One of the key ways House Republicans want to impose harsh cuts on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often referred to as food stamps) is by bringing back, in force, a policy item that had slowly been removed by the states: asset tests. Rather than minor, technocratic fixes, this is an important change that shifts the program in a major way. And, independent of what one thinks of the scale of the food stamp program, this is a particularly bad policy, and understanding why it is so bad might give us some clues about why our social policy apparatus is such a mess.
The assets test change is accomplished in the House bill by removing the ability of states to use “categorical eligibility” in determining eligibility for SNAP. That practice allows states the ability to line up how people qualify for food stamps with other programs. And one reason categorical eligibility has been expanded has been to not use federally imposed assets tests to determine eligibility.
Assets tests are a type of test designed to see if the family has means to survive without aid. (Hence the term in social insurance, means-testing.) According to the CBO, for the “purpose of that test, assets include cash, amounts in bank accounts, and other types of financial resources, but they exclude the value of houses, retirement or education savings accounts, and (in most states) cars.”
Normally, if you have more than $2,000 in assets, you do not qualify for SNAP. In the past 10 years however, 41 states have opted to go with categorical eligibility in order to circumvent this test, either eliminating assets tests or raising them much higher. You can see a map of the evolution of this trend here.
It’s worth noting that the GOP’s aggressive implementation of these asset tests pushes against major trends in social policy, and there’s at least five major problems with this approach from the policy point of view.
The House’s food stamps cuts aren’t just cruel. They’re dumb.
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