WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, released the following statement on the Senate passage of the Republican reconciliation bill:
“This bill is bad for families trying to put food on the table, for rural economies already dealing with the impact of tariffs, and for state and local governments working to make critical investments in the future.
“SNAP serves 42 million Americans - children, seniors, people with disabilities and veterans. This bill will terminate food assistance for nearly 3 million of them and will reduce benefits for millions more.
“These cuts also mean farmers, who are already operating on razor-thin margins, will see billions in lost revenue and rural, independent grocers will be in jeopardy.
“On top of that, the bill shifts massive costs to the states. State and local governments will be forced to choose: provide food assistance or reduce other critical services like law enforcement or health care. Even worse, the bill rewards states who have the highest error rates by delaying their SNAP cost-shift.
“The message to the country and the nation’s governors is this: raise your error rate and it delays your cuts for a year. Keep your error rate high for another year, you get no cuts again. Yet states with lower error rates must pay hundreds of millions of dollars.
Rather than shifting costs to states that they cannot pay for, what we should be doing is working together to bring down costs and to pass a bipartisan Farm Bill that will support all of rural America and make sure that families can put food on the table.”
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