Posted August 17, 2000  

Food Stamps and Onerous Oversight

By Jonathan Walters

Food stamp use nationwide has been falling, and falling faster than can be explained by an improved economy and lower welfare rolls. That, naturally, has led social services advocates to ask why, and many believe they’ve found the answer in a report recently released by America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest food bank.

The report outlines what it views as blatantly onerous application requirements set up by state governments, which oversee the federally funded program. Questions about burial plot ownership, the sale of blood and winnings from bingo now pepper many of the applications for food stamps. Some applications go on this way for more than 10 pages. Ohio even asks whether the applicant is a fugitive from New Jersey.

It all sounds so silly, not to mention blatantly designed to discourage applicants. But food stamp applications are no creature of state machinations aimed at driving away people who need food. Such seemingly ridiculous or intrusive questions are a direct result of the haplessly onerous oversight that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has exercised over the program since its inauguration--even the question about fleeing New Jersey.

In a world where the effectiveness of social service programs has shifted from process to results, Ag Department officials still are locked into a focus on eligibility: What amount in food stamps should someone get, given their income. This goofy preoccupation has led Ag to aggressively pursue and fine states for overpaying applicants by as little as $5. In Ag’s view, the measure of the food stamp program's effectiveness is a state’s "error rate"; that is, how many times they over-stamped applicants given the applicant’s income and net worth (the feds allow you one burial plot, by the way, but the second one counts against your food stamp allotment).

And so states, justifiably paranoid about being nailed by Ag, are now peppering applicants with all kinds of federally inspired questions, to avoid the sometimes hefty fines that Ag has been known to lay on its state partners.

Given the status quo, states are no doubt going to continue to pack their food stamp applications with all kinds of detailed questions about an applicant’s income and net worth. And they will do that until the U.S. Department of Agriculture decides something very fundamental: that the measure of the program's performance isn't reflected in whether somebody got $5, or $10 or $20 more in food stamps than they should have, but whether everyone in America is getting enough nutritious food to eat.

When that happens, states can boil their applications down to two questions: Are you hungry? Can you afford food? But given the federal mindset on this one, that day is a long way off.

Jonathan Walters is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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