The Williamsport Sun-Gazette recently had an editorial supporting U.S. Representative Glenn Thompson’s contention that Pennsylvania doesn’t meet the new 6% error requirement for receiving Federal funds for SNAP, the food assistance program that helps the very poor in our state and also provides small family farms with an additional market for their produce in this food assistance program. Representative Thompson charges Governor Josh Shapiro with a lack of oversight that led to Pennsylvania showing a 10.72% error.

A little background will show Representative Thompson’s duplicity here. This new federal standard for receiving food aid is currently being met by only eight states. Forty-two states do not meet it. In fact, the national average error rate is 10.93% which shows that Pennsylvania is doing better than the average at detecting errors in the SNAP distribution system. According to Human Services Secretary Val Arkoosh, states seeking help in dealing with their error rates, which are primarily the result of clerical errors and not the result of free loaders among the poor, are out of luck now. Federal guidance meetings have been routinely cancelled, and calls for technical assistance have gone unanswered for three months.

I wonder if Representative Thompson is aware that over 144,000 poor Pennsylvanians will lose their food assistance because of this new rule. I wonder if Representative Thompson knows how many small family farms in Pennsylvania will lost a valuable market because of this new rule. Probably not since the current administration is all for industrial farming and not so much interested in small family farms. And of course, this new standard will take food assistance and markets away from farmers and the poor all over the country, in all those forty-two states who do not meet this punitive standard.

Representative Thompson and all the Republican members of the House Agriculture Committee which he chairs should be ashamed of themselves. They are literally taking food from the mouths of babies.

ELLEN A. BLAIS

Mansfield

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom