Arizona Gets the Jason DeParle Treatment

Arizona was the focus of a gripping episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily this week, based on Jason DeParle’s reporting on the effects on real people of the Trump Administration’s nationwide tightening of policies for SNAP beneficiaries.

For a variety of reasons, Arizona has cut a far greater percentage of applicants from its rolls than most other states. The state tightened verification requirements in anticipation of federal error-rate penalties while also losing roughly a third of its caseworkers. According to both the New York Times and the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (where the Times got its data), the rolls have shrunk since the passage of the One Beautiful Bill in 49 states, averaging about an 11% drop overall. But in Arizona, the rolls have been cut by about half.

DeParle has a signature method to his journalism. He humanizes the real-world effects of policy on poor people by chronicling how policy decisions from far away upend their daily lives. His articles for the New York Times Magazine on poverty were required reading for aspiring journalists (like me) in the 1990s. And his book “American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare” formalized the formula with its tales of the difficulties its subjects faced.

Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.

Less frequently mentioned was the fact that DeParle’s wife, Nancy-Ann DeParle, was serving as the Administrator of the organization that preceded the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during those 90s articles (the same job that Mehmet Oz holds today). Or that “American Dream” came out just as Barack Obama, who would eventually make Nancy-Ann his White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, was building a name for himself as someone who could mesmerize with stories of hope deferred due to the cruelties of poverty.

It’s an effective strategy, and DeParle’s Arizona reporting is worthy of its author’s legacy. Several of the Arizonans he profiles who are now struggling under the new changes, including a woman who fantasize about stealing enough food so her children can eat, will break your heart.

But the problem with the way The Times presents this information in both the article and the podcast–the problem with the way liberals always present such information, every single time–is the uninvestigated assumption (let alone proven) that the government is making these changes out of cruelty. They don’t even have to say that out loud, they simply don’t take seriously any opposing point of view. Or discuss why Americans voted for enough Congressmen to make these changes possible.

Yes, they dutifully note that “Republicans saw SNAP as a bloated program. It had more than doubled in size since 2000. About one in eight Americans get SNAP, and its annual cost had exceeded $100 billion.” These are three shocking statistics. But in the parts that detail the human cost, the listener/reader gets only an image of Republican lawmakers  gleefully enjoying the suffering, like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

Take for example, one Arizona rule change described in the podcast.

DeParle tells us that recipients used to be able to list the number of family members on their application and collect benefits commensurate with the total in the household.

“It used to be that applicants could just walk in the office and tell a caseworker how many people lived in the household and who they were. Now, applicants had to go to neighbors or friends and get a written declaration of who lived in the household. If the neighbor or friend failed to sign the letter or failed to put their phone number on the letter, you’d have to start all over again.”

Does anyone over 5 not understand what will happen if the system relies simply on the word of the applicant?

Everyone knows that some applicants will overstate the actual number of household members. Not always because they’re bad people. It’s because they’re hungry and poor, and because the law incentivizes fraud. Had Arizona cracked down on exaggerated family size ten years ago, there would have been less pressure to cut this program in the first place, benefiting not only the good taxpayers of the United States, but the honest SNAP recipients who were doing things the right way. Now they all have to suffer the hassle and indignity of asking their neighbors to weigh in on their need for charity.

Another heartbreaking example comes in the form of Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who the New York Times says “weighs 69 pounds, [and] has had to skip meals since losing SNAP benefits, or food stamps, to feed the three teenage grandsons she is raising.” Dee gave up her career as a roadie for Jimmy Buffett, Britney Spears, and Slipknot so she could raise her five grandsons over the years when her son ran into what must have been pretty severe legal problems.

You’d need a heart of stone not to feel for her as she describes buying four gallons of milk every other day to feed these growing young men. If she wants to personally reach out to me, I will Venmo her some dough for her grocery fund.

The podcast relates her story: “About 15 years ago, she started receiving SNAP, and has been on it since. ‘Without SNAP, we would have starved. We would have starved, or maybe we wouldn’t have starved. We would have not had the proper nutrition, for sure.’ She was receiving about $700 a month in SNAP aid. That’s about a third of her income. The rest mostly comes from social security.” So the taxpayers of America have been providing for Dee, exactly as intended by these programs. I’m happy things have been working the way the should.

At the same time, Dee herself says that she’s been renewing her benefits without problem for 15 years until this year when all of a sudden a paperwork error she made caused someone to reject her application.

I get it. A minor error shouldn’t cost this family its subsistence. But the name of the program is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Fifteen years doesn’t feel like a supplement. It feels like a permanent entitlement.

It functions very much like the Temporary Protected Status that the government granted Haitians in January 2010, a status that President Trump ended this year. If these words don’t mean “temporary” and “supplemental,” then what do they mean?

But that’s the problem at the core of Jason DeParle’s journalism and the New York Times in general. They don’t make an honest effort to explain the rationale behind these policies. They are happy to let stand caricatures of #MeanRepublicans who simply prefer for Dee’s five young adult grandsons to suffer the consequences of their father‘s bad behavior.

In fact, when the government conceived the First Food Stamp program, they designed it specifically to help farmers. Recipients of those first stamps in 1939 could use them to buy only surplus goods, as determined by the Secretary of Agriculture. The program was ended just four years later because “unmarketable food surpluses and widespread unemployment–no longer existed.”

The federal government restarted it in 1964 when President Johnson made it permanent as part of the Great Society. And expanded constantly since, including when, as we learn in the Times, “the Biden administration unilaterally raised benefits by 25 percent.” But even in the 60s, the government didn’t intend it as a grant. According to A Short History of SNAP, that first permanent program “Required that recipients purchase their food stamps, paying an amount commensurate with their normal expenditures for food and receiving an amount of food stamps representing an opportunity more nearly to obtain a low-cost nutritionally adequate diet.”