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Food security advocates and D.C. Council members celebrated when the District finished the 2023 fiscal year with more revenue than expected: That extra money was supposed to be used to boost food assistance benefits by nearly $40 million in the new year.
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But now the administration of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) says it’s not moving forward with the enhanced aid, deflating the advocates and council members who fought for the boost after witnessing the soaring need for food assistance following the expiration of pandemic-era federal relief.
Council members were outraged during a breakfast meeting Tuesday and throughout the week, accusing the Bowser administration of choosing to ignore the council’s budget directive to use the money to temporarily boost the District’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Roughly 140,000 District residents rely on the program to feed their families, for whom advocates say even a small increase in benefits can make a significant difference.
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But Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor for health and human services, said the choice not to increase the benefits is one born of financial necessity, as many of the District’s social services programs are overburdened, over budget and more in need of the cash.
“The budget for the Department of Human Services, to put it mildly, is underwater at this point,” he said in a Friday interview.
The situation sets up another clash between the D.C. Council and the Bowser administration over how to fund critical social services programs, disagreements that have become a pattern over the past year or two and have increasingly angered council members. But it also underscores an inescapable reality in the District: Crushing demand for social services is repeatedly outpacing the city’s budget, forcing difficult decisions about which programs to prioritize even as council members criticize the administration for poor budget planning.
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Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), who led the Give SNAP a Raise legislation, said she understood that reality — but in this case, she said, the money is available, the council specifically allocated the money for SNAP, and that’s how it should be used.
“They’re trying to bank money. And I recognize — I’m not naive — I recognize the challenges the city is facing,” Henderson said, also noting the $750 million shortfall the region’s public transportation system is confronting. “That means we also have to take care of our people. Food access should always be at the top of our list. Feeding people and making sure folks can stay housed should always be at the top of our list.”
Henderson’s legislation, which would give eligible families or seniors a 10 percent increase in their benefits, sprouted from the economic strain caused by the pandemic and the soaring inflation that hit grocery store shelves. In 2019, about 94,000 District residents relied on SNAP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank. By 2020, that number climbed to roughly 135,000 residents, an increase of 44 percent, and has only grown since.
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Pandemic-era enhanced federal aid expired in March, leaving tens of thousands of District residents with far less money to spend on food even though, for many, their economic situations had not improved. Henderson hoped Give SNAP a Raise could fill some of that gap.
During a tough budget season this spring, council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) included a provision that would allow Henderson’s legislation to move forward on a contingency basis. The provision would trigger nearly $40 million in additional SNAP benefits for nine months from January to September 2024 — but only if there was excess revenue at the end of fiscal 2023, which there was.
That’s why food security advocates were perplexed to learn that, despite the $178.8 million in excess revenue that the chief financial officer announced Sept. 30, the Bowser administration was not preparing to roll out enhanced SNAP benefits.
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“Our SNAP participants have experienced a lot of harm through the ending of the SNAP emergency allotment and just overall food access and food insecurity, the rising food costs,” said LaMonika Jones, director of D.C. Hunger Solutions, which pushed hard for the boosted benefits. “So to hear this news that the mayor has stated that there is not an intent to fund or disburse those funds for Give SNAP a Raise is very disappointing.”
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Turnage said that he believed the goal to expand SNAP was “laudable.” But he said that goal is colliding with the reality that DHS’s spending is already outpacing its budget, with a $22.5 million shortfall just two months into the fiscal year that Turnage expects will only grow.
“When you have a picture of a department frankly underwater with respect to its budget, with significant spending pressures they have to resolve, some of which could impact essential services we simply cannot stop,” Turnage said, “it would be financially reckless to take on another $39 million budget cost until we have resolved some of those issues.”
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A spokesman for Lewis George objected Saturday morning, noting it is not a new cost but simply a way to use unanticipated funds, and the administration should find other ways to resolve the budgeting problems.
Turnage said the agency is stretched thin and can’t contemplate expanding a program at the moment. He said staff members are mired in processing Medicaid recertification paperwork for thousands of people, along with backlogs of existing SNAP applications. D.C. has the worst processing rate nationwide.
But Henderson said hearing about staffing issues now frustrated her because she had worked closely with DHS in developing the legislation to try to ensure it would minimize administrative costs. She added that other spending pressures, such as a cost-of-living rate hike associated with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), could have been anticipated and should not have been a surprise.
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Turnage said he would have to review how officials budgeted for TANF — but said that more often the spending pressure is due to ballooning demand in key programs beyond what they were intended to handle. For example, formerly homeless families are staying in the Family Re-Housing Stabilization Program far longer than the program was designed for because many are not able to be stably housed without aid after the one-year program ends, driving up the cost of the program by tens of millions of dollars, Turnage said.
The council in July passed emergency legislation that allowed for extensions in the housing program under certain guardrails — but one guardrail was that DHS could offer extensions to families only if funding was available. In a letter to colleagues, Henderson noted that if DHS were following this provision of the law, the legislation should not be causing severe spending pressures.
Turnage argued that’s easier said than done, noting that not offering families extensions for their housing would risk making them homeless.
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“The question is, how would people respond both inside and outside of government to seeing hundreds of people evicted because we have not been able to move them from FRSP to a more stable housing situation?” he said.
That conundrum with the Family Re-Housing and Stabilization Program, also known as rapid rehousing, has been one of the most significant areas of disagreement with the council over the past year.
Most recently, Bowser wanted $20.6 million that the council allocated for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) to instead go toward rapid rehousing, after the administration had to dip into contingency funds to house hundreds of families. The council, however, rejected that request last month, arguing that addressing the soaring demand for ERAP took priority. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), one of the biggest critics of rapid rehousing, argued that it was more productive to spend the money on helping people pay rent to avoid homelessness versus paying millions housing them after they become homeless.
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Council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large) compared Bowser’s desire to use ERAP funds for rapid rehousing to the latest battle over the allocated SNAP funds.
“Mayor Bowser is trying to reduce funding for food assistance and for rental assistance. But it’s not because of an unexpected financial emergency. It’s because of irresponsible budgeting,” White charged on X, formerly Twitter.
DHS can’t move around millions of dollars without council approval. Turnage said that the administration plans to submit a request to redirect the nearly $40 million in SNAP funds but that officials have not settled yet on how they will ask for the money to be spent.
Henderson said she fears that by the time the disagreement is settled, months will have passed, and the opportunity may be lost because of the temporary nature of the benefits boost.
“We needed to figure out how to make this permanent,” she said. “I’m going to continue working on that front, even in the quote-unquote budget pressure conversation, because when people can’t eat, when people can’t feed their families, they do desperate things.”
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