Let 'Em Eat a Balanced Budget: Surplus food for low-income older Americans is on the federal budget chopping block

When her food stamps run out each month, Rita Mash of Nelsonville, Ohio, turns to a box of surplus food delivered under a federal program. With the canned vegetables and fruit, cheese, cereal, peanut butter and evaporated milk, she feeds her husband and four grandchildren. "This way, we are able to have groceries for the last week of the month," Mash says. "This program is vital to us."

Yet President Bush's budget proposals for fiscal 2007 would eliminate the program (the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, or CSFP, started in 1968), which serves 420,000 low-income older Americans in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Total projected savings: $107 million—out of a $2.8 trillion budget.

"It's unconscionable," says Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks. Her group and other charities deliver 12,000 food boxes a month and have a waiting list of thousands.

"If we can't sustain these seniors in independent living, they're going to move into nursing homes and increase the costs to government," Hamler-Fugitt says. "Do we want to give them CSFP food boxes valued at about $150 a year or spend $50,000 a year to put them in a nursing home?"

The Bush administration says it wants to eliminate the food distribution program, which also helps low-income women and young children, because its effectiveness has not been demonstrated and because it overlaps with the food stamp and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) programs. Instead, more of the older recipients will be encouraged to apply for food stamps if they don't already receive them.

The administration's claim that food stamps will replace the surplus food is "a poor excuse" for eliminating the program, says Richard Noriega of the South Texas Food Bank, which has about 5,000 people enrolled in CSFP.

Noriega estimates the retail value of the monthly food deliveries at $55 a box. The monthly food stamp benefit for an older individual is less than $20, often as little as $10, and the program has more restrictive eligibility requirements. In addition, Noriega says, the recipients "then have to pay someone $10 for gas to get them to the grocery store to buy the food."

The consternation is shared by Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. "It really does come under the category, in the most extreme way, of balancing the budget on the backs of those who are most needy," Kohl said earlier this year after Bush's plan became public.

Will Congress go along with Bush's proposal? Not likely. In early budget deliberations, the House Appropriations Committee voted to increase funding for CSFP to $118 million.