"What are they giving out today?"

There are many qualities of the Trump Administration that frequently are criticized: the incompetence; the chaos; the tweeting; the lying; the contempt for Constitutional norms; the hostility toward immigrants; and so on.  Most of these qualities, of course, are more or less directly traceable to the character and personality of the president.

But there is another aspect of the Trump Administration that may deserve more consideration than it has received so far: the policy innovations.

I suppose that Betsy DeVos in the Department of Education has come across so far as the chief innovator.  On the whole, her innovations tend to run along somewhat predictable conservative lines: cutting budgets, rescinding regulations, supporting school choice and holding borrowers accountable for their loans.

So it was interesting to read today that the Trump Administration is proposing a radical change to the program that still is popularly known as food stamps.  Here is Helena Bottemiller Evich's description at Politico:

The proposal, buried in the White House’s fiscal 2019 budget, would replace about half of the money most families receive via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, with what the Department of Agriculture is calling “America’s Harvest Box.” That package would be made up of "100 percent U.S. grown and produced food" and would include items like shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal.

It seems that the momentum, if any, for this novel approach did not come from the grassroots, nor the usual channels of conservative policy:

The idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations.  [USDA spokesman Tim] Murtaugh said the concept was developed internally at USDA.  [OMB Director Mick] Mulvaney on Monday credited [USDA Secretary Sonny] Perdue for it during a briefing at the White House. 

"Secretary Perdue wanted to give it a chance," he said.  "We thought it was a tremendous idea."

Much of the remainder of the article consists of various experts and advocates explaining why this may not be a very good idea:

Kevin Concannon, who oversaw SNAP during the Obama Administration, was aghast when he saw the proposal.  "Holy mackerel," said Concannon, who said it reminded him of when poor people had to line up and wait for local officials to dole out food and other welfare benefits.  "I don't know where this came from, but I suspect that the folks when they were drawing it up were also watching silent movies." 

Other anti-hunger advocates said the concept was reminiscent of wartime rations or soup lines during the Great Depression.  The Food Research and Action Center, a prominent nonprofit group, called the harvest box idea "a Rube Goldberg-designed system" that would be "costly, inefficient, stigmatizing and prone to failure."

I am all for taking a fresh look at government programs, especially those that spend upward of $70 billion annually for 16 million recipients.  But ...

The Politico article does a nice job of calling out that one of the strengths of the SNAP program is that it leverages existing distribution channels.   Recipients take their SNAP card to the local supermarket and buy whatever groceries are covered under the program.  Thus recipients benefit from the same complex logistics that bring fresh meat, produce, dairy products and other high quality goods to American consumers.  The harvest box program presumably would bypass those existing logistics arrangements and would require constructing a parallel system of distribution.  If I were a member of Congress concerned about the cost of the SNAP program, I'd wish to be shown that the cost of this parallel distribution system wouldn't offset whatever savings are imagined from the government using its purchasing power to buy peanut butter, rice, breakfast cereal and whatever else goes in the box.

And whatever system of logistics is devised, it doesn't strain the imagination to suppose that it will require recipients to go to a distribution point and wait in line to receive their box of non-perishables.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is one of the reasons that people were so eager to leave the Soviet Union.  Again, looking at this from a conservative point of view, what experience of government programs makes the USDA confident that it will deliver the right quantities of goods to the right places at the right times to feed the right people?

Another strength of the existing SNAP program is that it respects the dignity of the recipients.  It allows them to shop with their fellow citizens, choose the goods they wish to purchase, and pay for them in a relatively unobtrusive way.  There is nothing dignified about waiting in line to receive one's free handouts.

The scheme may have its merits.  But - to draw one more time from the conservative playbook - let's not roll it out at a grand scale in order to shake out the bugs.  Why not budget a modest amount and run a few small pilot projects?  And then learn some lessons?  The hungry people aren't going anywhere; the poor we will always have with us.  If this idea is an improvement, let's demonstrate it on a small scale, rather than charging ahead with a chain saw to start cutting gigantic holes in the safety net.