Giving Compass' Take:

• H. Claire Brown reports that new work requirements issued by the Department of Agriculture will cut benefits for millions of food stamp recipients.

• How can funders help to guide social programs to do the most good? 

• Learn about the impact of work requirements. 

As President Trump prepared to sign the farm bill, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a rule that will likely force many more food stamp recipients to prove they’re working if they want to continue receiving aid. The move is seen by some as a new and improved way to appease those Republicans who had aggressively stumped for the farm bill to go further in imposing work requirements on people using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Those affected by the new rule will include single adults without children (officially termed Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents, or ABAWD), who aren’t exempt from work requirements for other reasons, a category that included 3.8 million people in 2016, Lipps said. The agency estimates this change will affect 775,000 people by 2020.

The change will also crack down on states’ ability to request exemptions from an existing rule that kicks ABAWDs out of the food stamps program after three months if they are unemployed. Lipps estimated that change will mean 75 percent of the areas currently using waivers will not be waived in the future.

In 1996, Congress passed a law that limited food stamp usage for ABAWDs to three months out of every three years if they remained unemployed. Recognizing that the rule may have been too strict to accommodate periods of widespread economic change, it did permit states to apply for waivers to temporarily suspend the time limit during stretches of high unemployment. Since the 1990s, the waivers have been implemented pretty broadly. During the global recession of 2008, for instance, Congress voted to suspend the three-month rule countrywide. According to an analysis conducted by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, about a third of Americans have lived in a waived area at any given time since 1996.

Read the full article about new work requirements for food stamp recipients by H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy.