Today, House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (MN-02) delivered the following opening statement at the full committee markup of the Republicans' partisan reconciliation bill. The bill, which makes $300 billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will take food away from millions of American seniors, children, veterans and people with disabilities and cost farmers billions in lost farm income due to reduced food demand. Watch the full markup here.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

When I became Ranking Member of the Committee for the 119^th Congress, I expected to be here today in a different kind of markup. One where you and I worked to bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass a bipartisan, five-year farm bill.

And yet here we are tonight. With a bill that came out 24 hours ago. One that seeks to cut around $300 billion from a title of the farm bill: the Nutrition Title. In a partisan process.

Folks, the average SNAP benefit is about $6 per day. Let me say that again – six dollars a day. You don’t build a life on SNAP; you build a bridge to the next paycheck, the next opportunity, the next moment of stability.

I’m sure we will hear about this today. So, let’s dispel the myth that SNAP discourages work. That’s simply false. Adults on SNAP are already required to work or actively looking for work. Many are juggling multiple jobs, trying to raise children and make ends meet.

Others are caregivers, students, or temporarily out of the workforce due to illness or injury. SNAP doesn’t enable dependence – it enables resilience.

And here’s the deeper truth: access to food is not a privilege. In a nation as rich and resourceful as ours, no one – no one – should go hungry. But that’s exactly what will happen if we gut this program tonight. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new paperwork requirements alone will take food assistance away from at least 3 million people.

We will see more children going to bed without dinner. More seniors skipping meals to afford medicine. More parents sacrificing their own nutrition so their kids can eat.

Cuts that every single one of us knows will take food away from families at a time when working folks are struggling with higher costs. Every single one of my Republican colleagues here tonight should be ashamed.

The instructions to this Committee were to find $230 billion in cuts to SNAP. But that wasn’t good enough for the extremists in your party. Tonight, you’re cutting more. And you know a traditional farm bill is not a priority for your leadership.

If it were, we would have seen it on the House floor in the last Congress. So, you’re stuffing all the funding we need for farm programs into this partisan process and holding your nose.

The cut you are proposing to SNAP tonight would be the largest rollback of an anti-hunger program in our nation’s history.

Now tonight, I know I’m going to hear some of you rant and rave about “waste, fraud and abuse and error rates.” But this bill fails to address these issues.

Commonsense solutions like upgrading EBT cards to chip technology – a security feature that’s been used for credit cards for a decade – are nowhere to be found. And the changes you are proposing in the error rate calculation are designed to increase error rates in your states – which will force states to cut benefits.

Make no mistake about it. Our farmers need a better safety net. We are right here. Ready to work on a bipartisan farm bill.

But that isn’t what’s happening here tonight. Tonight, you’re taking food away from single moms with 7-year-olds at home – as if being a single parent raising a young child wasn’t hard enough already. And farmers, too, will suffer from your direct attacks on SNAP.

Every $1 invested in SNAP creates more than $1.50 in economic activity and has double the economic impact in rural communities. It provides a huge return on investment for the American taxpayer.

Every dollar we spend on food travels through the entire food supply chain. SNAP supports nearly 400,000 jobs in grocery stores, warehouses, trucking companies and farms.

It helps pay the wages of the clerks who stock the store shelves; the truckers who deliver the food; the manufacturers who package it and the American farmers who grow it.

Today, if you vote for this bill, it will result in $30 billion in lost revenue for our farmers. Because when you’re taking food off the kitchen tables of America’s seniors and children, you’re decreasing demand for the food our farmers grow.

Rural grocery stores often heavily rely on SNAP for a significant portion of their revenue, with some stores seeing SNAP sales account for 20-30 percent or more of their total income. With these cuts, you’re also putting local grocery stores out of business, which doesn’t help rural America.

The massive unfunded mandate this bill forces on states just passes the buck on to state legislatures, forcing them to slash local programs and services, cut benefits, kick vulnerable people off SNAP or raise taxes. We already know states can’t afford it.

This is an attempt to shift blame, so that when parents and people with disabilities start going hungry, the people who wrote and voted for these cuts in this very room can look the other way.  Benefits will get cut – and for what? To fund tax breaks for everyone but the middle class.

Tonight, I am no. Tomorrow, I am no. And every day after that I am no on this bill.

I yield back.