If a proposal by the Trump administration is enacted, local health officials estimate more than 1,000 Marin residents could lose food stamps provided through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“It would narrow the scope of who is eligible for food support,” said Kari Beuerman, assistant director of the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services. “We’re very concerned about that.”
Known as CalFresh in California, the food stamp program provides qualified applicants with an electronic benefit transfer card that may be used like a debit card in participating grocery stores and farmers markets.
U.S. Agriculture Department officials say they want to close a loophole that allows some states, including California, to give food stamps to people even though they might not have met the maximum income and asset requirements.
To qualify for food stamps, a family’s assets and income are required to be at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. That means a family of three in Marin must earn no more than $21,330 per year to qualify.
Because of a change in state law, as of June 1 Californians receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) assistance are also eligible for food stamps. SSI is a federally funded program that provides income support to eligible people who are 65 or older, blind or disabled. SSI recipients must have assets of $3,500 or less to quality for food stamps.
Under current law, however, California and 38 other states have been able to streamline the approval process and grant food stamps to people who qualify for another federal aid program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). To qualify for TANF people must be pregnant or have children.
“What this rule change proposes to do is to eliminate that broad based categorical eligibility that California has been providing since 2008,” Beuerman said.
“The broad based categorical eligibility allows people who are just modestly above that 130% level to have the benefit,” she said. “It takes into account that they have expenses like paying their rent, paying for child care and paying for medications; that actually puts their income much lower when you account for expenses.”
Beuerman said the change would increase the administrative expense of operating the program.
“For people who are categorically eligible we don’t do a means test,” she said. “This would reinstate the need to do a means test on 100 percent of our clientele. That is a big workload burden for staff. It is very time consuming, and it’s expensive to administer.”
Beuerman said the proposed change will also increase churn in the program. She said that is because eligibility often fluctuates depending on when asset levels are checked. If someone has just deposited a paycheck, it may push the client over the limit, but only temporarily.
“Studies show that a majority of people who are means tested do wind up qualifying for CalFresh,” Beuerman said.
Paul Ash, director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, said, “There is a really insidious thing that we do in this country. We ask low income people to provide their information over and over again with different agencies in order to access benefits.
“This broad-based eligibility gave a little bit of relief to this practice by allowing people who were on TANF or SSI to go ahead and qualify for CalFresh,” Ash said, “because the requirements, while not identical, are so close that the money saved from the government having to pay eligibility workers to take the information more than offsets the slight difference in benefit amounts.”
Ash said the proposed change would affect people in high cost of living areas such as the Bay Area disproportionately because the federal poverty level used as a means of qualifying food stamp recipients is not adjusted for cost of living.
“There is already a group of people who have earned out of being eligible for this benefit,” Ash said, “even though due to our high cost of living they are no closer to being able to feed themselves than the family in another part of the country where the cost of living is low.”
Beuerman said this proposed change in the eligibility rules is just the latest move by the Trump administration to create confusion around the food stamp program. In September, the administration proposed a change to “public charge” policies that would disqualify anyone who has received food stamps from getting a green card.
Beuerman said it is unclear if this initiative is moving forward, and the government has said food stamp use before the rule goes into effect will not be counted against immigrants.
Nevertheless, Beuerman said, “All these potential changes are frightening and confusing people and discouraging them from applying for benefits.”
She said this is frustrating since Marin, which has one of the lowest food stamp participation rates in the state, has been trying to boost usage of the program by eligible residents.
