues McCabe Firing Only the Beginning Nearly 200 Busted in $3.7-Million Food-Stamp Fraud Operation Judicial Watch Files New Lawsuit on Clinton Pay-to-Play Issues Judicial Watch meticulously documented Hillary Clinton’s use of the State Department to take care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. She and Bill are the poster children for pay-to-play. Now we’re looking into a potential linchpin of that operation. We just sued the State Department for emails, calendar entries and other information in the electronic file of Dennis Cheng, who was deputy chief of protocol for two years...

In his big budget proposal Monday, President Trump offered a novel idea: Instead of giving needy people stamps they can redeem for food, why not just give them actual food? As you might guess, liberals were enraged by the notion. How dare Mr. Trump try to take food stamps away from hungry people and give them — of all things — food? Here’s how the liberal HuffPost saw it: “Facing a trillion-dollar deficit because of his just-passed tax cuts, President Donald Trump has an idea for how to get some of that money back: making poor people eat beans and...