So it looks as though the farm bill is going to pass through Congress without making any substantial changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps). As Vince Smith wrote earlier this week, the bill is full of lucrative giveaways for “a few very wealthy farm businesses” — so without solid antipoverty reform there is little reason to support it.

This legislation represents another missed opportunity to help SNAP become more than an EBT card. The program that reaches nearly 40 million Americans will continue to operate as though helping its recipients find employment and move out of poverty is not its job.

This year’s farm bill is another missed opportunity to help SNAP become more than an EBT card. Image via Twenty20

I have written about the importance of tightening work engagement requirements for non-disabled, working age adults receiving SNAP several times while the farm bill was under consideration, and there’s no need to rehash all of that here. But I will very briefly note why this failure to require SNAP to help its non-working, non-disabled beneficiaries move into work and earnings is an especially bad missed opportunity.

The last time unemployment was as low as it is now, in 2000, about 6 percent of the American population was on SNAP. And even though SNAP enrollment has declined since its peak in 2013, the enrollment rate (11.9 percent) is still nearly twice what it was 18 years ago. The traditional relationship between unemployment and SNAP enrollment, which tracked very closely between the advent of food stamps and the Great Recession, has not been restored. And labor force participation among working-age adults is still two percentage points lower than it was in 2000.

There are still between 7 and 9 million SNAP recipients who are capable of work and are telling SNAP administrators that they have no earnings. Passing the farm bill without any movement toward encouraging work among this group means that we may be missing the best chance we will have in years to get millions of Americans into earnings and out of poverty.

Those who oppose these efforts should understand that they are turning a blind eye toward the millions of poor Americans who have come to learn that SNAP only gives them an EBT card but does not help them escape poverty through earnings from work.