$8.6 Billion in SNAP cuts
On Monday Congress passed The Agricultural Act of 2014, a final, five-year authorization of food and farm programs. The bill includes important reforms to food aid, but it also includes an $8.6 billion cut in SNAP benefits. While this is less than the $40 billion in cuts proposed in 2013, the cut comes at at time when many families in American are struggling to make ends meet.
The bill will cut benefits for approximately 850,000 households in 15 states—California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin—and the District of Columbia, just months after every SNAP household in the country saw its monthly allotments reduced.[ref]Visit bread.org for more details[/ref]
Write Your Representatives
To send a letter asking Congress to expand and protect the SNAP program, look up your state representative here, or your state senators here. A letter may look something like this (just replace the parts in brackets):
Dear Senator/Representative,
I’m writing to ask you to do all you can to ensure a place at the table for all people. Measures taken in the recent farm bill have begun to restore parts of the SNAP program, but I urge you not to consider that this is enough.
[Include and example or personal story]
A world without hunger is possible, but you must make ending hunger a priority for that to happen. This means Congress needs to take a balanced approach to deficit reduction and sufficiently fund programs that effectively reduce hunger and poverty. I ask you to ensure that all our brothers and sisters have a place at the table, so that we may soon see the day when no child goes hungry and no parent sacrifices a meal so that his or her child can eat.
Sincerely,
[your name]
[your address]
[city, state, ZIP]
Learn More
There are a lot of myths out there, and misconceptions about food stamps and SNAP. You can find a great, well documented, summary of the SNAP program here from feedingamerica.org.
