Republicans Once More Fixin' To Let Babies Go Hungry, But In America This Time

Maybe Keanu could save the program by doing PSAs as John WIC.

Let them eat cake, indeed. Photo by Henley Design Studio on Unsplash.

As they try to agree on a plan that will cut enough services out of the federal budget to cover at least some of the massive costs of extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the already obscenely rich, Republicans are again considering letting children in low-income families go hungry so that billionaires can profit. Republicans aren’t saying that upfront, of course, and the policy they’re kicking around doesn’t even make explicit mention of cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC.

As Salon’s food editor Ashlie D. Stevens explains, it’s a very tricksy way to take food away from hungry children without actually cutting the budget for WIC. Instead, the budget buggerers are looking at making changes to two other safety net programs, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps.

Currently, a process called “adjunctive eligibility” means that families can qualify for WIC if they’re enrolled in separate programs that are based on family income, like SNAP or Medicaid. You meet the income requirements for either of those, and you can sign up for WIC, because the income rules are roughly the same. Saves families headaches, and saves the federal government the cost and processing hassle of doing redundant paperwork.

But Republicans want to save some money for billionaires by tightening eligibility for SNAP and Medicaid, and that would mean fewer families could use the shortcut for WIC. They’d need to submit a separate application, and whenever benefits get harder to qualify for, fewer people bother, and fewer get the benefits they’d otherwise qualify for.

That’s the idea, of course, because Republicans are scum who like throwing up arbitrary barriers to poor people getting help even when they’re eligible for it.

At the risk of causing your eyes to roll right out of their sockets, we must throw another abbreviation at you, but this one is essential to understanding what these creeps want to do. Republicans are discussing eliminating “Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility (BBCE)” in the SNAP program. That’s a provision that lets states provide SNAP benefits more widely by extending eligibility for the program to folks whose family income is just a little bit above the federal income threshold. BBCE gives families the ability to keep receiving SNAP — never a princely sum anyway — if they work a few more hours or otherwise go a tiny bit over the income limit. And remember, qualifying for SNAP also qualifies them for WIC under adjunctive eligibility, even though that lacks an abbreviation for you to look up halfway through reading.

A policy brief from the National WIC Association estimates that if BBCE were ended, it would toss 3.1 million people off SNAP. As a knock-on effect, Stevens notes,

Given that 11.6% of SNAP recipients are preschool-aged children, this could mean that at least 359,600 infants and young children would lose their automatic WIC eligibility.

Isn’t that a neat trick? Sure, some families would jump through the hoops to apply separately for WIC, but many wouldn’t.

Now, Trump pushed to eliminate BBCE once before, back in 2019, although the change never went through. This time out, Republicans may be hoping nobody will notice one more slap in the faces of poor kids if they jam it into their big reconciliation bill among a lot of bigger, sexier awfulness.

On top of changes to SNAP, the Big Bill will almost certainly make Medicaid more difficult to qualify for, especially if some Republicans achieve their dream of repealing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Since 80 percent of participants in WIC get their healthcare through Medicaid, making Medicaid harder to sign up for would — adjunctive eligibility again! — reduce the number of folks who automatically qualify for WIC, even if they still can get it by applying separately.

Jesus Christ on a gyro-stabilized electric unicycle, you can already hear Republicans saying “well if they’re too lazy to do a little extra paperwork, maybe their kids aren’t all that hungry, now are they?”

Mind you, SNAP, Medicaid, and WIC are only three of many safety net programs that Republicans are eyeing for cuts in their Big Billionaire Boosting Bill. All told, as this depressing brief from First Focus on Children details, Republicans are looking at a staggering menu of cuts to programs that help poor kids, which combined will drive more and more kids into poverty. And that’s sure to have terrible long-term costs for America that won’t simply be a matter of dollars and cents.

Child poverty is not just a policy decision — it is an economic liability. When children grow up in poverty, they are more likely to experience poor health, struggle in school, and require government assistance as adults. The costs associated with child poverty in the United States are staggering, estimated at up to $1.1 trillion annually in lost productivity, increased health care spending, and higher crime rates, according to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).

Republicans, of course, will explain that if people don’t want those problems, they should work harder and not be poor.

Besides, just think of the savings to taxpayers, at least until many of those expendable children reach school age and are less able to learn, putting them on the fast track to dropping out, unemployment, and crime. Maybe assigning more cops in the schools would move the process along.

Republicans always insist that big tax cuts help everyone, even though the reality is that they mostly help the already very wealthy become more obscenely wealthy. But hooray, megacorporations will be able to do stock buybacks, improving shareholder value very far away from those hungry kids and their annoying crying.

The great part is that the people who write the changes into law, and the people who benefit, won’t ever meet the people who get hurt, outside of the plot contrivances of some future didactic social-problems movie that’ll make Crash (2004) seem subtle and nuanced by comparison.

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[Salon / First Focus on Children]

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