The money spent on food stamps and the number of people who receive them are declining as the economy has improved, according to a report released Wednesday, even as the program remains a source of contention in congressional negotiations to complete a five-year farm bill.
The report, by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group, said that spending and the program’s caseload leveled off in 2011 and 2012 and had remained essentially flat for the past year.
The center said the number of people on food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was declining month to month in about half the states and increasing incrementally in the other half. About a third of the states had fewer people participating in the food stamp program in August, the most recent month for which there is available data, than a year earlier, the group said.
The program is under fire in the Republican-led House, where a proposed bill would cut food stamps by nearly $40 billion over 10 years. A Senate bill would decrease spending by $4 billion over 10 years. Republicans lawmakers have said the program, which costs about $78 billion a year, has grown out of control.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Utah and North Dakota had the biggest declines, about 6 percent.
Some of the caseload decline can be attributed to the fact that stimulus funding for the program, which had temporarily increased benefits, expired Nov. 1. That cut benefits by about 7 percent on average, for a total of about $5 billion, the center found.
The Congressional Budget Office expects that the number of food stamp recipients will fall by 2 to 5 percent each year over the next decade â€" from 47.7 million to 34.3 million by 2023 â€" if the economy continues to improve.
“Further large SNAP cuts, at a time when unemployment remains above 7 percent and the economy struggles to create enough jobs, would make life harder for tens of millions of Americans who are already struggling to put food on their tables each day,†Dorothy Rosenbaum, a senior policy analyst at the center, said in the report.
