GOP Seeks $16 Billion in Food Stamp Cuts : Congress: Proposal would reduce spending over five years. It would tighten eligibility, require able-bodied recipients to work or lose their benefits.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans have crafted legislation that would reduce spending on the food stamp program by $16 billion over the next five years as part of the GOP’s effort to redo the nation’s welfare programs, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The savings, which would average more than $3 billion a year for five years in a program that annually provides $23 billion in benefits to 27 million people, would come from such steps as tightening eligibility, cracking down on fraud and eliminating some planned increases tied to the cost of food.

The food stamp program is the second largest federal program for the needy after Medicaid. Currently, a family of three is eligible to receive food coupons if the family’s monthly income is $1,027 or less.

The House GOP legislative proposal would require the secretary of agriculture to advise Congress every three months on what the department is doing to keep expenditures within appropriated limits.

If they have no dependents, able-bodied food stamp recipients between ages 18 and 50 would be required to work or lose benefits after three months, according to the House GOP documents.

The House Agriculture Committee is scheduled Tuesday to mark up--or prepare for submission to the House floor--the food stamp legislation. It is one of three major pieces of the House Republican welfare plan moving through separate committees. They are scheduled to be united into one bill by the House Rules Committee before being sent to the floor for final action. The outlook in the Senate for such legislation is unclear.

The federal food stamp program was originally targeted in the House GOP’s “contract with America” for extinction during the first 100 days of the legislative session. The money was to be combined with that from other nutrition programs and sent to states as part of a lump sum cash payment, called a block grant, that states could use as they see fit.

But the GOP blueprint ran up against old-fashioned politics last month when farm state legislators persuaded the House leadership that the Agriculture Department’s largest program should survive as a final “safety net for the truly needy.”

The contract’s pledge to turn food stamps into a block grant was abandoned, prompting an outcry from Republican governors. The governors said they needed control of all major welfare programs to make overall reforms and improve efficiency enough to provide services with reduced federal funds.

Under counterpressure from the governors to restore the block grant strategy, House leaders devised yet another compromise proposal, agreeing to turn over the program to states that have set up electronic payment systems for dispensing food aid.

Only Maryland has established such a system in the 13 years the program has been available. A Republican source estimated it may take states “between two years and forever” to go to electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, systems, which are complicated to design and to get both beneficiaries and food stores to use. Under EBT systems, food stamp recipients use plastic cards similar to those for automated teller machines.

The Republican source said late Saturday that the final amount of savings in the food stamp bill had not been determined, but that it would be at least $16 billion over five years.