We are now pleased to hear from Miss Nancy Amedei, director, Food Research & Action Center.

STATEMENTS OF MS. NANCY AMEDEI, DIRECTOR, FOOD RESEARCH & ACTION CENTER, AND DELTON PONDER, HATTIESBURG, MISS.

Ms. AMEDEI. Senator, thank you very much.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear.1

With me this morning is Delton Ponder, who is here from Hattiesburg, Miss. I wonder if we could allow him to make his statement first?

The CHAIRMAN. Certainly.

You are aware of the time constraints. However, your entire statement will be put in the record. And I appreciate your appearance here.

You may proceed, sir.

Mr. PONDER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I want to thank you for the opportunity to come here today.

My name is Delton Ponder, and I come from Hattiesburg, Miss. I appreciate the chance to tell my story. I hope it will help you understand how important food stamps and school lunches are to people like us, and how hard it will be on families like mine if some of these proposals go through.

I am a full-time worker, earning $5.30 an hour at Forest General Hospital in Hattiesburg. I work 40 hours a week as a maintenance engineer. Besides myself, there is my wife, and three children, aged 8, 11, and 14. I mostly support my family on the money I earn, which comes to about $919 a month, but my take-home pay is only $682.74. My wife also gets an SSI check for $165.24 each month, because her health problems have left her disabled.

I brought with me copies of my monthly bills, like the note on my house, which is $225 a month, a copy of my electric bill, which averages about $116 each month-that's about to go up-and a water bill of about $8 a month.

My telephone runs about $26 a month-they charge extra because I live about 8 miles from town. Gasoline and oil averages about $125 a month, largely because of all the trips I have to make back and forth to the doctor. Liability insurance on my car is another $10.

Food bills run our family about $300 a month, and that is without buying anything fancy. As you can see, I haven't even mentioned clothes or household expenses or any of the things that just come up. Just with our ordinary expenses, we would not be rich after we get through paying all our regular monthly bills.

If everybody in my family was healthy, we would manage all right. But my family has a lot of special health problems. My wife, who is just 35 years old, has had surgery 13 times in the last 7 years. We originally moved back to Mississippi when she and two of my children were all hospitalized at the same time with a bronchial condition that led the doctors to recommend that we move away from Illinois, where the winters are cold, to some place warm. So we moved back to Mississippi where I had been raised.

1 See p. 336 for the prepared statement of Ms. Amedei.

Right now, I am trying to pay off $5,000 in bills from the last time my wife was hospitalized last year. On top of that, one of my children, the 8-year-old, has been diagnosed as having a terminal condition known as ectodermal dysplasis, which means she loses all of her hair and will receive no permanent teeth and will lose her eyesight and powers of speech, and she suffers from a redundant colon.

She will be needing a lot of special care in the months ahead. Even with my insurance policy and some help from medicaid for the hospital bills, I still have to pay many of our medical bills out of my salary. Both she and my wife have to see a doctor every week. Some months my medical bills are well over $150.

We get $226 a month in food stamps. The deduction I get for work-related expenses doesn't cover all the mandatory payroll deductions, or things like the uniforms I have to buy, but the food stamps make it possible for us to eat.

I have worked all my life, and I never thought I would have to ask for help like this. Before this, I tried to work two jobs till I was down to skin and bones. If I had any choice, I wouldn't even have applied for food stamps. But I don't have a choice. Without food stamps, I simply could not feed my family. And if the children couldn't get some of their meals at school, even with the food stamps we would not be able to manage.

I follow what has been going on by reading papers and watching the news, and I may not have all the details, but I understand you mean to take away $36 of my food stamps every month just because my children eat at school. The two of them that are 11 and 14 seem to be hungry all the time as it is. They are going through that growing stage where they never seem to fill up. And then, when they said in the paper that people with gross incomes at 130 percent of the poverty line are too rich for food stamps, I learned that means that by next year, I might not be able to get any food stamps for my family at all. We are already eating beans and potatoes, and every kind of food that fills you up but doesn't cost much. But if I still have to pay those same bills, and don't get any food stamps, or get less in food stamps, I just honestly don't know what I am going to do.

If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer to the best of my ability. I was glad to come here today to tell you my story, but also because I know a lot of other people who would go to bed hungry if it weren't for food stamps, and what you do is going to affect them, too.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, very much—

Ms. AMEDEI. Senator, I think that Mr. Ponder's story says really better than I can say what we would like this committee to hear. His story that reflects what so many people in this country who depend on food stamps, sir, are going through right now.

When we get past the billions and the statistics and the studies and the investigations and everything else, it comes down to people like Mr. Ponder and his family.

And several of the proposals in front of this committee right now would take food directly away from his family. If eligibility is limited to 130 percent of the poverty line, he loses food stamps altogether.

That is a notion that says, you can look at some dollar amount and not take into consideration what is going on in that family's lives.

Now, if he didn't have sick people in his family, his income might be just fine for him and his family. But the fact that they are sick and have these enormous medical bills that they cannot pay out of any other source, means he just doesn't have money available for food.

The way the food stamp program is constructed now, as you know so well, it takes those kinds of things into account. Setting a gross income eligibility limit at 130 percent of the poverty line would stop that.

Now, Mr. Chairman, clearly this is one of the families that will be affected, and this is my second point; if we trade off because of school lunch, there is no question about it. His family will have to eat less. His children will suffer because of that.

Now, the woman I was speaking to just last week from Oklahoma was in a similar situation. She was in a family in which the head of their household had a business of his own for many years. And then he was in declining health for several years and eventually couldn't work at all. He just recently had surgery again. While they were busy selling off things and trying to make do and trying not to have to go for help, she was in an accident and her back was broken. They put a glass disc in her spine and weren't able to completely fix one of her legs, which was rather badly injured in the accident.

They have four children at home. And they stand to lose because of these proposals, much like Mr. Ponder and his family, $48 a month because their children are in school. They stand to lose because, like Mr. Ponder, they are people who are going to be affected by the freezing of deductions. Their deductions will not be permitted to go up, even though right now their utilities have gotten so high that with rent and utilities they only have $43 a month left after they pay their rent and utilities. There is no money left to help out for medical expenses, for school expenses, for clothing for the children.

She told a story about just a week or so ago when one of her children in an art class was told by the teacher that she couldn't draw any more. He snatched the paper right out of her hand and said, "Until you pay that $4.50 fee, you are not going to draw in my class." And he walked away with the paper in his hand. With $43 a month after her rent and utilities are paid, and living just on food stamps to feed the family, she doesn't have $4.50 for an art fee. She can't feed those children with less money than she has

now.

Right now, she said, they eat popcorn and they drink a lot of water because it fills their stomachs up and doesn't cost very much. That is how they live now. If they lose $43 a month because those children are in school, and their deductions are frozen for utilities particularly, they are going to hurt even more badly.

And then there is one more provision, and that is the provision that says we should never allow food stamp recipients to even have total value of the thrifty food plan for 1 month. It says that when we update the food stamps next January for the first time in a

year, even though prices have been climbing up, we are going to take them to last September's prices. So we start poor people out behind, even at the point at which they get their only increase for a year. And they never get the thrifty food plan.

And it is against that that all of these deductions are being taken.

There are families all over this country in this condition.

There is a woman in Arlington we know who has about $9 a month left, to include her food, all of her expenses, any of her outof-pocket medical expenses, after she has paid rent and utilities. She is going to lose her eligibility entirely because she is over 130 percent of the poverty line with her SSI payment and one other little source of income.

Some of these people are going to hurt terribly. Many of them are going to hurt in ways that we are never going to know, because they are going to go hungry at home. Others we will probably hear about in the newspapers. Most of them we won't know about. But the effects we will certainly know about. They are inescapable and we can predict them.

I think that this committee over the years has done a wonderful service in this country by providing us with the food assistance programs, with the incentive programs that have helped millions and millions of people, and has made a tremendous difference in their lives.

I think what we are facing now is a set of choices that could say that we are going to go back on all of that.

I am a little bit reluctant to just stop here, because there is one other thing I would like to do, if I may.

I was concerned a bit by some of the comments that were made by earlier witnesses. I can give you something for the record on that; because I understand your time constraints.

The CHAIRMAN. Go right ahead.

Ms. AMEDEI. I would just like to mention one or two other things. I think that sometimes in the glare of the lights and the fact that somebody is appearing before a Senate committee, things tend to get stated a little differently than they might under cooler circumstances.

For example, the Commissioner from Tennessee said that there were no options for the States in the food stamp program. I am sure she understands and she knows very well that there are some options.

One of their options is on how the States handle fraud. The States have a number of options with respect to how they handle fraud.

There was a comment made by one of the witnesses about the number of single-person households that have been created. There was some story about whether that meant that people were misrepresenting their situations, though Senator Pryor was able to point out the tremendous increase in participation by the elderly and many of whom are in single-person households.

So we have to be a little bit careful about looking at the statistics that we do have access to, Mr. Chairman, to make sure that they do tell us the accurate story and that we don't get carried away by the circumstances.

There is a final point. I will elaborate a little bit on it when we send you something.

And this is, I think, a real serious, fundamental public policy question facing this committee and many other committees now, and that is the tension between the desire on the one hand, and I think quite legitimately by many people here in Washington, to have more and more control over Federal dollars-and we all want to be sure that if the tax dollars are being spent, they are spent for the purposes for which they were intended-but on the other hand, to see that real needs are met.

As to the first part, I think there is a legitimate need, and people are legitimately concerned about fraud and abuse and about mismanagement and inefficiency. If we all are going to be collecting dollars from the taxpayers, we want the money to go back to the taxpayers and we want to be assured it is being spent for the purposes for which we said it was going to be spent.

But that comes into a bit of conflict then when, on the other hand we see the people in the States who are asked to implement all of the regulations that flow out of the amount of detail that is demanded in accomplishing this end.

One of the Commissioners this morning showed a very impressive packet of regulations and memorandums and everything. Well, the act has been amended three times in the last 4 years. So of course there are a lot of regulations, and more than there would be otherwise.

Some of those regulations were to tighten up on fraud and abuse provisions, incidentally. Both have been amended three times in the last 4 years.

Some of the regulations were so you would have greater accountability for all of these taxpayers when you do come back to them and tell them how those food stamp dollars are spent.

And some of the regulations are so we can check up on the error rates. They are so that we can see if the error rates are going down, and so that we will have some idea year after year if we are doing a better job.

Just the fact that this packet of regulations is so high, that doesn't mean it is all somehow crazy or irrational or doesn't have a good purpose.

So we are caught in a bit of struggie here, of tension. We want accountability for those Federal dollars, but we also want a manageable program. And those of us who care about the recipientsand I think we all care about the recipients of these programswant that as much as anybody else. We want programs that are accountable because people who abuse or misuse the program are taking the money away from Mr. Ponder here and his family, and are taking it away from him as much as those who take it away in other ways.

And I might say he also needs a program he can understand and that he doesn't have to spend hours to go through the forms on. He would like it a clear and straightforward program. I don't think there is any doubt about that.

So I think what I am saying is what we want to do is strike a balance. And it is not going to be an easy thing to do. We want to be sure that we let those provisions that have passed go into effect,