Is Federal-Level Advocacy Disempowering?

As some of you know, I’ve been writing for the Poverty in America blog on Change.org as well as on federal and District-level issues here. But the powers-that-be have told me that my pieces don’t fit into their new strategy.

I’ve been thinking about this — not the loss of the gig, but the underpinnings of the strategy. I’m assuming here that Ben Rattray, the founder and CEO of Change.org, believes what he told his bloggers while I was still among them.

According to Rattray, the biggest opportunity for advocacy now is local, not national. Targeting the President or Congress is a “disempowering model of social change” — both because chances of victory are slim and because an individual voice makes so little difference.

By contrast, there are “tens of thousands of issues that people can organize around in their own communities.” These are “eminently winnable” and can be significantly advanced by a petition and/or blog postings. Rattray’s goal, in fact, is at least one victory a day.

Now, I’ve got no brief for campaigns that are genuinely futile. But I doubt that the vast majority of campaigns at the federal level are.

In many cases, advocates won’t get exactly what they want — at least, not right away. That old saw about how the sausage is made means there’s a lot of compromise. That’s frustrating I would guess for those intent on counting up victories.

But won’t things be much worse if none of us advocates for the nationwide interests of low-income and other disadvantaged people? Should we feel disempowered when the result isn’t a clear cut victory?

Consider, for example, the just-signed law reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act. The bill produced by the House Education and Labor Committee was stronger in many ways than the Senate bill the House adopted.

But, at the end of the day, it was the Senate bill or nothing — at least until next year, when prospects would surely have been dimmer. And, as the Food Research and Action Center says, the new law “has many important and excellent provisions.”

FRAC doesn’t view the outcome as a defeat, though it doesn’t view it as a done deal either. Should we who advocated for the stronger bill — and against the food stamp pay-for — feel disempowered when the lead nutrition advocacy organization doesn’t?

And is it really less empowering for an individual to join in a campaign that can win only with the resources of national organizations and massive grassroots support?

I personally feel empowered when I feel connected to something big and important. The fact that my lone voice doesn’t make a critical difference doesn’t matter.

Surely other people feel this way or they wouldn’t sign national advocacy petitions, call their members of Congress when asked to, join national e-mail groups, etc.

Granted, local campaigns can achieve changes that make a difference to some portion of the population. Low-wage workers in San Francisco, for example, are better off since the local paid sick leave law was passed.

And sometimes successful local campaigns inspire others. Flaws notwithstanding, the District of Columbia’s paid sick leave law is a case in point, as are the numerous campaigns under way across the country.

But so much of what a local government can and can’t do depends on federal policy. Consider how many of our key safety net programs are so-called federal-state partnerships. Both the federal rules and the funding levels shape the services available and to whom.

We may, for example, feel that the District should allow participants in its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to spend their full work preparation hours in adult basic education, English as a second language and/or literacy programs until they develop the basic skills that decent jobs in our local labor market require.

But federal regulations won’t allow this. So it’s futile to “organize around” the issue in our local community, demanding that the District adopt a more flexible definition of “vocational education training” than Councilmembers Michael Brown and Tommy Wells have proposed.

The sensible course, I think, is to join with organizations that will advocate for a broader definition of training for work when Congress gets around to reauthorizing TANF.

Same, of course, is true for a vast number of other programs that affect low-income people. That flawed new child nutrition law will ultimately help pay for the better school meals that the District’s Healthy Schools Act mandates.

All of which isn’t to say that Rattray’s wrong in asserting that there’s “widespread disenchantment with advocacy among the broader public” — meaning here the public that generally favors progressive causes.

It’s hard not to feel disenchanted these days when we see the sharp turn to the right and the compromises progressives are making.

But I’m quite sure the answer isn’t to retreat to winnable local causes. What do you think?

Between the Rock and the Hard Place on the Child Nutrition Bill

The New York Times has come out in favor of the Senate’s bill to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act. It acknowledges that the House bill is considerably better — in part because it doesn’t make further cuts in the food stamp program to help offset the costs.

But, it says, “effective lawmakers know when it makes sense to stand and fight for principle and when the time comes to accept a decent compromise.” And that time for the House is now because unless it passes the Senate bill as-is, there won’t be a reauthorized Child Nutrition Act this year.

What it doesn’t say is that any expansion of the Child Nutrition Act could be up against more formidable barriers next year. What’s the hope for new spending on child hunger when Congressman John Boehner, possibly the next House Speaker, wants to roll back federal spending (except for defense, veterans and seniors) to the 2008 level?

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack seems to be of the mind that the administration ought to accept a bill that, in some manner, addresses the general priorities he sketched back in February. “What we don’t want to do,” he recently said, “is compromise what we can get today for what may or may not be available in 2013.”

Unclear whether the pay-for troubles him. After all, it originated in the White House, though not as an offset for the Child Nutrition Act. Certainly seems not to be troubling the First Lady.

Some major advocacy organizations are apparently also looking at the clock — and the elections polls. For example, Margo Wootan, Director of Nutrition Policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, now says the Senate bill is “terrific.” She’d earlier praised the stronger House bill as the best she’d ever seen.

Echoing Senator Blanche Lincoln, the primary author of the Senate bill, Wootan argues that if Congress doesn’t use food stamps to pay for it, it will use the money for something totally unrelated to better school meals for low-income kids. I would add better access as well.

I don’t know where to come out on this tough issue, though I know how I’m leaning.

On the one side, the House has had more than two months to come up with an offset package for its reauthorization bill and has thus far produced nothing — or at any rate, nothing final enough to be made public.

The Child Nutrition Act will technically expire at the end of the month. The House will recess then, and it will face must-do appropriations tasks when it reconvenes in November, as will the Senate. So if it doesn’t do something PDQ, we’re likely to have another extension of the current legislation.

Even if the Democrats retain control, passing the stronger House bill will be an uphill battle next year. And though the Senate bill falls short of what’s needed to make even a majority of children “healthy and hunger-free,” it’s considerably better than what we’ve got now.

On the other side, I’ve no doubt that the Food Research and Action Center is right when it says that using food stamp benefits to pay for the child nutrition bill “will make children hungrier.” And, as I’ve previously noted, food stamps aren’t for children only. The Senate bill will take food out of the mouths of poor adults too.

Looking beyond the hunger issues, the new Census poverty/income report tells us that 2.2 million fewer people would have been counted as poor if it had factored in the cash value of food stamps.

Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, recently reconfirmed his firm’s earlier finding that food stamps deliver more “bang for the buck” than any other form of stimulus considered. Do we believe that the economy will improve so much in the next two years that a cutback in consumer demand won’t matter?

Maybe Lincoln and Wootan are right. If Congress doesn’t use the $2.2 billion food stamp reduction for the Child Nutrition bill, it will use it for something else.

But, as we’ve already seen, dipping into the food stamp budget can become as habit forming as, well, eating. If Congress does it twice, won’t it just be that much easier to do it again?

Senate Deals Double Blow To Food Stamp Recipients

Much has been written of late about the political and systemic ills that are plaguing the Senate. Most of the griping has come from Democrats who see good bills die or get woefully compromised.

But the Senate recently passed two otherwise good bills with very bad offsets that can’t be blamed on the Republican opposition.

In both cases, the offset reduces the duration of the 13.6% increase in food stamp benefits that was part of the economic recovery act.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, a family of four will stand to lose $59 per month. This at a time when more than 40.8 million people depend on food stamps to stave off hunger.

One of the bills — an amendment actually — is basically the surviving fragments of what began as a fairly robust jobs bill. It will, at long last, extend the higher federal match on state Medicaid costs (FMAP), though in a cost-cutting phased-down form rather than a straightforward extension. The amendment will also provide local education agencies with funds to minimize further teacher layoffs.

Total cost is estimated at $26.1 billion. About 45% of this is “paid for” by terminating the food stamp benefit boost in April 2014. Left alone, it would probably have ended, with no benefits loss, in 2018.

This is the single largest component of the pay-for — increased from $6.7 to $11.9 billion in part because some Senators objected to parts of the pay-for that would have kept multinational corporations from shielding foreign-earned income from U.S. taxes.

So instead an estimated 319,000 public-sector jobs are temporarily saved by sacrificing the stimulus measure that delivers the biggest economic bang for the buck. Some Democrats in the House didn’t like it, but they voted for it anyway. So it’s a done deal now and unlikely to be undone.

The other bill will reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act. As I earlier wrote, it will do some very good, if limited things to reduce child hunger and improve child health — the latter mainly by paving the way for more balanced food offerings in schools, daycare centers and after-school programs.

Total price tag $4.5 billion over 10 years. Nearly half — $2.2 billion — paid for by cutting an additional five months off the food stamp benefit increase. This is apparently a substitute for the Senate Agriculture Committee’s plan to tap a program that provides agricultural producers with financial support for their efforts to comply with environmental regulations.

“Highly and widely popular with farmers, ranchers and private forest landowners,” said five of the Republican committee members who objected to the environment incentives pay-for. Those interests obviously have more clout than the poor people who rely on food stamps — and, at least on the Senate side, the organizations that advocate for them.

The White House has thus far been cagily neutral. Michelle Obama, its spokesperson for the legislation,” said that “the Senate vote moves us one step closer to reaching [the] goal” of ending child obesity. Nothing about the pay-for.

Congressman David Obey (D-WI), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, says that the idea of cutting food stamp benefits to pay for the local school aid originated in the White House. Not a hopeful sign for its intervention to prevent a double whammy.

Congressman George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the committee that drafted the House bill reeauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act, is keeping his cards close to his chest. Publicly, he too just refers to the “important step” the Senate took and the bipartisan leadership behind it.

As might be expected, FRAC has launched a campaign against cutting food stamp benefits to fund other priorities. The Senate’s child nutrition bill, it rightly says, “will make children hungrier.”

It’s got a sign-on letter, endorsed by more than 1,400 organizations, that I assume will be revised to focus on the House.

The School Nutrition Association, which, of course, welcomes the prospective funding increase for healthier school meals, also urges the House to find a different offset. “In the effort to raise ‘Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids’ [the promise in the title of the Senate bill] we don’t want to risk compromising their dinner to improve their lunch.”

This, of course, assumes that poor parents will still be able to afford dinners. We know that, in the past, families regularly ran out of food stamps before the end of the month. We know that the current Child Nutrition Act falls far short of ensuring that poor children get three squares a day every day. Neither of the reauthorizing bills will come close.

And since when have we decided that only child hunger matters? According to FRAC’s letter, nearly half of all food stamp recipients are children. That leaves at least 20.8 million who aren’t.

Some of them are disabled people dependent on Supplemental Social Security. This year’s maximum monthly benefit for an individual is $674. Some are retired workers, about a quarter of whom depend solely on Social Security. Average monthly retirement benefit is just under $1,170.

These are people for whom every penny matters — as indeed it does for everyone in the nearly 90% of food stamp households whose incomes are below the federal poverty line.

Do we throw these people, children included, under the bus because it’s an easy way to pay for some of the long-overdue improvements in the child nutrition program?

What’s In The Child Nutrition Bill For Hungry Kids?

We all know by now–or certainly should–that far too many children in this wealthy country simply don’t get enough to eat

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2008-9 food security report, 1.1 million children were living in households where they and/or their siblings sometimes had a  skimpy meal or no meal at all because their parents couldn’t afford to buy enough food.

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s bill to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act seeks to reduce child hunger. It goes at this through various measures to expand access to subsidized meal programs.

For school meal programs, the bill would simplify the process that allows schools in high-poverty areas to offer free meals to all students. These areas, the Committee report says, enroll more than 5 million children–over 10% of the public school population. The current, burdensome process may deter some schools from claiming “community eligibility.” So low-income children may be left out because their parents don’t know free meals are available or are overwhelmed by the paperwork.

The bill would also make foster children automatically eligible for free meals and do a couple of things to promote “direct certification” for other low-income children. At this point, schools must certify free-meal eligibility for children whose parents receive food stamps. They may also directly certify children whose families participate in TANF or the program that distributes food on Indian reservations. The bill would provide bonuses to school districts that adopt these options.

It would also allow school districts to directly certify children covered by Medicaid, but only selectively. In the 2012-13 school year, USDA would designate districts representing 2.5% of children eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Additional districts would be added annually, at the same rate, up to a total of 10% of low-income children. The rationale for this cap is not explained.

The bill does more than increase access to in-school meals. It would allow eligible after-school programs in all states to receive reimbursements for a full meal, rather than only a snack. At this point, programs in only 13 states and the District of Columbia can get reimbursed for a full meal. The expansion would go a long way toward ensuring that low-income children get three well-balanced meals a day–at least, during days when school is in session.

So far as I can see, summer meals get short shrift. Participation in them is egregiously low, compared to participation in school lunch programs. Indeed, the Food Research and Action Center reports that only 17.3% of the children who ate free or reduced-price school lunches during the 2007-8 school year then participated in a summer meal program. And not all programs operated all summer long.

To expand access, the bill would require school food administrators to help nonprofits that operate summer meals programs with outreach to families. Period.

But, of course, changing the standards that now restrict reimbursements for summer meals to programs in high-poverty communities would increase the federal government’s costs. So would funding transportation in rural areas, where needy children may live far from summer meal sites.

And then, as with in-school meals, there’s the issue of reimbursement rates. Somewhat higher than rates for school breakfasts and lunches. But, as FRAC reports, a USDA survey found that 73% of sponsors expected to lose money operating their summer meal programs. This may partially explain why the number of meals served last August was substantially lower than the number served in June and July.

As I wrote last week, the Senate Agriculture Committee’s bill would provide $4.5 billion over 10 years for all the programs included in the Child Nutrition Act. The Committee Chair’s framework indicates that $1.2 billion of the total would be for “a path to end child hunger.” Not to eliminate it, as President Obama promised. But to take us down the road apiece.

Is this really the best we can do?

NOTE: I apparently skipped over a section of the bill. It would actually do more to expand access to summer meal programs than require school food administrators to help with outreach. It would also authorize $20 million in competitive grants for “activities that improve and encourage sponsor retention.” This translates into about $5 million a year for Fiscal Years 2011-15. This doesn’t alter my view that the bill fails to address the significant barriers to access.