After illegally bailing out college graduates with a $400 billion student debt amnesty, President Joe Biden is back. This time, he’s illegally raising food stamps by $200 billion. House Republicans should end both of these illegal measures.
According to a Government Accountability Office report released last week, Biden’s agriculture department abused its authority under the 2018 Farm Bill to expedite a food cost review required by the legislation. It also flouted its own guidelines when it came to those costs. As a result of these illegal changes, the benefits of food stamps have risen above inflation for the first time in 45 years.
Since 1975, the USDA has created meal plans that represent an adequate diet at four different price points: affordable, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. The levels of Food Stamp benefits have always been set at the level of the Thrifty Food Plan. The USDA has reassessed these levels three times since 1975, most recently 15 years ago.
Here, Biden’s violating separation of powers again and unilaterally increasing spending on food stamps, another impeachable offense.https://t.co/sxASkAZ5fS
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) December 27, 2022
The 2018 Farm Bill required a new assessment to be completed by 2022, with subsequent assessments every five years. This revaluation is essentially a computer model that inputs food, price, and nutrition data to create a “market basket” of foods and beverages needed to support a healthy diet.
The Biden administration, according to the GAO, essentially ran the books on its computer model, breaking nearly a dozen internal USDA guidelines along the way, to produce a whopping 21 percent increase in the maximum benefit in food stamps.
Unsurprisingly, even after presenting the GAO findings, the Biden administration has not apologized for its illegal activity.
“We stand behind both the quality of our work and the difference it has made in the lives of millions of people,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in response to the GAO report. “We owed it to the American people to get the revaluation right and to do it fast, and that’s exactly what we did.”
From his illegal bailouts of students to his outright refusal to enforce our nation’s immigration laws at this trove of food stamps, Biden has proven that there is no law he won’t break for political gain. House Republicans shouldn’t give USDA another cent until it severs this tie in food stamps and redoes the reevaluation as required by the Farm Bill of 2018, this time under guidelines set by USDA.
