A new proposal for SNAP eligibility requirements could cut off food assistance for some Nevada families.
If a family receives benefits through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, such as help with housing, child care, or job preparation, they will most likely not qualify for SNAP benefits, too.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed to terminate SNAP benefits for households with incomes of about $35,000 a year for families of three.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the country is seeing the lowest rate of poverty in history, with more working people today than ever before.
Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, said, "As we move more Americans than ever before into work and into less poverty, the idea is that we need to make sure that we're double-checking who's in these programs. If they are deserving under all of the rules to be in the programs, of course they will stay there."
Just this last year, there's been a drop of about 23% in the number of people receiving SNAP benefits here in Nevada.
The Retail Association of Nevada says that these new rules will affect more than just the people receiving the benefits.
They say that the SNAP program is designed to help agricultural growth, and that local grocery stores and farms will be negatively affected by this as well.
Bryan Wachter, the President of the Retail Association of Nevada, said, "A downstream effect of being able to feed people who need it the most, and so the program works really well, and it's the most effective program the federal government has. In fact, there is more than the dollar that we get per dollar in benefits to Nevadans. We get more than $3 back in economic activity once it goes through the system."
They believe this new proposal will lead to more government expenses.
Saying people will spend more time filing paperwork through each organization, when it's currently set up to be one application for all services.
Each program is designed to help in different ways, and the Retail Association feels limiting access to them for families will only cause more harm, possibly taking SNAP benefits away from six million people nationally.
"It forces folks to start making changes that they otherwise wouldn't have made, when we have a government program that has proven to work exceedingly well, that we can be able to solve these problems that are actively choosing to make it harder is just a difficult reality to understand," Wachter tells us.
There is a 30-day public comment period that started this week after the federal government announced this proposal.
