Report: 52 Percent of Non-Disabled Parents on Food Stamps Do Not Work

The debate surrounding food stamp recipients focuses on able-bodied adults without children, and a report released Thursday found that more than half of parents without disabilities who receive food stamps do not work.

The report, from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), found that 52 percent of able-bodied parents on food stamps were not working, even though they had no disabilities precluding them from seeking employment.

FGA’s report, which cited the most recent USDA data from fiscal year 2015, added that more than 12 million able-bodied parents use food stamps—nearly three times the number of people in this group who enrolled in food stamps in the year 2000.

The current federal policy states that able-bodied adults without children can only receive benefits from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the program in charge of food stamps—for three months during a three-year period without working or participating in state-approved job training, according to the USDA’s website.

However, there are no federal policy work requirements after a certain period for those able-bodied parents receiving SNAP benefits.

After looking at how some states that implemented the work requirements noticed a drop in food stamp enrollment and an increase in employment, the authors of the FGA report came up with another proposal for lawmakers to get more people off of welfare.

They proposed that lawmakers should not only expand work requirements to able-bodied adults without children, but to able-bodied adults with children.

“The best way to free able-bodied adults from the dependency trap is to get them back to work,” said FGA’s Vice President of Research Jonathan Ingram, one of the authors of the report. “Congress should expand work requirements to parents on food stamps, moving millions from welfare to work, and helping to break the cycle of dependency.”

Ingram and the other authors of the report proposed that expanding work requirements to this group of people would save the federal government $12 billion per year and cause seven million adults to drop off of welfare assistance.

While federal government policies have not yet required able-bodied parents who receive food stamps to work, some states like Wisconsin are proposing policies that would require parents of school-aged children to work to receive benefits.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker proposed that the state’s current food stamp work requirement—that able-bodied adults without children work at least 20 hours a week to receive benefits—be expanded for parents with children between the ages of 6 and 18 by October 2019.