Week Ending May 18, 2018

  • Farm Bill Cuts Food Aid and Privatizes SNAP
  • House Passes VA Privatization Bill
  • Bank Deregulation Bill Weakens Consumer Protections
  • Public Housing Funding Approved by House Subcommittee

Farm Bill Cuts Food Aid and Privatizes SNAP

In a surprise move after three days of debate, the House defeated the Farm Bill (H.R. 2). The bill failed on a vote of 198 to 213, with 30 Republicans voting against it. A motion to reconsider the vote is still pending, so further changes may be made to reach a majority. As currently drafted, the bill cuts $17 billion in food assistance from SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), taking this basic need away from one million families and two million seniors, women, children and other individuals, and replaces it with harsh mandates imposing unrealistic employment requirements on recipients. It also diverts resources for food to underfunded, new training programs and removes state flexibility. The bill would add pressure on states to privatize job training and employment services in addition to SNAP eligibility.

In addition, an amendment was agreed to, sponsored by Rep. John Faso (R-NY), that would eliminate the long-standing requirement for merit staff employees to conduct eligibility determination. SNAP helps not only its recipients, but also the broader economy, because it works as an economic "multiplier" locally, yielding $9 of spending in local communities from every $5 spent through SNAP.

What You Need to Know: AFSCME strongly opposes these extreme changes to SNAP in H.R. 2, especially privatization efforts that have not worked in states like Texas and Indiana that tried it earlier.  After the House floor vote, the Senate is expected to begin work on its own bill. We are working to ensure the Senate bill will not include harmful work requirements, cuts in SNAP or privatization, as the Senate hopefully crafts a bipartisan bill unlike the House’s.

House Passes VA Privatization Bill

By a vote of 347 to 70, the House passed the VA MISSION Act (S. 2372). AFSCME opposed the bill because it would allow the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to privatize veterans' health care and dismantle or close many of the 170 VA medical centers and 1,061 clinics across the nation. The privatizing of veterans’ health care would be a radical change in the nationwide VA system, allowing a move to publicly provide veterans’ health care.

What You Need to Know: The specialized VA health care system includes preeminent specialists and researchers in many areas, including the treating and caring for Agent Orange exposure-related illness, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, as well as designing advanced prosthetics and other special needs. Privatization threatens these veteran-centric programs. The privatization proponents made this vote particularly difficult for representatives who support quality, publicly provided veterans’ health care. While the bill does include other important bipartisan provisions that AFSCME supports, GOP leaders refused to allow a single amendment to eliminate harmful provisions.

Bank Deregulation Bill Weakens Consumer Protections

Next week, GOP leaders have scheduled a vote in the full House on legislation to roll back nationwide protections safeguarding America’s economy and weaken consumer protections safeguarding student loan borrowers and home buyers. This bill also increases the risk of a recession, which would cause harm to working families who would likely suffer from layoffs, higher unemployment rates, underwater mortgages, and significantly reduced retirement savings, as a direct result.

This legislation (S. 2155) specifically deregulates roughly 25 of America’s 38 largest banks and rolls back other systemic economic and financial safeguards designed to protect America’s banking system from speculative investments, overleveraged lending, and outright fraud and criminal activities. These protections were enacted in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, in response to the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting global recession. These protections are a major success, and they helped stabilize our economy in troubled times and aided working families.

What You Need to Know:  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that if enacted into law, S. 2155 will raise the likelihood that a future financial crisis will force taxpayers to again bail out banks. This legislation also would lead to excessive fees and higher interest rates for buyers of mobile homes. It limits loan opportunities for other homebuyers, reduces their affordable borrowing, and increases banks’ discriminatory lending and loan approvals, which disproportionately harm people of color. It also would increase costs to families who borrowed college tuition with private student loans.

Public Housing Funding Approved by House Subcommittee

The House Appropriations Subcommittee voted to fund the Public Housing Capital Fund at $2.75 billion for fiscal year 2019 (FY 2019) at the same level as the current fiscal year. In contrast, President Trump’s proposed FY 2019 budget would reduce this funding to zero. The subcommittee’s ranking Democrat Rep. David Price (D-NC) said this $2.75 billion is “well below demonstrated need, but it nonetheless represents a major improvement over the funding levels from prior years.” Unfortunately, while it is a step in the right direction, this funding does not reduce the public housing modernization backlog, which exceeds $30 billion and increases annually. 

The Public Housing Operating Fund was flat-funded at $4.55 billion, which is not enough to cover 100 percent of the operating costs incurred by Public Housing Authorities. In contrast, President Trump’s FY 2019 budget proposed significantly less. The Family Self-Sufficiency Program, which supports local family self-sufficiency coordinators, was funded at $75 million. These funding decisions were contained in the FY 2019 appropriations bill for Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (T-HUD).

What You Need to Know:  While AFSCME is disappointed with these relatively low funding levels, in the current political climate it could have been much worse. For example, the House Republican leadership’s recently introduced package of mid-year budget cuts (H.R. 3), which proposes to cut $7 billion of previously appropriated federal funding from children’s health care, also proposes to cut $38 million from the Public Housing Capital Fund that was enacted in prior years.

On a related note, President Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently introduced a package of rent reforms throughout HUD-assisted housing (Making Affordable Housing Work Act of 2018), including proposals that triple minimum rents. This package also imposes work requirements, eliminates residents’ income deductions for medical and child care expenses used to determine income and calculate rent, and worsens other existing tenant protections. HUD estimates its proposal to triple minimum rents would affect 712,000 households or 15 percent of the 4.7 million households in federally subsidized housing. AFSCME opposes proposals to increase rents and impose counterproductive work requirements.

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