One of the key ways House Republicans want to impose harsh cuts on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often referred to as food stamps) is by bringing back, in force, a policy item that had slowly been removed by the states: asset tests. Rather than minor, technocratic fixes, this is an important change that shifts the program in a major way. And, independent of what one thinks of the scale of the food stamp program, this is a particularly bad policy, and understanding why it is so bad might give us some clues about why our social policy apparatus is such a mess.
The assets test change is accomplished in the House bill by removing the ability of states to use “categorical eligibility” in determining eligibility for SNAP. That practice allows states the ability to line up how people qualify for food stamps with other programs. And one reason categorical eligibility has been expanded has been to not use federally imposed assets tests to determine eligibility.
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