Since Mike Johnson’s recent ascent to House speaker, food insecurity advocates have been sounding the alarm. As Politico reported last week, Johnson is a proponent of more hard-line efforts to overhaul America’s largest anti-hunger program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which currently serves over 40 million people.
In 2018, per the publication, he referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.”
[I]t was during the controversial War on Poverty that conservatives really began to focus their attention on food stamps as a political instrument that needed to be either managed or mitigated. Many argued that the program, as well as associated welfare initiatives, would discourage self-reliance and personal responsibility and breed a generation of Americans who were always seeking a handout. This nasty stereotype about people in poverty, especially people of color, was infamously cemented into our nation’s broader consciousness during Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign with his popularization of the phrase “welfare queen.”
"There's a woman in Chicago,” he said during a campaign speech. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”
Since then, food insecurity advocates have been attempting to undo the tremendous amount of damage done by that rhetoric. Meanwhile, catalyzed by Reagan’s unflattering stereotype — and perhaps their already-held beliefs that most welfare recipients are fraudulent and undeserving, rather than fellow citizens genuinely in need of government assistance — generations of conservative politicians have attempted to decrease the program’s reach.
In the 1990s, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a vocal critic of the welfare system, including SNAP, referring to it as a “culture of poverty.” This attitude was heavily reflected in the Trump administration’s plans to tighten eligibility for SNAP (which were ultimately largely unfulfilled), as well as Republicans’ more successful efforts this year, which come at a critical time for hunger in the United States.