Trump wants to overhaul America's safety net with giant cuts to housing, food stamps and health care
Trump wants to overhaul America’s safety net with giant cuts to housing, food stamps and health care
By Tracy Jan, Caitlin Dewey, Amy Goldstein and Jeff Stein February 12
The budget that President Trump proposed Monday takes a hard whack at the poorest Americans, slashing billions of dollars from food stamps, public health insurance and federal housing vouchers, while trying to tilt the programs in more conservative directions.
The spending plan reaches beyond the White House’s own power over the government social safety net and presumes lawmakers will overhaul long-standing entitlement programs for the poor in ways beyond what Congress so far has been willing to do.
The changes call on lawmakers to eliminate the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and transform the rest of that program into a system of capped payments to states; convert food assistance into a hybrid of commodity deliveries and traditional cash benefits; and expand requirements that low-income people work to qualify for federal assistance.
Specifically, the Trump budget proposal would gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, by $17.2 billion in 2019 — equivalent to 22 percent of the program’s total cost last year — and implement a boxed food delivery program, a system that White House budget director Mick Mulvaney compared to Blue Apron.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-wants-to-overhaul-americas-safety-net-with-giant-cuts-to-housing-food-stamps-and-health-care/2018/02/12/a7cfd03e-102f-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?utm_term=.8d1aab74400a
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