Conservative firebrand Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) argued in a press release on Tuesday that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides cushy benefits to recipients and accused Democrats protesting proposed cuts of engaging in a “left-wing publicity stunt intended to make it appear proposed cuts to food stamps would leave families unable to feed themselves.”

On Friday, the Senate advanced a farm bill that would take $4 billion out of SNAP and the House is considering cutting the program by 2.5 percent and leaving some two million families without food assistance. In response, more than 26 members of Congress are taking the “SNAP Challenge,” living off a food stamp budget for a week to draw attention to the inadequacy of the average benefit of $4.50 per day. Forty-seven million Americans are currently enrolled in the program.

But an aide in Stockman’s office claims to have “debunked” their effort and is accusing Democrats of “intentionally buying overpriced food and shopping at high-priced chains to make it appear the cuts go too far”:

Donny Ferguson, who serves as Stockman’s communications director and agriculture policy advisor, was able to buy enough food to eat well for a week on just $27.58, almost four dollars less than the $31.50 “SNAP Challenge” figure.

“I wanted to personally experience the effects of the proposed cuts to food stamps. I didn’t plan ahead or buy strategically, I just saw the publicity stunt and made a snap decision to drive down the street and try it myself. I put my money where my mouth is, and the proposed food stamp cuts are still quite filling,” said Ferguson.

“We can cut the proposed benefits by an additional 12.4 percent and still be able to eat for a week,” said Ferguson. “Not only am I feeding myself for less than the SNAP Challenge, I will probably have food left over.” [...]

“I didn’t use coupons, I didn’t compare prices and was buying for one, instead of a family. I could have bought even more food per person if I were splitting $126 four ways, instead of budgeting $31.50 to eat for one” said Ferguson. “I could have bought cheaper vegetables instead of prepared red beans and rice, but I like red beans and rice. Folks aren’t buying fast food instead of vegetables because of benefit limits, they’re buying fast food because fast food tastes great and vegetables taste like vegetables.”

Stockman’s office appears to misunderstand the challenge. Rather than impulsively buying food, participants plan for nutritious meals, akin to actual families enrolled in the program. And with the average cost of food at home far exceeding the SNAP Challenge allotment, families often struggle to afford meals.

A study published earlier this year by the Institute of Medicine found that “low-income and minority populations are more likely than other groups to experience limited access to supermarkets and other large retail outlets” These families also lack the transportation to access quality food and don’t have “sufficient time to produce healthy meals from scratch.” Since food prices vary across the nation, “SNAP participants who live in locales with higher food prices find it difficult to meet their needs with the current benefit,” the IOM concluded.

Indeed, as Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) — one of the members participating in the challenge — pointed out, “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” “I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind,” she wrote.

The latest poverty data show that SNAP lifted 4.7 million households out of poverty in 2011.

The House plans to vote this week on a farm bill that cuts nearly $21 billion from food stamps, and several members who support the cuts have benefited significantly from the various forms of farm subsidies provided by the same legislation.

The ten Republicans in question have collected about $6.7 million in federal farm money dating back to the 1990s, according to analysis by the Environmental Working Group. Over the years, they’ve also justified cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) with a variety of smears against recipients and misrepresentations of the program’s nature and performance. Rep. Stephen Fincher’s (R-TN) erroneous biblical argument for cuts that would knock two million Americans off of food aid drew attention last month given that he’s gotten nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies over the years. But some of his colleagues deserve similar scrutiny for their apparent hypocrisy with regard to the House farm bill.

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who’s gotten over $500,000 in subsidy payments since 1995, is a particularly interesting case. While Noem is diplomatic in most public statements on food stamps, she endorses a common smear of the program when away from cameras. In a constituent letter obtained by ThinkProgress, Noem wrote that “loopholes and fraud in the current program have lead to federal spending on SNAP to increase [sic] by 270 percent over the past ten years.” Rep. Vicki Hartzler (R-MO) offers to same rationale for the cuts, and has taken $500,000 in farm subsidies as well.

In fact, the jump in food stamp enrollment is due almost entirely to the catastrophic economic collapse and ensuing Great Recession. Even amid that heightened strain on the program’s staff, “SNAP achieved its lowest error rates on record in fiscal year 2011,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Outright fraud is down to just one percent.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are more common in the farm subsidies programs that have sent over a million taxpayer dollars to the Hartzler and Noem households over the years than in food stamps. Crop insurance alone has a 4.7 percent error rate, compared to 3.8 percent for SNAP.

Other common rationales from this group of would-be SNAP cutters fare no better under scrutiny. Many conservatives believe charities and individuals can better serve the hungry. But as ThinkProgress has noted, food charities say they are already beyond their capacity and cannot step into the breach the House bill would leave. Conservative objections to policies that expand SNAP eligibility to families just above the program’s cutoff level of 130 percent of the poverty line look less righteous when you consider that 8 in 10 hungry American children live in households with income up to 185 percent of the poverty line.

And while Rep. Marlin Stutzman’s (R-IN) suggestion that America’s poor amount to budget fat in need of trimming is a philosophical question, the question of dependency he raised in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing food stamps has no basis in fact.

ThinkProgress intern Kumar Ramanathan contributed research to this post.

Twenty-six members of Congress will live off of a food stamp budget this week to draw attention to House Republicans cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program’s eligibility requirements already leave out 50 million food insecure households, but another 2 million Americans would lose access to food stamps in the proposed changes for the Farm Bill.

The SNAP challenge means that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and 25 participating members must try to live off of under $4.50 per day for food and drink.

Lee detailed the tough decisions she made grocery shopping — butter and milk were outside her budget and a McDonalds value menu item will count as her midweek break — in a blog post. “What I’m thinking about most during this trip is that I’m shopping only for myself,” she wrote, comparing the difficult decisions now to when she needed public assistance as a single mother. “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind.” Many Americans receiving SNAP benefits are under 18 years old and live in working households.

On Wednesday, the participating Democrats chronicled their trips to the grocery store, where they poured over coupons and attempted to buy a week’s worth of food for about $30:

51 cents to spare. Hardest shopping trip in memory. Two small bags of groceries, not a lot of food. #SNAPchallenge twitter.com/RepDanKildee/s…

— Rep. Dan Kildee (@RepDanKildee) June 12, 2013

Other officials have attempted to live off of food stamps for short periods of time. Newark Mayor Cory Booker took the challenge earlier this year. When Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton participated in the challenge, he found he was “tired” and it was “hard to focus” by day four. “If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant,” he wrote. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who recently participated in the SNAP challenge, found “I’m hungry for five days…I lost six pounds in four days.”

Compare these reactions to the arguments made by conservatives, who pan food stamps as government dependency. “Unfortunately, the rapid growth of this program has only increased dependency on government and added to our federal deficit,” 25 Republican members wrote in a letter Tuesday. Last Thanksgiving, a Fox News host joked she would look “fabulous” on a food stamp diet.

Over one in five American children lack steady access to sufficient food, and over 50 million total Americans are food insecure. Those figures come from Map the Meal Gap, an annual report from the anti-hunger charity Feeding America that tracks food security down to the county level.

Feeding America’s interactive map is based on national data from 2011 and focuses on the rates of food insecurity rather than the raw numbers. The country’s largest cities have the largest raw numbers of food-insecure children, but children in rural communities are most likely to be food insecure. Forty-three percent of America’s counties are rural, but they make up almost two-thirds of counties with high rates of child food insecurity.

Three in ten children in New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. face food insecurity, as do a quarter or more of children in Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Nevada, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Zavala County, Texas has the highest rate of child food insecurity: 46 percent. Click the map to access the interactive graphic on FeedingAmerica.org:

While redistricting prevented Feeding America from calculating the figures by congressional district as they have in past reports, the county-level results should still be helpful as Congress debates billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP). The entirety of the Senate-proposed cuts come from restricting states’ use of simplified eligibility criteria for SNAP. The House bill goes even further, eliminating two common eligibility expansion programs that allow states to provide SNAP benefits to those earning more than 130 percent of the poverty line, which is the normal cutoff for SNAP.

But Map the Meal Gap offers some evidence that the expanded SNAP eligibility some states provide is needed. Forty-five percent of food-insecure Americans earn more than the SNAP threshold, and 29 percent earn more than 185 percent of the poverty line.

As Congress debates exactly how many billions of dollars to cut from the government’s main food assistance program for low-income Americans, a new report finds that the existing safety net has failed millions of people who must constantly worry about how to feed themselves and their families.

According to the International Human Rights Clinic of NYU Law School, the four biggest food assistance programs fall short for as many as 50 million food insecure households. Eligibility requirements are already so strict that one in four households classified as food insecure were still considered too high-income to receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Even families considered poor enough for food aid only get a pittance that runs out quickly; for instance, the maximum benefit for a family of four is $668 a month, or a little under $2 per meal for each family member.

To demonstrate the impossibility of surviving on food stamps, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recently spent a week eating on $4.80 a day, mainly consuming ramen noodles, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a banana. “I’m hungry for five days…I lost six pounds in four days,” Murphy said upon concluding the experiment. He also realized that nutritious food and produce was far, far out of reach for people living on SNAP benefits. Indeed, obesity and related diseases are common among SNAP recipients who simply can’t afford nutritious food.

As a result, many families can no longer rely on these benefits. Instead, they increasingly have no choice but to turn to emergency food pantries run by charities. In the wake of the financial crisis, 37 million people relied on these emergency food providers — a 46 percent increase from 2005. These charities, many of which took devastating funding hits in the recession, are struggling to accommodate the influx of needy people who are supposed to be covered by government programs. As for the recipients themselves, the stigma against hungry people has made many people feel humiliated to turn to these programs.

Republicans looking to cut SNAP and other safety net programs have painted recipients as perpetually unemployed people who have become “dependent” on the government because it’s easier than getting a job. In fact, more than 80 percent of families receiving SNAP include a working adult. Despite the stigma, the reality is that the many low-income or part-time jobs available to these Americans simply do not pay enough to sustain a family’s survival. Most of the remainder of SNAP recipients are disabled or elderly and cannot work.

One woman interviewed for the report is struggling to feed her daughters because her medical treatment has left her unable to work:

My food stamps are depleted after maybe two and a half weeks. That’s when our cupboards become bare and there isn’t anything left in the deep freezer. I start to worry about where our next meal is coming from. The first thing my daughters do when they come home from school is look in the refrigerator and say, ‘Well, Mom, we don’t have this, we don’t have that.’ I hear those words and I feel like I’m not providing for my children. Where I live, we are only allowed to go to the food pantries every three months. I get vegetables and bread there, but not meat. Not having meat is difficult for my girls. I make sure they always have something to eat—many times it’s canned goods.

Though the recession spiked SNAP enrollment by 76 percent, the program is still facing even steeper budget cuts that would take food aid away from more than 12 million people. Automatic sequestration cuts have devastated other nutrition programs, like Meals on Wheels for disabled seniors and the Women, Infants, and Children aid program (WIC) to provide pregnant women and their children with essential nutrients for proper development.

One of New Jersey’s largest food banks is eyeing congressional efforts to cut two million Americans from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) with concern. While proponents of the cuts often argue that food banks and other charitable food distribution operations will step into the breach as government shrinks its aid to hungry Americans, officials at the Community FoodBank of New Jersey say that’s not how the safety net works.

“You need food pantries, and you need SNAP, and you need school lunch programs. When you cut one, you’re cutting the whole net,” Community FoodBank’s Diane Riley told NJ.com. The interconnectedness of anti-hunger programs means that SNAP cuts will knock over 200,000 low-income schoolchildren off of the free lunch program. And charities like Community FoodBank, which already serves over 900,000 New Jersey residents per year through a network of partner organizations around the state, are “already struggling to keep up with the demand” even with SNAP funding at its current level.

Local food charities in Ohio and Colorado echoed Riley’s point. Amy Pezzani, Executive Director of Colorado’s Food Bank for Larimer County, said the House bill “would add 4 million meals to the table of each of the 200 or so local food banks in the Feeding America network every year,” leaving individual county food banks to scrounge up a further $1 million each. That money isn’t there, according to charity leaders. Writing at TheGrio.com last week, Feeding America CEO Bob Aiken explained that the same recession that spiked demand at food banks also took a bite out of the charitable giving on which they depend: “34 percent of Americans admit cutting back on donations” between 2006-2010.

Yet House Republicans intend to forge ahead with over $20 billion in cuts to the program, on top of a significant benefits cut already scheduled for November.

The cuts, contained in the House’s draft of the Farm Bill, would only be the latest example of this congress balancing the budget on the backs of the neediest. From Meals on Wheels programs to disadvantaged schools reliant on federal funds to public defenders for accused criminals unable to afford attorneys, the ongoing cuts due to sequestration are falling hardest on the poor.

As the farm bill approved by the Agriculture Committee last week reaches the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) will be a few hours into an experiment: eating for a week on the meager food budget afford by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Murphy announced on Twitter that he would take the SNAP Challenge, which is the brainchild of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

That means Murphy will be eating on a few dollars per day, as his colleagues debate a measure that would cut $4 billion from the SNAP budget over the next decade. Murphy is using the $3 per day allowance FRAC and allies recommended in 2007 guidelines for lawmakers interested in the challenge, although government data shows the program averaged about $4.40/day nationwide in fiscal year 2012.

But if anything, the SNAP Challenge understates the hardships actual SNAP recipients face, both today and in the near future.

Those Americans must make it a full month on SNAP, and statistics show that about 80 percent of a given recipient’s monthly allotment gets spent in the first two weeks of the month:

Additionally, there is already a major cut scheduled for fall of 2013:

It’s harder to quantify another facet of life on SNAP that Murphy’s attempt to raise awareness of the program won’t require him to face: social stigma. The senator won’t have to worry about a cashier loudly asking him to run his Electronic Benefits Transfer card again while other customers wait behind him. He probably won’t experience the judgment of peers described here by Tiffani Stacy of Columbus, TX.

Murphy’s experience of life on SNAP, however muted, ought to help draw attention to the program’s inability to absorb the further cuts Congress has proposed.

The House is about to begin debating this year’s farm bill, as House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) has scheduled a mark up on May 15. Ahead of the negotiations, Lucas has already indicated that he is planning steep cuts in spending, mostly focused on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, reports Capital Press:

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., told Capital Press on April 26 that he is planning a farm bill that will cut $38 billion in spending over 10 years, with $20 billion coming from the food stamps account and $18 billion from the rest of the bill.

Those cuts would be $3 billion more than those included in a farm bill passed by the committee last year.

In fact, the bill passed last year by the committee included $16.5 billion in cuts to SNAP, which was predicted to end benefits for 2 to 3 million people. Lucas’s proposal would cut SNAP even more severely.

Unlike many other social safety net programs, SNAP easily expands and contracts in response to increased need, and therefore has been very responsive to the economic downturn. It is also a crucial tool in fighting poverty: In 2011, the program kept roughly 4.7 million people out of poverty, including 2.1 million children, and cut the number of children living in extreme poverty in half. Food stamps also lead to better health and economic outcomes for beneficiaries. They can reduce food insecurity among high-risk children by 20 percent and improve their health by 35 percent.

Yet the benefits are already meager. The average recipient receives about $133 a month, or about $1.48 a meal. Rather than looking for cuts in the food stamp program, perhaps lawmakers could instead focus on crop subsidies that fuel the junk food industry.