Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/143759
6A Daily News – Saturday, July 13, 2013 FACT CHECK: Farm bill doesn't end food stamps WASHINGTON (AP) — One after another, angry Democrats took to the House floor to say Republicans would increase hunger in America by stripping food stamps from the farm bill. In reality, though, the bill passed by the House on Thursday didn't deal with food stamps at all. And the lack of congressional action on food stamps could keep the $80 billion-a-year program untouched by any cuts. That didn't stop several Democrats from stating that the legislation ''takes food nutrition from working families.'' House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Republicans just before the bill passed on a narrow 216-208 vote: ''You are taking food out of the mouths of your own poor constituents.'' Money for food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has for decades been linked to farm programs in what is known as the farm bill. That union has brought urban Democratic support for the rural farm programs, which are renewed about every five years. But the longtime pairing ended abruptly amid battles over cuts in the food stamp program, which derailed the farm bill last month. Some Republicans have said there is rampant fraud in the program and benefits are going to some people who aren't eligible. In the 2012 presidential campaign, then-candidate Newt Gingrich once said that people could use food stamps for anything, including trips to Hawaii. In fact, food stamps can only be used for food purchases at retail outlets. And Agriculture Department officials have cracked down on fraud in recent years. The program has still doubled in cost since 2008, to almost $80 billion a year. Although some benefits have gone up, the main growth comes from a big jump in the number of participants, a result of the economic recession. All told, almost 47 million people used SNAP last year, or one in seven Americans. That number has not gone down this year. Republicans said a separate food stamp bill would come at a later date. Until that happens, food stamps will continue as they are. They are paid for by annual spending bills and the Democratic Senate and President Barack Obama have strongly objected to making major cuts. Still, the concerns that Democrats expressed Thursday could come to fruition. House Republicans have made many different proposals that would radically overhaul food stamps — cracking down on eligibility, increasing work requirements or adding an expiration date to the program. And after quickly moving the farm-only bill to the floor and rallying most of his caucus to vote for it, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Republicans would ''act with dispatch'' to get a separate food stamp bill to the floor. But it won't be easy. Republicans themselves are divided on the issue. There is no consensus on how much the program should be cut or changed, and more moderate Republicans would likely balk at the bigger changes sought by conservatives. Adding to the difficulty is how those issues would be resolved in conference negotiations with the Senate, which passed its own version of a farm bill in June. That bill includes food stamps and would only cut them by a half percent. Senate Democrats have said repeatedly that they will reject major changes or higher cuts to the program. All of that disagreement strongly strengthens the possibility that current food and farm law will simply be extended when it expires in September — keeping food stamps at the same levels they are now. The greater concern for food stamp advocates is the long-term damage that splitting the farm bill in two, and making food stamps a partisan issue, could have. If SNAP is not protected in the farm bill, or if future farm bills don't pass, Republicans could eventually find other ways to cut SNAP — including in the annual appropriations bills that actually fund the food stamps. ''There's a long history of bipartisanship on this,'' Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., said on the floor, referring to food stamps in the farm bill. ''All of a sudden this has become a partisan issue, and the target, so that you can try to balance the budget, has been placed right on the programs like SNAP.'' Planes called just before fire deaths PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona wildfire was so out of control because of winds from a nearby thunderstorm that officials asked for half the available Western U.S. air tanker fleet nearly an hour before 19 members of a Hotshot crew were killed, records obtained by the Associated Press Friday show. The records from the federal Bureau of Land Management show Arizona officials asked for six heavy air tankers at 4:08 p.m. on June 30, about 50 minutes after outflowing high winds from a nearby thunderstorm began driving the wildfire toward the small town of Yarnell. National Weather Service officials issued a wind warning to fire managers at 3:26 p.m. that day. The firefighters radioed that they were trapped and getting into the emergency fire shelters at 4:47 p.m. The six planes were never deployed or arrived because of the limited number of tankers in the nation's aerial firefighting fleet and the dangerous weather conditions at the time. Fire officials said even if they had been available winds were so strong they couldn't have been used to save the firefighters' lives. But the fact that so many planes were requested provides more proof that firefighters were facing an increasingly dangerous scenario. There were only 12 heavy tankers available that day in the Western United States. ''It is significant, and it makes an exclamation point to the situation, doesn't it,'' said Jim Paxon, a spokesman for the Arizona Division of Forestry, which was managing the fire. The agency asked for the six heavy tankers when the thunderstorm started kicking up fire activity but they didn't get them because none were available. The heavy tankers are used to lay lines of fire retardant to prevent a fire's spread and protect ground crews. The request came nearly an hour before out-of-control flames trapped the 19 members of the Granite Mountain hotshots and led to the nation's worst wildland fire tragedy since 1933. Despite the size of the order and what the state Forestry Division says was the dire danger to the town, there was no sign crews were in immediate danger. There also wasn't any sense of urgency conveyed when the air tankers were ordered, federal officials said. Don Smurthwaite, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho, described the request for six large tankers as ''coincidental and not consequential'' to the fate of the doomed Hotshot crew. He said none of the dispatch records related to the request show ''any expression firefighters were in trouble. ''We did not know at this level how much jeopardy the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew was in,'' said Smurthwaite, whose agency oversees the deployment of firefighting aircraft in wildfires. No aircraft were battling the blaze when the crew died. Three drops were made 12:30 and 1 p.m. on June 30 by large P-2V tankers capable of dropping 2,800 gallons of retardant that had been working a fire farther north in Arizona, but they went back to that assignment, Paxon said. Fire officials had earlier asked for the nation's two huge DC-10 air tankers that can drop about four times the retardant, but they were unavailable. Only a spotter plane was in the air when the Prescott, Ariz.-based Granite Mountain Hotshots died. The state's fleet of small single-engine retardant-dropping planes was grounded in Prescott because of the weather, and no helicopters or heavy tankers were available. Paxon said the tankers would not have been able to drop during what he described as a very large wind event anyway. ''When that fire blew up with the (thunderstorm) outflow there was no way to get any aircraft in close to the fire,'' he said. ''Beyond the heat and the turbulence there's just really unstable air. They tell these big commercial airliners to fly around thunderstorms — well, this activity's more than a thunderstorm, the activity on a fire when you get one of these big outflow events with 40 or 50 miles an hour winds.'' Paxon said they ordered the planes despite knowing they couldn't be used at the moment in hopes of building a retardant line between the fire and the town of Yarnell.