Harvest boxes are aimed at saving $120 billion in SNAP over the next 10 years by giving low-income families packages of shelf-stable foods selected by the government to replace their food stamp benefits. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Trump’s ‘harvest box’ plan met with boos

The moment a top USDA official brought up the Trump administration’s pitch to provide a good portion of food stamp benefits via the “America’s Harvest Box” concept on Monday, a sea of some 1,200 people snickered and booed at the National Anti-Hunger Policy Conference.

Someone in the audience shouted. More than 20 people walked out in protest. On the sidelines, food bank leaders fumed over the impracticality of the proposal.


It was a highly unusual level of hostility for a wonky conference focused on the inner workings of federal nutrition programs. It also demonstrates how motivated anti-hunger advocates are to fight back against the Trump administration’s attempts to trim the social safety net. And it may be a harbinger of drama to come as Congress looks to reauthorize the farm bill. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still commonly known as food stamps, accounts for the vast majority of the cost of the legislation.

“This is really about the continued assault on the dignity of people,” Seft Hunter, executive director of the nonprofit Communities Creating Opportunity in Kansas City, said of the harvest box pitch. He was among those who protested the USDA official's speech.

“We’re going to fight on this. To eat is to live,” he added. “This is the very basis of human dignity, and it’s not something that’s negotiable for us.”

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Harvest boxes, unveiled as part of President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget earlier this month, are aimed at saving $120 billion in SNAP over the next 10 years by giving low-income families packages of shelf-stable foods selected by the government to replace a large share of their food stamp benefits. The concept has been widely panned by anti-hunger advocates, Democrats, grocery retailers and editorial boards across the country, but USDA officials insist they are serious and the idea deserves consideration. The box concept is part of a broader plan to cut $214 billion from the program over a decade. Right now, the program, which helps roughly 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries, costs about $70 billion each year.

At this week's conference, Brandon Lipps — who serves as both administrator of USDA's Food and Nutrition Service and as acting deputy undersecretary of food, nutrition and consumer services — spoke during the anti-hunger breakfast session on Monday. Lipps lauded federal nutrition programs for playing a crucial role in society, and emphasized a need to do a better job of helping people move out of poverty.

But the room erupted in boos and muted laughter as soon as he mentioned harvest boxes.

Lipps was unfazed by the raucous crowd. "As with any innovative idea, and we don't see those inside the Beltway very often, there are questions to be answered and details to be worked out,” he said calmly. “Your boos are welcome, but so are your good ideas. Please talk to us. All new ideas require dialogue."

The boos grew significantly louder when Lipps later suggested that food boxes would lower program costs while also keeping SNAP benefits at essentially the same level they are at now.

"We need to dialogue about these things," Lipps added. "We have to find better and more efficient ways to run our programs."

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The idea was modeled after the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides boxes of shelf-stable food to about 600,000 low-income senior citizens. USDA sends these goods to food banks and other nonprofits who then sort it, pack it in boxes and figure out how to distribute the packages to senior citizens in need. USDA also runs a program that delivers staple foods to Native American communities in need through the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, a program which critics contend has had a negative health effects on the recipients.

Several attendees told POLITICO that they believed Republicans, who recently passed a tax overhaul estimated to add about $1.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade, were trying to pay for those cuts on the backs of low-income Americans.

Anti-hunger advocates are taking their message to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, urging lawmakers to reject any attempted cuts to SNAP. Opposition to the harvest box idea has become an entry point for those discussions.

“It’s so obviously the opposite of efficient, that I think people want to stand up against it,” said Kate Leone, senior vice president of government relations at Feeding America, which represents a large network of food banks.

At the conference on Monday, the mood shifted later in the day when Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) took the stage. He received loud applause as he characterized the harvest box concept as “impractical” and “stupid.” House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas), who’s expected to unveil his version of the farm bill in the coming weeks, has indicated he’s open to at least looking at a pilot for the harvest box idea.

But McGovern also made clear he doesn’t think the proposal is the biggest threat to SNAP in the next farm bill. Instead, McGovern pointed to the targeting of able-bodied adults without dependents, also known as ABAWDs, by Republican lawmakers and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

The USDA last week put out a request for comment on ways to move ABAWDs — which are estimated to be about 9 percent of the approximately 43 million people receiving food stamps each year — off the program and out of poverty. Conaway is also expected to propose stricter work requirements for that population when he unveils a draft of the farm bill.

McGovern said the population is “complicated,” noting that it includes: veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan; young adults leaving foster care; and residents of rural areas who don’t have access to worker training. Cutting them off would be “cruel,” he said.

The prominent anti-hunger advocate said he’d rather “have no farm bill than a lousy farm bill,” and encouraged the audience to try to defeat any legislation that includes significant cuts to nutrition programs. McGovern has yet to see the nutrition title of the farm bill that Conaway has drafted, which he said makes him think it would do just that.

“We’ll be in a position to write a better farm bill after November,” McGovern said, suggesting that Democrats may be able to take control of the House after the midterm elections.