Donald Trump’s food stamp box idea is a solution without a problem

With the release of its fiscal year 2019 budget, the Trump administration pitched a “bold, innovative approach” to reform food stamps.

Unfortunately for recipients of assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the approach solves the non-existent problem of welfare recipients being able to choose their own food. The administration’s proposal would create a bureaucratic nightmare that would increase costs and force-feed Americans in a one-size-fits-all system.

The proposal recommends the creation of a program that would ship food packages known as “America’s Harvest Box” to SNAP recipients receiving more than $90 monthly in benefits nationwide, which would encompass 81% of SNAP recipients (16.4 million households). These new Harvest Boxes would take the place of half of SNAP recipients’ current benefits. The USDA argues that by buying directly from producers, it could deliver food at approximately half the retail cost, saving $129.2 billion over the next decade.

In theory, this would cut SNAP’s $68 billion annual budget by an average of $13 billion a year.

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SNAP is not a perfect system. It costs American taxpayers a large amount of money and has not proved effective enough in moving able-bodied benefit recipients towards work. Program integrity and reducing improper payments could also be addressed.

Even so, the solution is hardly an administrative monstrosity aimed at targeting one of SNAP’s main selling points: personal responsibility and consumer choice.

The odds that a proposal such as this could actually save money, let alone the kind of money that the USDA suggests, are low. The Harvest Box program would need the ability to deliver food on a monthly basis to households all across America. This could entail significant costs, as 85% of persistent-poverty counties in the United States are not in metro areas.

Assuming 16.4 million packages sent out 12 months a year, about 197 million Harvest Boxes would have to be sent out annually. For reference, that’s almost a third of the amount of packages Amazon handles in a given year. It’s difficult to see this as a more efficient system than simply crediting money to an Electronic Benefit Transfer card.

Even aside from the cost of delivering groceries to more than 16 million households spread out across America, an entire administrative apparatus would be needed to oversee such a program. Producers would need to be selected, food of nutritional value chosen and purchased, then directed to shipping centers. The requirement that all Harvest Box food be 100% American essentially means that the proposal would sacrifice cost savings in order to provide a payout to large farming businesses.

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Yet even if this proposal were able to save money, it would still be a bad idea. Harvest Boxes would be packed by USDA bureaucrats, not anyone with knowledge of an individual family’s needs.

The USDA proposal documents do not go into detail on whether it would provide for individual nutritional requirements, but if it did so, it would be another bureaucratic nightmare. And with low-income Americans already struggling to access fresh and healthy options, what logic is there in replacing half their food budget with non-perishables intended to last a month?

Why is this necessary? Though administration officials have referred to the program as being a “Blue Apron-type program,” Blue Apron at least allows you to choose the meals you have delivered. Families know far better than the federal government what they or their children need to eat, and forcing them to eat from a standardized package is inefficient (not to mention demeaning and insulting). The current system allows families to simply go to the grocery store and choose for themselves what their needs are. So long as families are purchasing items eligible for food stamps, no bureaucrat needs to be involved in that choice.

The Trump administration should scrap this poorly conceived idea and instead focus on meaningful reform. Taxpayers and benefit recipients would benefit from a better defined pathway to work for SNAP recipients and program integrity reforms. Neither would benefit from an inefficient and expensive system that tells Americans what to eat.

Andrew Wilford is an associate policy analyst with the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Follow him on Twitter: @PolicyWilford.