SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — is the official name for the food stamp programmes.
"All of a sudden you're saying, 'we don't trust you to make the right decisions for your family.' It's demeaning and it's patronising. This is pro-hunger, because people will leave the program," Gunderson said.Under the proposed plan, households that receive more than US$90 in SNAP benefits each month — roughly 81 per cent of households in the program, or about 16.4 million — would be affected.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue called the box "a bold, innovative approach to providing nutritious food to people who need assistance feeding themselves and their families."
But the proposal doesn't include any concrete details about how much the programme would cost or how it would be implemented, saying only that states will be given flexibility to distribute the boxes "through existing infrastructure, partnership, and/or directly to residences through commercial and/or retail delivery services."
Lawmakers say they aren't even sure where the idea came from.
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the ranking member of the House nutrition subcommittee, called the proposal a "cruel joke" that came out of nowhere. He said despite having numerous hearings on SNAP, Monday's budget was the first time he'd heard of the food box proposal.
"I don't even know how to implement it. Who would distribute these boxes?" he said.
"How would we do this? Do they anticipate recipients getting them at supermarkets? In addition to being a cruel and demeaning and awful idea, it's just not practical."
A spokeswoman for House agriculture committee Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, said the committee has held 21 hearings and invited 80 experts to speak about SNAP in its preparations of the forthcoming farm bill, and the idea of a food box was not once discussed.
An Agriculture Department spokesman said the idea was developed internally, but didn't provide further details on the brainstorming process. Mulvaney credited it to Perdue.
Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, top Democrat on the Senate agriculture committee, said the food box idea "isn't a serious proposal and is clearly meant to be a distraction from this Administration's proposed budget that fails our families and farmers."
The proposal is part of a broader plan to gut the SNAP program, reducing it by roughly US$213 billion — nearly 30 per cent — over the next decade. The plan also proposes tightening work requirements for recipients.
Matt Knott, president of hunger relief network Feeding America, called it "an unworkable solution in search of a problem."
"SNAP is an efficient program that already utilises a grocery system," Knott said. "It's a program that expands and contracts as the economy expands and contracts as well. It's flexible, timely and efficient, and converting a sufficient portion of it to an antiquated program where boxes are delivered is simply unworkable."
