Rep. Handel Introduces Her First Bill
Though Rep. Karen Handel (R, GA-6) has co-sponsored several bills, yesterday marks the first time that Georgia’s newest member of Congress has introduced a bill of her own. The bill, H.R. 5338, is entitled the Stop Needless Award Payments (SNAP) Act of 2018. It seeks to eliminate an initiative of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that awards bonus payments to states for “correcting errors, reducing erroneous payments, and meeting other performance indicators.” Currently, states receive a total nearly $50 million through the program every year.
Rep. Handel:
“We’ve lowered the expectations of government to where we now pay extra just to get the job done right. We have to set the expectation that services are delivered as promised.That’s what taxpayers should expect. That’s definitely what taxpayers deserve.
Cash assistance, public housing, and nutrition assistance are vital safety net programs, and we should expect these programs to be administered effectively — to best serve those in need and to do so with minimal fraud and errors. I am proud to offer this commonsense reform and continue my strong record of government reform and cutting waste.”
About Author
lawtonsack
Lawton is a graduate of Georgia Southern University (the GSU) with a degree in Information Technology. He has held numerous positions within the Georgia Republican Party throughout the years.
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This is disappointing. Reducing errors should be a good goal! If perfection is the expectation then everyone in SNAP is automatically making the maximum they can make? No incentives? That should work. Not.
Hey, why don’t we apply this standard to the Defense Department? How do you y’all think this would play out?
This is the kind of crap which makes people cynical and disengaged.
I was hoping to find how many employees are in the SNAP program but I was unsuccessful. But there are about 7,000 in the DFCS. So let’s guess that there are 2300 in SNAP. Handel says the feds spend $50M for this bonus program, so that’s an average of $1M per state. Let’s say Georgia gets a little more than the average, maybe $2M. And let’s say that typically 20% of your workforce is eligible for a bonus. So that’s about 500 employees sharing $2M, which is an average of $4000 each. A pretty good incentive but certainly not extravagant. (You could just as easily assume 600 employees sharing $1.5M, which is $2500 each, just for perspective.)
Perhaps more relevant- on sites like Glassdoor the prevailing comment about working at DFCS is the insane workloads. So if Karen Handel wants to expect better performance, maybe she should look into addressing that rather than punishing those trying to help.
I can’t imagine there would be any trickling down. The only way to get increased efficiency from the program is with additional staff time dedicated to increase efficiency; i.e. additional salary expense, which would actually divert resources from other administrative tasks in the short run. The “bonus” could then go towards recovering salary cost increases. Also, without knowing what the performance indicators are, it’s hard to know what they intend, or if they would be useful. It’s not like states haven’t been administering these programs for a while, and can confirm applicant validity with a good deal of inter-agency information sharing, etc. The bill is just a fearful toe dipped in the water.
Ahhh, good morning Mr. Marx! “CEOs, Koch heirs, and other trust fund douchebags”
It is still THEIR money! Glad to see you in full fledged “class warfare” mode this am…
Hey, she started it!