In its annual budget proposal unveiled on Monday, the Trump administration included an overhaul of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly—and still colloquially—known as food stamps. In lieu of about half the amount of credit that a family currently receives each month, the White House proposes to send to SNAP recipients whose benefits exceed a certain threshold an "America's Harvest Box," the term OMB director Mick Mulvaney used to describe a "Blue Apron-type" assortment of canned goods, peanut butter, pasta, juice, and powdered milk. It feels like this should go without saying, but despite the moniker, the boxes would not include fresh fruits or vegetables.

Here is how SNAP works right now. If your family's gross monthly income is at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, you apply for benefits at a SNAP office in your state. Assuming your application is approved, you receive a reloadable, debit card-like card pre-loaded with credits that are usable at participating retailers. You can use it to buy just about anything you want, as long as it's food—grains, dairy, meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables are okay, but toothpaste, toilet paper, deodorant, and other household items you might consider "essential" are not. You also can't use SNAP to buy booze, or cigarettes, or ready-to-serve foods. If you want rotisserie chicken, you're going to have to go home and rotisserie one yourself.

The problems with the White House's harebrained idea here should be obvious to anyone who put more than ten minutes of thought into it before putting pen to paper. Intuitively, it's hard to see how shipping giant boxes of canned goods to millions of people every month is going to be less expensive than mailing them a letter-size envelope once. It treats recipients as nutrient-neutral automatons, ignoring things like religious restrictions, and food allergies, and doctor-recommended diets. It elides the fact that little children can be, on occasion, picky eaters who might not love the particular obscure canned legume that the government chose to send to their parents that month, and who can't readily understand pleas that they have no other choice but to eat it.

Let's keep going. It pretends that shipping delays don't happen, and that common carriers never lose things in transit. It fails to address the reality that lower-income people, who tend to be more transient than their higher-income peers, might unexpectedly find themselves living elsewhere by the time the first of the month rolls around. As Hunger Free America's Miguelina Diaz pointed out to NPR, the mystery box's contents "could be something that [SNAP recipients] don't even know how to make." It assumes that everyone has a secure place at which they can receive very important mail, and that their schedules allow them to stay home and wait for it. It forces people to make an impossible choice: Go to work and make money and hope to God that their kids' food doesn't get stolen off the front porch, or call in sick and wait for their allotment of green beans to arrive sometime between the hours of 8 A.M. and 8 P.M.

Being poor in this country is an unending exercise in enduring the myriad humiliations to which, in our bootstraps-laden, moralistic, dispositionist conception of the world, low-income people are subjected on a daily basis. An overlooked element of SNAP's design is that, all things considered, it does a decent job of easing the burden of this stigmatization—participants can go to a store, shop for what they want to eat, and then buy it by swiping a plastic card, just like anyone else. Food stamps allow them the freedom to buy food "normally," on their own time, and in places in which they already shop. It is a simple but profoundly important way to help alleviate the tremendous psychological tax associated with poverty, and to extend to those who pay it a bit of human dignity, if only for a moment.

Recall that the Republican Party's most important accomplishment of the past year is passing a $1.5 trillion tax cut, the benefits of which flow primarily to the largest corporations and wealthiest people in America. Paying for part of this self-inflicted wound by telling poor people what they can and cannot eat constitutes an extraordinary act of cruelty, and justifying it by cheerfully invoking the name of your favorite podcast's favorite sponsor requires an extraordinary level of shamelessness. To those in this White House, millions of Americans are not really people, at least not in the sense of being equal to everyone else. They are faceless nuisances, an inconvenient problem to be solved by filling them with whatever calories happen to be cheapest.