Food Assistance Will Be Slashed

Floor Speech

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Mrs. TRAHAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because working families in my district and across the country deserve better than the legislation the Republican majority is forcing through this week.

Under the leadership of Speaker McCarthy, House Republicans have drafted a partisan bill that will slash funding for critical food assistance programs that parents depend on to feed their children.

In fact, under this extreme proposal, the GOP is defunding hundreds of millions of dollars from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC for short.

That means that 5 million women and children nationwide, including 74,000 children and 24,000 women in my home State of Massachusetts, are going to see their benefits drastically cut.

Mr. Speaker, if you think that sounds bad, just wait until you hear how Republicans are going to do it.

For children, House Republicans are trying to reduce the WIC fruit and vegetable benefit from $25 to just $11 to cover a whole month. For pregnant and postpartum women, the GOP is slashing the fruit and vegetable benefit from $44 to $13 a month.

For breastfeeding moms, this extreme proposal imposes a devastating 60 percent cut from $49 to just $15 each month.

Mr. Speaker, these cuts are unnecessary, they are dangerous, and they are cruel. Above all else, this bill is a demonstration of the Republican Party's values. It is a demonstration of what they think life is like for working families, that you can simply tell a mom and her children or an expecting mother to stop being poor, and magically they won't be poor anymore.

As someone who grew up in a working family that lived paycheck to paycheck, I can tell my colleagues across the aisle firsthand: That is not how it works.

In fact, telling families to ``pull themselves up by their bootstraps'' while cutting the very program that they depend on to feed their children is going to have the opposite effect. It is going to force millions of Americans--millions of children--into hunger or worse.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I know many of my Republican colleagues may not know what it is like to worry about making ends meet. They may not know what it is like worrying if they will be able to put food on the table the next day or have to swipe that EBT card at the grocery store in front of a long line praying it will cover everything in your cart.

However, there are thousands--if not tens or hundreds of thousands-- of people in their home State who know exactly what that feels like and who experience that feeling every single day, and they are depending on them to stop what they are doing.

Mr. Speaker, stop trying to cut the last safety net that they have to make sure their kids don't go hungry.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this dangerous legislation.

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