Two GOP bills putting restrictions on SNAP are headed to Hobbs’ desk

Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have voted to pass two bills that would make it more difficult for Arizonans to receive or keep government benefits to help them buy food. 

The bills passed through both the House of Representatives and Senate on a party-line vote but are likely to get a veto from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. 

The proposals would impose training or work requirements on “abled-bodied” people using the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, and would bar the Arizona Department of Economic Security from applying for work requirement waivers on behalf of able-bodied workers. 

SNAP, formerly called food stamps, helps families with low or no income pay for groceries through monthly benefits. More than 900,000 Arizonans are currently enrolled. 

House Bill 2502 mandates that SNAP recipients aged 18-60 who are able-bodied, and don’t have disabled dependents or children younger than six, either be employed at least 30 hours per week or participate in a work training program. 

Most Arizonans who use SNAP would not have to participate in the work training program because they are children, senior citizens or disabled. 

House Bill 2503 would stop DES from applying or renewing work requirement waivers on behalf of beneficiaries in the state, something that the department might do for people living in counties that have fewer job opportunities and higher unemployment than the state as a whole. 

Only three members of the public officially registered in support of the bill, and two of those were representatives of the Opportunity Solutions Project, a right-leaning organization based in Florida that lobbied for lawmakers to pass the bill. 

One of them, Scott Centorino, said during a Senate Health and Human Services Committee meeting on March 12 that the proposals were all about the “dignity of work.” 

In contrast, 77 individuals and organizations registered in opposition to the bill, including the American Academy of Pediatrics; the Arizona Public Health Association; the William E. Morris Institute of Justice, which advocates for low-income Arizonans; and the ACLU of Arizona. 

Autumn Byars, a hunger advocacy fellow at Grand Canyon Synod, asked senators during the hearing whether any of them ever had to worry where their next meal was coming from. Byars said that, when she was in elementary school, her family hit tough times and had to get by with the help of SNAP and other government benefits, even though her father was employed as a pastor of a small parish. She said she’s felt the same stress recently as a college student trying to stretch her student aid payments to make ends meet. 

“The reality is that everyone participating in SNAP is already under an incredible amount of stress,” she said. “Requiring additional red tape and bureaucracy by way of these training programs that this bill outlines will only add to this mental load.”

Around 9,400 people already participate in Arizona’s voluntary employment and training program that HB2502 would make mandatory for those who don’t qualify for an exemption. 

DES already spends around $14 million on this program annually to pay its contracted job training providers, as well as for child care and transportation for those who participate, costing a total of around $1,500 per participant. 

Legislative budget analysts estimate that the bill could potentially result in 130,600 more people participating in the training program annually. However, federal law prevents the state from kicking people off SNAP for failing to meet work or training requirements if the person has a good reason for not participating, so the number would likely be lower than that. 

While JLBC estimates that the bill would increase both the state and federal costs of the training program, without a good idea of what an expanded program would look like, analysts said they couldn’t accurately estimate what those costs would be. 

And if the proposals led to people being kicked out of SNAP, the state wouldn’t save a dime.

“We also estimate that while there may be a decline in SNAP caseloads as a result of this bill, any caseload savings would accrue to the federal government as SNAP benefits are 100% federally funded,” JLBC wrote in a fiscal note on the bill. “These savings would offset, at least partially, the federal costs of the expanded E&T (employment and training) program.”

***CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to reflect that Autumn Byars is a hunger advocacy fellow at Grand Canyon Synod.