Submit Your Comments to Protect SNAP and Families that Need It—by April 2

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (http://www.cbpp.org):

Food assistance is at risk — again — and your voice is needed.

Just months after Congress and the Trump Administration debated and renewed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through the farm bill, the Administration is now proposing to implement through executive action what it failed to secure through legislation: taking away food assistance from struggling workers and families through harsh cuts and changes to SNAP.

We need your help to generate lots of public comments making clear that this proposed federal regulation would vastly increase food insecurity. The deadline to submit comments is April 2, so it’s time to get commenting!

Here’s what you need to know about the proposed regulation:

Federal law already limits SNAP eligibility to just three months out of every three years for unemployed and underemployed adults without dependent children unless they can document 20 hours of work a week. States can request waivers to exempt people from the time limit, such as those in areas with high unemployment or those who lack a high school diploma or face other high barriers to employment.

Now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has proposed making the existing time limit even harsher. USDA’s proposed rule would undercut states’ ability to waive these time limits in many areas where there are too few jobs. By USDA’s own estimates, its proposal would eliminate SNAP benefits for 755,000 adults and cut SNAP benefits by $15 billion over 10 years.

Feeding America, the Food Research & Action Center, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are helping coordinate a campaign to oppose this rule.

If we generate lots of comments opposing this proposed rule, we may be able to prevent some of the harmful consequences by delaying the final version of the rule or forcing it to be changed.

Here’s what you can do to help stop this rule:

1.Submit comments from your organization.

We’ve developed a set of template comments for organizations that can be easily customized. Additional templates for organizations that focus on a specific population or perspective will soon be posted to the campaign page: http://bit.ly/SNAPRuleCampaign.

Once you customize your comments, you can upload the file or cut and paste your comments into the online submission form on Regulations.gov. Or, if you prefer, you can mail comments to: Certification Policy Branch, Program Development Division, FNS, 3101 Park Center Drive, Alexandria, Virginia 22302.

2. Submit your personal comments.

It is vital that we generate a significant volume of comments in opposition to the rule. Consider submitting individual comments in opposition to the rule. Every comment counts!

We have developed digital comment platforms to make this process as easy as possible. Feel free to use any of the options below that work best for your organization, or you can leverage your own platform to tailor the page to your audience.

Feeding America comment platform: http://bit.ly/FASNAPComments

The Center for American Progress comment platform: handsoffsnap.org

Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) comment platform:  http://www.frac.org/timelimitcomments

3. Encourage other organizations and individuals to submit comments and ask their networks to weigh in as well.

Comments are counted individually, so please don’t do a sign-on letter with multiple organizations listed — that would only count as one comment! And please ask everyone in your networks to submit individual comments.

For additional resources and details about the SNAP comments campaign, please visit http://bit.ly/SNAPRuleCampaign.

Thank you for jumping into action to oppose this SNAP rule. We have just under two months to generate as many comments as we can, so we appreciate everything you can do to spread the word and submit your own comments. In case you missed it, our friends at CLASP have written a great piece reminding us why it’s so important to submit comments on harmful administrative proposals like this one.

In last year’s farm bill debate, you helped make it clear that these harmful proposals were the wrong approach. Now it’s time to sound the same message at the administrative level and protect food assistance for hundreds of thousands of people in need.