In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Bob Greenstein, one of the nation’s most respected voices on budget policy. Greenstein is founder and president emeritus of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a visiting fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Cook and Greenstein discuss President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which Congress is considering – and how it could end food and health care support for millions of Americans.
They assess how the House version of the bill could remove up to 15 million people from Medicaid in the next few years. They question the motive behind this effort, and highlight provisions in the bill that would make it harder for Americans living on lower income to get food assistance. Cook and Greenstein analyze how efforts in the bill to cut federal spending will lead to higher costs for states and more arduous red tape for citizens to comply with to receive benefits.
Ken: Hey everyone. It’s Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. One of the issues that we're hearing an awful lot about these days is the Federal Food Assistance Program. It used to be called Food stamps, but now it's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. And it's in the news for a couple of reasons.
One is because there have been efforts underway to significantly change the program to reduce benefits, increase hurdles to access, and to disallow purchases like soda and junk food through the program. That last point has been driven largely by the Make America Healthy Again agenda. The way this is being sold to us is that families that participate in the SNAP program shouldn't be able to buy certain foods and drinks with federal money in order to encourage healthier choices.
Now, you'd think that I and the folks at EWG would support this. We are no fans of high fructose corn syrup, food chemicals, or processed foods. Though I have to say on a human level, I enjoy sodas and sweets from time to time as much as the next person. But our core belief over the years has been that you cannot help people make healthier choices if they don't have food and create barriers to access.
And the SNAP program – reducing benefits does not result in healthier kids. It first results in hungrier kids.
The second big issue, of course, is the budget. This Republican led Congress has said that they are adding work requirements, increasing paperwork, and introducing other hurdles. As part of their effort, they claim to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse.
And why are they working on cleaning up the budget now while it's to pass? President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill so that he can give the wealthiest Americans massive tax cuts and pay for his draconian immigration policies. I had a great conversation on our last episode with Marian Nessel where we talked about this and I wanted to continue the conversation.
So I invited my guest today as he has been a key player for decades on social justice, food justice, and anti-poverty issues. Robert Greenstein is an intellectual leader, founder and president emeritus of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – a think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies.
The center has been the gold standard for policy analysis for over 40 years. Everyone, and I mean everyone, looks to the Center to have a clear, equal eye and nonpartisan understanding of what the implications of legislation before Congress will be, with special reference on legislation that affects low income Americans.
Bob is also a visiting fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution where he is affiliated with the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative. Bob has been applying his insight as an expert on the federal budget and a range of domestic policy issues, including programs and policies affecting low and moderate income families and individuals.
He's been doing that for decades. I should also mention Bob is a personal friend and an inspiration to our work here at EWG.
Bob, thank you for joining. I've been so upset by what I'm watching unfold on Capitol Hill. I've been visiting again and again, the Center and the Brookings Institute websites to get my head around what this legislation will mean for real people and what the long-term cost will be of pushing people out of SNAP and out of Medicaid.
It's a red hot issue now. The house has finished its first round. And now the Senate is taking on President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill. What are your overall takes on what is unfolding now on Capitol Hill with this Big Beautiful Bill? And what will it mean in the areas that you're most concerned with?
What will it mean for real people?
Bob: Well, Ken, first thanks very much for inviting me. You and I have known each other a long time and I've been a fan of your work and the Environmental Working Group for decades. This bill is, uh, one could say it's kind of unspeakable and that would barely be touching the surface if I could quote someone else who fully reflects my feelings.
Paul Krugman in his substack wrote, “The House has now passed what must surely be the worst piece of legislation in modern US history. Millions of Americans are about to see crucial support snatched away. A significant number will die prematurely due to inadequate medical care or nutrition. Yet this suffering won't offset a hole in the budget.”
It's really just to help finance huge tax cuts. I've been involved in battles over the safety net since 1972 when I came to Washington, and we've had cycles before the early Reagan years. In the mid nineties when there have been cuts in these programs and –
Ken: I remember having dinners with you and hearing the war stories from the close perspective that you had about all of those episodes over the decades.
Bob: But this goes so far beyond those. Let's take Medicaid and Obamacare. The CBO’s (Congressional Budget Office) partial estimate is that the combination of changes in Medicaid and in eligibility for premiums – subsidies to help afford coverage in the Obamacare exchanges or marketplaces – will result in the lowering of those subsidies, meaning people will pay more in premiums.
CBO put out a document saying, we're still working on this, but based on what we've analyzed so far, our estimate is 13.7 million people who now have coverage will become uninsured, not in the first year. The bill is very cleverly designed so that some of the deepest cuts do not occur until after the midterm elections or even until after the 2028 presidential election.
Once they're all in effect, CBO estimates at least 13.7 million [will be kicked off Medicaid]. And since then, further analysis has been done and the best estimates now are that somewhere close to 15 million Americans who are now insured, will become uninsured. And that's just healthcare!?
Ken: Yeah.
Bob: Then you get to the nutrition assistance part.
For the first time in the history of this program, we used to call it food stamps but now we call it SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. We've shriveled cash assistance to the poorest people in the country that is really the bottom rung so that now holds people up even though it's in the form of food vouchers. But those help free up some money for other things. The SNAP program is really the fundamental bottom line on the safety net.
When all the cuts are fully in effect, it cuts the SNAP program by 34% and the ultimate effects might be even deeper than that because it makes a historic change. It moves from a program in which the federal government pays 100% of the benefits, where the states administer it and the federal government pays half of the state administrative costs. They would now convert it into a program in which states pay based on certain factors, particularly the size of the state's, SNAP error rates. States would have to pay 5% to 25% of the cost of the benefits. When you look at the cost of this program, that shifts tens of billions of dollars of cost onto states.
But states are required to balance their budgets each year, even in recessions, except for the state of Vermont. Where would the states get the money from? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that some states might discontinue the whole program. Others would undo options they've taken that enable them to reach more low income working families.
Ironically, some of the very families that voted for Donald Trump in the last election. And when you add the work requirement provisions of these bills, there's a fundamental issue here that the media has largely overlooked.
There have been debates about work requirements forever, but when I came to Washington in the seventies and in the eighties, and at least the first half of the nineties – first off, no one ever talked about work requirements for healthcare, right? “If you don't meet the requirement. We don't care if you're sick or you could be contagious.” We've never had that discussion.
We have for programs like SNAP or food stamps, but what a work requirement used to mean is if you're not exempt because of disability or age or caring for a very young child (if you're not working or if you're not employed), you have to look for a job. And there would be mechanisms to monitor, make sure people were doing sufficient job search. But the work requirements of those eras never said, “If you look for a job and can't find it, we cut you off and throw you out into the back alley.” That's what these provisions do.
Ken: Yeah
Ben: You must be working at least 20 hours a week. If you fall below that in Medicaid, you lose your coverage. In SNAP, they would allow you three months out of every three years in which you could get benefits while working less than 20 hours a week on average. But after that, you have to wait 33 months to be able to get back on the program. The House bill, the Big Beautiful Bill as it’s named, has this requirement: that if you're not working at least 20 hours a week, they (the federal government) throw you over the side. After three months they would not only continue to apply to people not raising children at home who were up to age 54, but they would raise it to people up to age 64 and also apply it to parents unless the youngest child is six or under.
And let me put the icing on the cake here – doesn't seem like the right analogy. Today, there is a requirement in SNAP currently for people up to age 54 that you only get three months out of three years (of benefits without proof of employment). It does not apply to people with kids. It also does not apply to people over age 54. It can only be waived if your county or state has an unemployment rate that is more than one fifth above the national average.
By contrast in the bill on the hill, those rules now say, “You can only get a waiver for your county from this requirement that if you're not working at least 20 hours a week, we throw you over the side after three months. You can only get a waiver if your local unemployment rate equals or exceeds 10%.”
Ken: Whoa.
Bob: If you look at the last four recessions in the United States before the COVID recession, a recession that was connected to a pandemic, if you look at the previous four, the deepest recession was the Great Recession of 2009-10.
In the Great Recession, the national unemployment rate hit 10% for one month out of the entire several year recession. So basically what these new requirements in SNAP mean is that if you're a 63-year-old widow who's looking for a job and can't find it, and the unemployment rate is 9% in your county [you wouldn’t get assistance].
If we were in a deep recession, this bill says, “we don't care. We're cutting off all your food assistance.” After 90 days, the degree of severity, I would say, of cruelty in these provisions is really unprecedented, and many of the same families, low income families and individuals, would get hit simultaneously. You'd lose your SNAP, you'd lose your Medicaid coverage.
And then although it's not part of the one Big Beautiful Bill, if you look at the budget that Trump just sent Capitol Hill for the programs for which funding is appropriated each year, he also proposes to completely eliminate the low income energy assistance program, which helps poor people heat their homes in the winter. That would be eliminated entirely and he cuts low income housing programs by over 40%.
Those already only serve one of every four low income families eligible. It would now be shrunken quite dramatically below that, and there would be a two year time limit on how long you could get rental assistance. So if you were no longer getting rental assistance, often you couldn't afford to keep your apartment, you'd get evicted after two years, and the same people might now not have Medicaid or food assistance either.
If you put it all together, this bill has the deepest, most severe cuts in assistance for people with lower to modest incomes in the nation's history, and it would cause the biggest increases in poverty and in the ranks of the uninsured of any piece of legislation in the modern history of the country. Now, to be sure, I'm not saying the poverty rate would go to the highest level in 70, 80 years.
If you go back 80 years ago, we had so little safety net and the poverty rate clearly was higher in the Great Depression and all of that. But what I'm saying is at any point in time you say, here's where we are today. Are we increasing support? Are we reducing support? Are we lowering poverty? Are we raising poverty?
As a change from the current system, this would create the largest increase in poverty and loss of health coverage. In the country's history.
Ken: What happened? There was so much debate in the past, as you said, about work requirements. There was so much debate about the cost of these programs, but there was always, I felt a reservoir of goodwill within the Republican party that prevented these kinds of extreme ideas from finding their way even into a budget resolution. That seems to be gone now.
I don't ever remember such a violent attachment to work requirements, for example, as a driver of getting people out of programs. People who are in the SNAP program, most of those households have workers in them, right?
Bob: Well, very much true in Medicaid as well.
I mean the really key point here is: in the last five years or so, two states had work requirements of this nature in Medicaid. One was Arkansas, it was in effect for a number of months, and then a court threw it out; and the other is Georgia that did get a federal waiver to do it, and the Georgia program is still in effect. So what happened in those two states?
In Arkansas, within a few months, something like 18,000 or 19,000 (of medicaid recipients) lost their health coverage, a much larger number than had been estimated. And there were very sophisticated studies by leading economists – Ben Summers of Harvard led one of the key studies that examined what happened here. And what they found was that the great bulk of people who got thrown off Medicaid in Arkansas for non-compliance with the work requirement were actually working, working sufficiently to meet the requirement or were disabled or incapacitated and exempt from the requirement, but they couldn't work their way through all of the paperwork. They couldn't reach someone to answer their questions, and the vast bulk of people who got thrown off were complying with the work requirement, but couldn't demonstrate that in time and with the right paperwork to the satisfaction of the state Medicaid office.
What Georgia adopted was an expansion of Medicaid coverage to certain low income groups that otherwise had been left out and were uninsured, but only if they met these work requirements that were similar to those in Arkansas. This program has been in effect for several years. A couple hundred thousand people who were estimated to be eligible to gain coverage through it.
And the last time I looked, the total number of people enrolled was 6,500. I mean, well under 10% of the number the state expected to serve when it instituted the program. Why did almost nobody sign up or remain enrolled? And again, the studies indicate that overwhelmingly the people are working or are disabled or incapacitated and the like. But (they) got caught up in the paperwork and the red tape and couldn't get through it. And the Georgia program in which only 6,500 people are enrolled several years after it started as a statewide program.
The Georgia program is the model on which the house based its nationwide Medicaid requirements that would go into effect if this bill becomes law.
On a related front, as you mentioned, I think that the severe political polarization of recent decades is a key factor here, as well as the movement of the Republican Party, well, to the right of where it used to be.
I mean, you may recall that for years in the seventies and beyond. My number one closest ally on Capitol Hill in trying to protect and defend and improve the food stamp program was Bob Dole.
Ken: I remember many the stories that you would tell about how Dole would stand up to others in his caucus, partly to balance farm politics and spending and so forth, because typically the SNAP program at least, is combined with the farm subsidy program in the farm bills and in that dance of legislation.
Bob: It was well beyond that. It was not primarily because of the farm subsidies. Dole really, he believed, you know, his partner was George McGovern.
Ken: Yes.
Bob: It was the Dole McGovern bill that became the basis for the modern food stamp program in the mid 1990s in what became the 1996 welfare law. The house ended the food stamp program and replaced it with a shrunken block grant to states. The person who made sure that it died after the bill left the house and did not become law was the then chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Dick Luger of Indiana.
No one thought of Bob Dahl or Dick Luger as a flaming liberal. John Danforth of Missouri, David Durenberger of Minnesota, and Olympia Snow in Maine. There were a lot of Republicans in those days who really were part of the effort to strengthen and improve the safety net and to ward off or limit retrenchment in it when the political pendulum turned.
And now one is hard pressed to name a single, I guess Lisa Murkowski maybe comes closest, but in the house, as we know, not a single so-called moderate Republican voted against the bill for weeks. They claimed the Medicaid cuts were too deep and then they all rolled over anyway.
Ken: Yeah, their opposition absolutely dissolved away. And as you describe, I had done some reading about the Georgia program in particular. It almost seems as if the whole point of the provisions in the house bill is to drive people out of the program.
Bob: It's to save money.
Ken: Yeah, to save money. Not to get people working per se. It's more like if we structure it this way, people will get out of the program and we'll save money and we can give that to millionaires in our tax breaks.
Bob: You've raised a very important point. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, whose director for a number of years has been Phil Swale – very fine economist.
Ken: Yeah.
Bob: Phil is a conservative. He was in the Bush White House. And he was for a number of years at the American Enterprise Institute. He is not a democrat or a liberal. And the CBO that he leads issued an important paper in 2022 studying work requirements, and it said that while the work requirements for cash welfare in the 1996 welfare bill did seem to have prompted some increase in employment, that Medicaid work requirements and SNAP work requirements produced little or no increase in employment.
CBO estimates that the work requirement provisions of the house bill, the Medicaid work requirements will result in no increase in employment but in big decreases in the number of people enrolled. And you know, people on the hill and their supporters always frame their proposals in ways that will sell the best.
But I like to think that there are certain standards or certain levels of distortion, shall we say, that one doesn't go beyond. That was before this bill. Just take last Sunday's talk shows where you had the head of OMB and the Speaker of the House claiming that this bill would reduce the deficit, not increase it, when every honest economist and analyst in the country knows that the bill substantially increases deficits in debt because of the massive tax cuts it can take.
Secondly, they keep insisting, like Russell Vote, the OMB director who comes off as mild-mannered. He's as extreme as they get and vote with a straight face and said on the Sunday talk shows that not a single person is going to lose Medicaid because of this.
Ken: Yeah.
Bob: Then when they defend the work requirements, they talk about 25 year olds playing video games at home. But 1 million of the people that CBO predicts will lose SNAP because of the changes in work requirements are people aged 55 to 64. They don't talk about that when they try to sell the bill.
Similarly, you know the claim that there are no benefit cuts and it's all fraud, waste and abuse. You shift huge costs to states in the SNAP program. States are left holding the bag, they'll end up cutting the benefits. How are they gonna make the numbers at all?
And another one: How many times have you heard in the last month a Republican leader say on TV or in a press confer\ence, “We're getting big savings from getting undocumented immigrants off the programs.”
Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for these programs. They're throwing legal immigrants off the programs. They're particularly removing people who are here illegally and have been granted asylum or refugee status because they were fleeing persecution or other kinds of threats in their home country, and they've satisfied the US immigration standards to get asylum or refugee status.
Those people heretofore have been eligible by and large for these programs. They're making them ineligible and then they're going one step farther and they're saying that if a state, as a number of states do, if a state with its own state money, no federal money involved, provides health coverage to undocumented children and pregnant women – or certain categories of generally, if you're a legal, permanent resident – you're ineligible for these benefits often for your first five years in the country. Some states at state costs provide the benefits during that five year period.
The bill on the hill says that if a state devotes any money at all to cover those groups of legal immigrants as and or undocumented immigrants, like undocumented children and pregnant women, that if a state does that, the federal government will slash the share of Medicaid costs in that state, that it bears shifting billions and billions of dollars to states.
So I expect states to discontinue those coverages. We're gonna have a lot of refugees and asylees and children who themselves have legal status who will become uninsured. The gap between the rhetoric that is being used to describe these cuts and the rhetoric that is being used, because if you really explain to the public, what they're really doing here. I think the popularity of it would drop significantly. And the Republicans think so too. That's why they're claiming that there are no benefit cuts here.
Ken: Yeah, no benefit cuts and just carving out waste, fraud, and abuse. And I saw the Speaker of the House, Mr. Johnson, say the other day, I think it was on a weekend talk show.
Someone challenged him and said, “You have a lot of people in your state who are beneficiaries of these programs, and there are estimates that tens of thousands of them will lose those benefits.” Mike Johnson said, “They'll have to lose the benefits. It's their fault if they don't meet the work requirements. And there are people in my district, in my state who don't deserve the benefits. I know that. And I'm fine with this program moving forward because it's going to eliminate payments to people who shouldn't have gotten them to begin with.”
I kind of, in a way, admired that he was at least saying people are gonna be kicked out of the program. But he was basically saying it, it was because they didn't deserve to be in the program to begin with.
Bob: Yeah. This is particularly true in what they're saying with respect to the work requirements. It ignores a couple of things. Surveys show that the great bulk of this population wants to work, but for people that don't have more than a high school education, the lower skilled, the low-skill part of the labor market is a very volatile labor market where people are at the whims of their whims, maybe not the right word, but they're, they're at the mercy of their employers as to how many hours of work they get.
For example, a recent study found that two thirds (⅔) of people in the low age labor market who work less than full time, want to work more hours, but their employers aren't offering more hours. There's a lot of documentation that people may work 30 hours a week for a number of weeks and then the business climate changes and their employer cuts them to 15 hours a week, in which case they would no longer meet these requirements.
There are people who particularly, but not only in recessions, I mean where we are in Washington, DC where you and I are just in the past weeks I've noted various restaurants and other small business enterprises that are announcing that they're going to close, probably partly related to all of the federal employees or former federal employees who no longer have jobs.
But in any case, yes, if your employer lays you off, whether because the employer is downsizing, closing, whatever, your employer lays you off and you can't quickly find another job paying at least 20 hours a week, you'll lose your benefits under these bills.
It's portrayed as though it's all people who are unwilling to work and they want to sponge off you, Joe Taxpayer. In fact, that’s not the case. It's far from the reality. There may be a small percentage of people for whom that's true, but it's a small percentage. The overwhelming bulk of the people who will get thrown off are people who, if the public knew their individual stories, I think would be sympathetic too.
Ken: I think that's right.
Inspired by you, EWG has always made the SNAP benefit in the debates where we've been involved, which are these farm bill debates where, you know – in the past it's for people who don't know, that's the comes up every five years and the way it has traditionally worked is there are sort of three big pots of money to fight over.
One is the farm subsidies. One is the conservation programs which is the way we got into these bills, programs that help farmers pay for part of the cost of protecting their land and protecting wildlife, water quality and so forth.
But the third big expenditure is SNAP. And I remember in the, in the early to mid 1980s, the first time I was aware of it, people would come up to me as we were trying to get more money for conservation. These would be like House staffers, typically Republican staffers and they would say, “Why don't we take it out of the food stamp program, the SNAP program, and put it into conservation.”
And from that very beginning and you know, knowing I was probably gonna have dinner with you two nights a week during these farm bill debates, or fairly often anyway, and knowing it's just wrong – we always objected to that. And then we, in every farm bill, our top priority is to protect or expand the SNAP benefits.
You can't be worried about what contaminants are in kids' food or if the food is not healthy, if they don't have food. And so that has been our rallying cry at EWG. There aren't a lot of public interest organizations just generally who are in the SNAP fight yet.
Obviously the center has been foremost, the Food Research and Action Council, our friends there, and of course many local groups and a number of religious groups, of course. And then you had people like Bob Dole. But the thing that's bugged me lately where it seems like just another way to pick on less fortunate people is this effort on the part of people to change the SNAP program so that you can't buy certain foods, particularly sugary sodas and junk food and so forth.
And I have to say, my initial reaction to a lot of these people who are speaking up to do that, I've never seen them anywhere near the fights to preserve the benefit. They're coming in now and saying the problem with SNAP is not that the benefits are too low, and it's not that they… You don't hear [Robert F.] Kennedy at the HHS or anyone else who's worried about hungry kids. You don't see them getting up and opposing the house provisions. What you see them getting up and saying is, “We need to cut soda out of the SNAP program.”
Bob: The proposal to not allow SNAP benefits to be used to purchase soda and so forth is not in the House Bill, and I don't expect it to make it into the legislation. But I would just note one aspect of that that often gets ignored.
When the food stamp program first started in the 1960s and for several decades thereafter, beneficiaries got coupon books of food stamps, and when they went to the checkout counter, they had to rip out the food stamp coupons and everybody saw them doing it.
It led to stigma and it led some people in need to refuse to participate. As modern technology advanced, the program moved from actual food stamp coupons to an electronic benefit transfer card. It's loaded with the amount of your food stamp benefit for the month, and that's how you now use SNAP benefits to pay for your groceries.
If we went to a system whereby some foods you couldn't purchase with SNAP and others, you could, then people who were on SNAP who were checking out would have to separate all their purchases into two different groups and pay for them separately. It would significantly bring back stigma in the program and inhibit participation from some very needy people.
So that's one reason I have trouble with that. But the budget resolution. That set up the current bill, the reconciliation bill. The budget resolution called on the House Ag Committee to cut $230 billion over 10 years from SNAP and instead they ended up cutting almost $300 billion over 10 years from SNAP.
Why did they go above the level they were assigned? Because they then used the difference to put another $60 billion in the farm subsidies of various sorts. What's that old saying? Heads I win, tails you lose.
If you look at the way that the house structured their requirement for states for the first time in the history of the program to have to pay part of the benefits, what they did, as I mentioned, every state would've to pay 5% of the benefits, but almost every state would end up having to pay 15 to 25% of the benefits. 'cause unless your error rate were below a very unrealistically low level, you'd be subject to a higher share of cost sharing. Okay, so your estate now, it's really vital to try to get your error rate down. Well, there are two other parts of the SNAP revisions of the House Bill.
One of them cuts in half the federal share of state administrative costs. You wanna reduce errors, you need more caseworkers, you need more electronic systems to match databases and earnings. But at the very same time, your state budget is going to get slammed. If your error rates are above a low level, your ability to reduce the error rate gets compromised by a huge reduction in the funding for administrative costs for the very kind of functions you need to do to try to get your error rate down, and then it goes further.
Then they have a provision that redefines what's in error. So in Medicaid, you're eligible or ineligible. If you're eligible, you get Medicaid coverage. In SNAP for every $3 of additional income you have, your benefit goes down $1.
People have fluctuating incomes. So a bunch of the errors are people get certified for a certain level of benefits and an auditor comes in two months later. The level of income in the family has moved a bit. That's a bit off. So then, there's long been a rule. That modest discrepancies, if you're really eligible, it's just a modest discrepancy on the benefit amount that isn't considered part of the error rate.
So the House wrote a provision into the bill to repeal that and say even small discrepancies are part of the error rate. Another thing we know, I know going back to my days running the food stamp program in the Carter administration, is one sure way to reduce errors is to simplify the rules in the program.
The eligibility and benefit rules and one sure way to increase errors is to make the program more complicated and require more paper. So there also are provisions in the House bill. They did it to save money, but where they repeal certain simplifications and make the eligibility and benefit structure more complicated.
Okay, put all these things together. The state gets hit with higher cost sharing requirements, which will lead to it to make deeper cuts in the program if it doesn't get its error rate down. While at the same time we slash the administrative funding for states to try to get the errors down, we redefine errors to artificially make the error rate higher and we complicate the program to make errors more likely.
All of those are part of the House bill at the same time. I mean, it's breathtaking. I've never seen anything like it.
Ken: Again, I think if most Americans heard the details here, they would object to it. And so that's why those, those details get hidden and they rush through these bills and they hope that people aren't gonna pay attention.
Bob: People used to have to buy their food stamps and the poorest people didn't have any, you know, you'd pay a certain amount and you get a larger amount back in food stamps, but if you couldn't pay the amount, you didn't get anything. And the central center point of the Food Stamp Act of 1977 was to eliminate the requirement that people pay for their food stamps.
And President Carter originally rejected it. We wanted it to be the Carter proposal, and he originally rejected it, but agreed to have a meeting, and Carter reversed himself and it became the Carter proposal and it became law and it fundamentally changed the food stamp program.
Ken: Amazing. So crystal balls are especially cloudy these days, I think but I'll ask you to look into yours. We have this, um, legislation coming over from the house. It's now being taken up by the Senate. What is your prognosis for where, where it will all come out? Are there any signs in the Senate that you see where we might expect a moderating impact on some of these Incredibly harsh, I think cruel is the right word, provisions in the House biil. Do you think, do you think there'll be some balancing?
Bob: I think that there will be a little bit of softening on the Medicaid cuts, but not much. A little bit of softening on the SNAP cuts. Whereas up until a few days ago, I thought the Senate was gonna drop the state cost sharing requirement.
Now, from what I'm hearing, they're gonna keep it, but not make it as big a cost sharing requirement. You know, what we saw in the house was that the people who called themselves moderates and said they objected, you know, were, “No Medicaid cuts over 450 500 billion a year,” and they ended up doing over 700 billion and they all voted yes.
A week or two before the markups, people, Republicans in the House were saying, we're not gonna cut 230 billion in SNAP. It's too big. We can't do it. And they ended up cutting 300 billion or 295 billion. My fear is a similar set of developments in the Senate. Susan Collins expresses concern, you know, that kind of thing.
They moderate a few things, but 90% of the really harsh low income provisions or so, I don't know if 90% will be the right percent, but the overwhelming bulk I fear are gonna stay in the bill. Boy, I think it was really disappointing that the so-called moderate Republicans in the house, what they ended up going to the wall on.
Was raising the ceiling on the state and local tax deduction? A break raising the ceiling that overwhelmingly benefits affluent households. People with six figure or seven figure incomes, that became what they really cared about. Not the severity of the Medicaid cuts, the SNSP cuts and the like. You know, people say they care about working families.
There is a provision in the house bill that's gotten little attention. That would put a big restriction on one of the most effective programs we've ever created that historically had Republicans support the earned income tax credit.
Ken: Yes.
Bob: You don't work, you don't get it. So it's not a work requirement issue, but they have written a provision into the house bill that every low income working family with children that applies for the credit starting in a few years.
Everyone will have to do all this paperwork and documentation in advance to prove that the child they're claiming when they file for the EITC is a child they're entitled to claim. Now this is a situation where we no longer have almost all the families in the country being conventional married couples where the marriage is stable until the child is 18.
We have many children. They move between one parent or another. The parents no longer live together. The data show a significant increase in the share of children who live at least part of the year with a grandparent, and it's these shifting child living arrangements that make it appear that there are some errors when often it's low income person A claims the child. And if you go through the very technical tax rules, low income person B was the one entitled to claim the child. But here they're gonna create all of this paperwork over these complicated rules at the same time that IRS funding is being reduced. People aren't gonna be able to call the IRS office and get a friendly caseworker to help them figure out how to fill out these forms. So I fear that millions of low income working families with children in the income ranges that Donald Trump won are now gonna lose their earned income credit because of the huge paperwork involved.
I mean, that's one of the ironies here. A party that for a long time has said the government is too big and intrusive. Is making the government far more intrusive, if you want Medicaid or SNAP or the earned income credit or things of this sort,
Ken: It's heartbreaking. And you know, I think there was a time where, because we had always been engaged, uh, in farm Bill fights standing up for SNAP.
I remember sitting down with David Beckman from Bread for the World with Colin Peterson and we were talking about. Where the cuts were going to happen. And David said, “Qhy is it always the case that when the agriculture committee,” this was his take, “Why do you always go for cuts first to the SNAP program instead of the the subsidy program?”
And Mr. Peterson just calmly explained that there would be no way for him to get reelected as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican district if he didn't come home with lots of money for Republican farmers. And so this whole topsy-turvy notion that big government is a problem that's oppressing people when the strongest demand for big government to benefit people comes from wealthier Republican beneficiaries of these programs already.
It was shocking to me that he just said it. I mean, Colin Peterson was, say what you will, he was very, very blunt. He told you what was on his mind, and he did that day. It makes me, uh, think also that for a long time I think the environmental community felt like we would be powerful enough politically to avoid the kinds of attacks that we saw happening on civil rights that we saw happening on social justice programs and anti-poverty programs.
That's no longer the case. We are sort of all in the same boat in a way, and from this bigger politics. That is really squeezing out opportunities, squeezing out fairness, squeezing out you know, protection for our future, whether it's in education or science or environment or taking care of our kids.
Do you have a sense of, of loss and mourning about all of this, Bob? I know we're both still in the fight. No question about that. But you must have your moments. I know, I do.
Bob: You know, you're worried about mourning. I started. Or discussion by referring to something that Paul Krugman had just written a paragraph or two later in the same piece.
He says, in coming weeks, I'll write more about these savage guts, but I can't bring myself to do it right now. I'm in mourning. A couple of thoughts on what you've just said.
I'm particularly frustrated these days and a lot of people are by what appears to be this growing battle between different wings of the Democratic Party. It's fine for people to disagree on policy preferences, but what I think very strongly is, this is a time when you want the biggest tent, not the smallest tent. You need to bring everybody who has concerns over these policies, even if they have some significant disagreements on what we should do instead.
But it's time for a really big temp. The blogger keeps saying,” Expand the tent. Don't shrink the tent.” I think that's very, very important.
A second thought that's going to be very interesting to look at in the future is that among the people who will be hit the hardest by the cuts in various programs. Most programs, Medicaid, SNAP, and others for people with low incomes, are no longer narrow programs only for people below the poverty line.
Most of these programs now also cover working families somewhat above the poverty line. I mean, you know, the poverty line, I think for a single individual today is only something like $17,000 a year or something like that. Families at $25, $30, %35,000 people. Archetypical struggling paycheck to paycheck family.
Yeah. There are a lot of the people who really get hit by the cuts in this bill, and they're people to which the Trumpified Republican party tries to appeal. Now, the way that they deal with that in this bill is, as I mentioned earlier, by deferring the implementation of a number of these cuts. So after the midterm election or after the presidential election, and also by shifting all kinds of costs to states that states can't meet, so that states then design the specific cuts and it doesn't look like when that happens a few years from now.
Yeah. People don't connect it to Donald Trump. Mike Johnson, their member of Congress or their senator. But if they weren't fearful about that, they wouldn't design them that way. One important rhetorical and messaging battle for the years ahead is to try to educate the public and affected constituencies as these changes take effect and begin, as I expect will be the case, I hope it's wrong, but as I fully expect to be the case, to cause lots of hardship that goes beyond the families that affect local economies. and small businesses and the like, rural hospitals, health clinics. It's really important to connect the dots. And make sure people understood where these new policies came from because obviously my longer term hope is that in the not too distant future, I expect that this stuff will pass. It'll be softened a little, but not very much. I hope that's wrong, but then the task becomes demonstrating the impacts, connecting the dots, and building the basis to either restore or pass other changes that more than compensate for these cuts in the years and decades to come. I think once the bill passes, that then becomes all of our tasks.
Ken: No, I, I think that's exactly right. And that's true across a whole slew of issues, right? Yeah. It's, uh, certainly true and renewable energy. It's true of environmental protection, true of science and, and across the board. I have the same hope, Bob, that over time, if these cruel measures become law and people are hurt the way we have.
Every reason to believe they will be hurt. I hope that when we come through the other side of that, people will remember, you know, part of it is there, there, but for the grace of God, go I, and that's true of communities as well as families. At any moment you can have a dramatic change in fortune, uh, at a community level if jobs move away at a family level, if something happens of a medical nature or a plant closes down and you lose your job or you get fewer hours. All of these factors give these programs their human face, and I'm very, very upset, very concerned that so many people are going along with this on the Republican side that know better. And hopeful that Democrats will build that big tent and make sure that we have the capability to tell the story going forward. As the cruelty takes, takes hold.
Bob: There was a fascinating news article a few weeks ago, sent a team of reporters into Mike Johnson, speaker of Johnson's district in Louisiana, which is a poor district. Yeah. If I remember correctly, there are over 100,000 people in Johnson's district who are today enrolled in Medicaid, and the reporters interviewed the district and what they reported, if I remember correctly, is that not a single person they interviewed knew that their congressman, Mike Johnson, was leading an effort to do big cuts in Medicaid. Not a single person they interviewed was aware of that. Right.
Ken: They probably wouldn't believe it.
Bob: And I think if I remember now my memory's a little hazier on this, but I think that's right.I think people, at a minimum, were surprised when the reporters said that. They were probably skeptical. I don't remember the article on that level of detail.
Ken: Yeah, I agree with you. I think the, maybe not the very worst that we fear, but. Pretty damn bad is going to happen at the end of this process, and it will be celebrated as the one big beautiful bill and a lot of people, uh, will get hurt so that a few people can benefit.
Yeah, Bob Greenstein, thank you so much. Thank you for, um, all the work you've done over the years and continue to do and thank you for inspiring me. As a, someone engaged in the public interest for many decades, you were always the. The kind of leader that I aspire to be. Your organizations have always turned out the quality of work that I've aspired to turn out.
You've really, uh, helped shape my thinking about what public interest work at its best can be. And I'm, I'm beyond grateful, my friend. Thank you so much.
Bob: Well, you're too kind and my thanks to you for, uh. Giving me a forum and a soapbox this afternoon.
Ken: Anytime. Robert Greenstein, thank you so much for joining us today.
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