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Dean, Wesley
2023.
Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture.
Vol. 34,
Issue. ,
p.
159.
Article contents
SNAP EXCLUSIONS AND THE ROLE OF CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN POLICY-MAKING
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2021
Abstract
This essay uses a specific example—proposals to exclude sugary drinks from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—to explore some features of the contemporary U.S. administrative state. Dating back to the Wilsonian origins of the U.S. administrative state there has been uncertainty about whether we can and should separate politics and administration. On the traditional view, the agencies are to be kept separate from politics—technocratic and value-neutral—although they are indirectly accountable to the president and Congress. The SNAP exclusions example shows, however, that agencies often must make complex and controversial decisions on their own, decisions that go beyond value-neutral technocratic administration. When authorizing legislation has multiple goals, as we’ll argue is the case in the SNAP example, an agency will have to choose between conflicting statutory mandates. Moreover, as the SNAP example shows, agencies often face complex normative questions of ethics and justice that go beyond the question of how to balance competing aims. The appropriate response to the SNAP exclusions example is not to keep politics out of administrative decision-making, but to develop procedures that allow ethical and political questions to be addressed in agency policy-making, consistent with overarching commitments to fairness and democracy.
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Footnotes
*
Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, brianhutler@jhu.edu; Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, abarnhi1@jhu.edu. We would like to thank the other contributors to this volume for their invaluable comments and discussion of our paper.
References
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2 Food and Nutrition Service, United States Department of Agriculture, “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation and Costs,” (2019) https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf
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15 The thought here, presumably, is that SNAP participants will try to purchase newly excluded foods with their SNAP debit card, will be told at the checkout that they can’t purchase those foods using SNAP, and will thereby be be outed as SNAP participants, causing embarrassment.
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20 Letter from Mayors to John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, June 18, 2013, http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2013/snap_letter_to_house_6_18_13.pdf.
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22 Ibid., 311.
23 Ibid.
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44 7 U.S.C. § 2011.
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53 Ibid‥
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