Solutions Blog

Trump’s budget proposal a disaster for Minnesotans who struggle with hunger

Statement attributable to Colleen Moriarty, Executive Director of Hunger Solutions Minnesota.

Close up of hands of a person holding a grocery list and pushing grocery cart through the store.

 

Yesterday’s release of the Trump budget shows the President’s true intentions: attacking the poor to subsidize the tax cuts enacted last year.

The President’s budget takes away access to food for millions of Americans. And nearly half-a-million Minnesotans rely on the program to put food on the table for their families.

Cutting people’s basic living standards by taking away their access to food, health care or other assistance makes it harder for them to make ends meet and only serve to push people further in to poverty.

Of particular concern in the President’s budget are $217 billion in cuts to SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. These cuts would affect most of those enrolled in the program. Proposals include:

  • Eliminating the minimum benefit level. Seniors in particular would be immediately impacted cuts to their benefits. Currently, the program has a minimum benefit of just $15 per month.
  • Immediate removal of waivers in 27 Minnesota counties hardest hit by the recession where people continue to struggle to find work that pays well enough to make ends meet.
  • An ill-conceived move to cut the highly efficient program that allows households to spend their benefits directly at local grocery stores and supermarkets, and instead replaces it with an undefined and certainly inefficient system of distributing commodity food boxes.

As the budget and the Farm Bill make their way through Congress, we call on our lawmakers, especially Senators Klobuchar and Smith, to fight against these proposed cuts to SNAP.

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