Biden’s illegal food stamp bonanza
Washington Examiner
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After illegally bailing out college graduates with a $400 billion student debt amnesty, President Joe Biden is back at it again. This time, he is illegally boosting food stamp benefits by $200 billion. House Republicans should put an end to both of these illegal measures.
According to a Government Accountability Office report released last week, Biden’s Department of Agriculture abused its authority under the 2018 Farm Bill to speed up a review of food costs required by the legislation. It also broke its own guidelines when arriving at those costs. As a result of these illegal changes, food stamp benefits increased beyond inflation for the first time in 45 years.
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Since 1975, the USDA has created food plans that represent a suitable diet at four different price points: thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. Food stamp benefit levels have always been set at the Thrifty Food Plan level. The USDA has reevaluated these levels three times since 1975, most recently 15 years ago.
The 2018 Farm Bill called for a new evaluation to be completed by 2022, with reevaluations every five years after that. This revaluation is essentially a computer model that inputs food, price, and nutrition data to create “Market Baskets” of foods and beverages necessary to support a healthy diet.
The Biden administration, according to the GAO, essentially cooked the books of its computer model, breaking almost a dozen internal USDA guidelines along the way, to produce a whopping 21% increase in the maximum food stamp benefit.
Predictably, even after presented with the GAO’s conclusions, the Biden administration was unapologetic about its illegal activity.
“We stand firm on both the quality of our work and the difference it made in millions of people’s lives,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in response to the GAO report. “We owed it to the American people to get the revaluation done well and get it done quickly — and that’s exactly what we did.”
From its illegal student bailouts to its complete refusal to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, to this food stamp bonanza, Biden has proven there is no law he won’t break for political gain. House Republicans should not give the USDA another dime until it rescinds this food stamp bonus and redoes the reevaluation as required by the 2018 Farm Bill, this time in accordance with established USDA guidelines.
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