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**VIDEO RELEASE** Farm Bill: House Ag Highlights How Work Helps Lift SNAP Recipients Out of Poverty

Washington, May 10, 2018
House Agriculture Committee members highlight the important provisions included in the 2018 Farm Bill, Agriculture and Nutrition Act (H.R. 2), dedicated to helping work-capable SNAP recipients find work or access skills and job training needed to improve their futures. Video transcript below.

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Video transcript:

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (VA-6): Well the SNAP program is an important program for the people who need it, but what people need the most is to get up and out of poverty and this farm bill does just that.

Chairman Mike Conaway (TX-11): We spent three years looking at this program, trying to figure out what should be the right policy for SNAP, and in our view the policy for SNAP should be about getting people back on their own two feet.

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (TN-4): What Republicans are trying to do, is get people off the cycle of poverty.

Rep. Glenn ‘GT’ Thompson (PA-5): Those folks need food security as well, and we are going to provide it, but we also know that they need an on-ramp to opportunity—a pathway to success.

Rep. Ralph Abraham (LA-5): Everybody wants to do better, not only for themselves, but certainly for their families.

Rep. Roger Marshall (KS-1): We’ve been doing basically the same thing with welfare since the 1960s and unfortunately we haven’t improved the number of people in poverty at all. All we’ve done is thrown trillions of dollars at the problem, so let’s try something different.

Abraham: This farm bill, with these either work or educational requirements, allows those that unfortunately maybe didn’t have the education that they so desired, to finally achieve that goal.

Rep. Ted Yoho (FL-3): This is a way that people can empower themselves through a program that allows them to get retrained maybe in the IT profession or in one of the traits.

Thompson: These aren’t jobs that require a college degree, these are jobs that just require a certification, a specialization, a little bit of training and that’s what we’re talking about connecting people with.

Yoho: …To where they can better themselves and then raise themselves out of that situation where they’re dependent on the program again.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (MO-4): It’s also important for our country. We have over 6 million jobs right now that are open and we need Americans in the workforce contributing and our country will be better for it.

DesJarlais: Over 80% of the country agrees that able-bodied people should work.

Yoho: …and if we can move people off of that, they’re less dependent on government and it creates the value to that individual that is priceless.

Marshall: I think it’s the right thing to do, I think it’s the morally right thing to do. We’re giving people a hand up rather than a hand out.

Thompson: Putting people back to work, giving people opportunity, providing a pathway to an on-ramp to opportunity, is not partisan.

Yoho: Republican or Democrat, those should go out of this. Do we want to empower people to do better in life and live the American dream?

Conaway: How do you determine a successful SNAP program? It should be measured by the number of lives that are better tomorrow than they were today.

Yoho: At the end of this, the end result is people will be self-sufficient and that’s, I think, our goal and responsibility as a government.

Conaway: That should be the purpose of SNAP, to make lives better.