In 1970, Democratic congressman Tom Foley of Washington State was the seventh ranking Democrat, and the highest-ranking northern one, on the House Agriculture Committee. Speaking to a reporter for the New York Times Magazine early that year, he described what he saw as “the problem with the committee” as it related to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) food assistance programs falling under its jurisdiction. The conservative southern Democrats who ran the committee, along with their Republican counterparts, remained wedded to the notion that “if you do something to provide assistance to Americans who don’t otherwise have the resources, this is going to strike a blow against initiative,” Foley said. “What it essentially comes out to is viewing food as a spur for people to work. This is the most conservative committee in the House in terms of traditional attitudes toward welfare.”Footnote ¹

Foley’s diagnosis of his colleagues’ outlook was hardly controversial, and applied to the counterpart committee in the Senate as well. Dominated by Cotton Belt Democrats and wheat-growing Republicans, both panels embodied in exaggerated form the key institutional attributes of Congress at the time: the dispersal of power among relatively autonomous committee chairmen and the disproportionate southern share of those chairmanships as a result of seniority rules and the Democrats’ long tenure in the majority. That such attributes correlated with conservative views on social policy was as unsurprising as it was consequential, for the Agriculture Committees had jurisdiction over a set of food programs for low-income Americans comprising an ever larger chunk of the USDA’s budget when Foley made his comments to the Times Magazine. Food stamps, the biggest of these feeding programs by far, would soon be the federal government’s second most widely used means-tested public assistance program.Footnote ² For supporters of the food stamp program inside and outside Congress who sought its expansion, then, committee jurisdiction posed a key predicament. Those with formal control over the policy regarded it with hostility while concerning themselves with the constituency politics of agricultural producers. In this sense, too, the Agriculture Committees reflected in acute form a broader congressional phenomenon, namely, the ability of southern Democratic chairmen to impose bottlenecks on legislation that liberals believed enjoyed majority Democratic support.

Despite the institutional difficulties that the food stamp program faced in Congress, however, it did in fact grow dramatically in the decade and a half following its establishment as a national program in 1964, reaching a monthly average of more than 21 million Americans by 1980.Footnote ³ What accounted for the program’s enactment and subsequent expansion in the 1960s and 1970s? And how did institutional dynamics shape both the substance of the policy and the strategies of food stamp advocates inside and outside Congress?

A twofold answer, detailed in the narrative below, corresponds to two roughly distinct periods of national public opinion and political momentum concerning the program—and during both periods, institutional reforms in Congress proved crucial. In the first period, food stamps enjoyed generally favorable public support and a distinctly unfavorable institutional environment given the negative power of key legislative gatekeepers. The program’s enactment and early survival depended on instrumental log-rolls between farm bloc congressmen and their urban liberal colleagues, and advocates and congressional actors seeking the food stamp program’s continued expansion took as their primary task the circumvention of those with formal committee jurisdiction over it. Tactics for overriding these chairmen’s opposition included public mobilization, the creation of alternative institutional channels through which policy and legislative work could be sent, and, eventually, broad-ranging congressional reforms enacted by liberal Democrats during the first half of the 1970s. Those reforms curbed the power of committee chairmen in general and transformed the House Agriculture Committee in particular, catapulting Tom Foley—a lonely liberal voice on the panel just five years earlier—to its chairmanship in 1975. A parallel development inaugurated the second period of food stamp politics: a potent mobilization against the program in the mid-1970s by conservatives in Congress and the executive branch seeking to harness growing popular discontent so as to roll back coverage and benefits. Amid this darkening political climate, however, liberal Democrats assuming new institutional leverage in the postreform Congress managed not only to forestall retrenchment but actually to further expand the program through major legislation in 1977.

Liberals’ undernoticed victory in this latter battle offers significant testament to the real substantive impact of congressional reforms too often remembered as unproductive procedural squabbles rife with unintended consequences. Indeed, the surprising survival and partial liberalization of food stamps in the late 1970s illustrate a connection between congressional restructuring and policy outcomes that few scholars of either food stamps or congressional reform have noted.Footnote ⁴ Congressional reform proved a boon for the program amid a darkened political climate, a dynamic that would soon recur in other areas of liberal social policy.

Moreover, the program’s legislative history, characterized by the strange-bedfellows complications of its committee jurisdiction and changes over time in issue salience, also embodies two themes important for scholars’ ongoing theoretical debates over committees in Congress: committees vary internally as well as among one another, and their roles and characteristics are subject to historical change. Ever since Richard Fenno offered his classic tripartite typology—with “prestige” committees offering members power within the chamber itself, “policy” committees tackling salient public policy issues, and “constituency” committees inhabiting stable nonideological policy realms with focused interest-group clients—the agriculture panels in both chambers have stood as iconic constituency committees, serving the interests of organized farm producers in a low-salience, bipartisan fashion.Footnote ⁵ For historically contingent reasons, however, a cluster of food programs emerged under the committees’ jurisdiction entailing ideological and partisan conflicts more akin to those of a policy committee and a set of political issues that grew in salience in the 1960s and 1970s. The effects of congressional reform on committees’ operation and power proved, not coincidentally, especially pronounced for such policy terrain.Footnote ⁶ And so the story of reform’s impact on food stamp politics offers a case study relevant to political science debates over committees, bolstering the case for theoretical models that incorporate institutional context and historical change.Footnote ⁷

In thus reflecting both the substantive and theoretical significance of institutional change, food stamps proved less an exception than an early harbinger of the politics of social policy writ large in the coming decades. As a major component of the patchwork U.S. social safety net, the food stamp program has a historical significance in its own right. But it also serves as a useful window into broader dynamics of institutional and political change. Food stamps’ jurisdictional plight in Congress, after all, revealed in acute form the very features of the “textbook Congress” targeted by reformers.Footnote ⁸ During the era of stagflation, moreover, the program encountered the newly potent force of antigovernment conservatism earlier and more directly than did other social policies. Food stamp politics directly factored only to a limited extent in either the congressional reforms or the nascent conservative movement of the 1970s. But the program’s fate at the intersection of those developments sheds useful light on the trajectory of partisan and institutional change leading all the way to our contemporary age of polarization. By the time that the long-standing food-stamp foe Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency, a period in which bipartisan ideological coalitions and autonomous committee barons structured the dynamics of policy conflicts was giving way to a new and still-continuing era. Ideologically sorted parties would increasingly come to shape and determine policy fights, with power no longer dispersed among committee fiefdoms but instead centralized in party leaderships.Footnote ⁹ This new institutional context actually reflected the intentions of the 1970s-era liberal reformers, even as the political climate for government activism grew far stormier than they had ever anticipated.

FEEDING THE HUNGRY DURING THE ERA OF THE COMMITTEE BARONS

Food stamps originated in a temporary Depression-era program embodying a dual rationale of farm support and food aid. A pilot policy administered in the late 1930s by Henry Wallace’s USDA, the federal food stamp program served, as it would in its later incarnation, as a local substitute for the commodity surplus program that distributed surplus foods directly to relief agencies at no cost. The latter system had failed to boost food demand as intended, as recipients tended to use the commodities as a substitute for rather than a supplement to food purchases they would otherwise make. USDA officials designed an alternative to improve both nutrition and aggregate food demand: a program in which qualifying Americans paid cash in exchange for a book of food coupons that included a bonus value good for purchasing designated surplus commodities.Footnote ¹⁰ Agency officials discontinued the food stamp program in 1943, when wartime mobilization diminished both the commodity surplus levels and the visible need for large-scale hunger relief. During the postwar years, however, as surpluses reaccumulated and Democrats sought proposals to differentiate themselves from the Eisenhower administration, the program’s revival became a liberal agenda item advocated by, among others, Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy in the Senate and St. Louis representative Leonor Sullivan in the House.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, these advocates correctly identified as their chief obstacle the potent opposition of southern Democratic leaders in the congressional Agriculture Committees and their respective appropriating subcommittees. Sullivan, Congress’s most dogged early champion of the program, recalled two decades later her Sisyphean efforts on behalf of a food stamp bill during the Eisenhower years, made even more difficult by her nonmembership in the House committee. “I pushed and pushed the Agriculture Committee,” she said. “And, finally, the chairman of the committee said, ‘All right, we’ll have a hearing.’ And we had a hearing. And I took a licking on it.”Footnote ¹¹ By that time, in 1958, Sullivan had managed to soften the resistance of Agriculture Chairman Harold Cooley of North Carolina, but had less luck with his fellow southern Democrats on the committee. Sullivan finally succeeded in getting the panel to report her bill through a parliamentary trick in August, but Virginia’s Howard Smith, chairman of the Rules Committee, then tabled it.Footnote ¹² It was only thanks to enlarged Democratic congressional majorities in 1959 that Sullivan’s proposal finally passed, this time not through the Agricultural Committee at all but as an amendment to an unrelated bill on the House floor. Eisenhower’s Agriculture Secretary ignored the act, which merely authorized rather than mandated the USDA to start a pilot program. But an opportunity loomed. “When Kennedy was elected,” Sullivan recalled, “I had a letter written so it was on his desk in 1961 the day he was inaugurated, reminding him that he was for the idea of food stamps while in the Senate.”Footnote ¹³

President Kennedy launched a pilot food stamp program in select counties under the direction of his Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman.Footnote ¹⁴ Over the next three years, as the administration came to view the policy as a successful hunger measure and sought its expansion nationally, congressional resistance from southern Democrats and Republicans remained a problem. Mississippi’s Jamie Whitten, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, appropriated only $40 million of the administration’s $51.5 million budget request for food stamps in 1963, for example—an early instance of the intransigence the powerful conservative would demonstrate on food stamps in coming years.Footnote ¹⁵ During Agriculture Committee hearings in 1963 on a bill sponsored by Sullivan to establish a national program, several southern Democrats joined with the committee’s Republicans in expressing hostility. E. C. Gathings of Arkansas lamented the disincentives to work caused by food aid in his district, where agricultural employers “cannot get help when we need these people so badly on farms to cultivate and harvest our crops. Our farmers would like to have some of these people who are drawing these commodities who will work.”Footnote ¹⁶ Others raised the specter of federal meddling in southern racial policies through nondiscrimination provisions in the bill. As Alabama Democrat George Grant pointedly asked a USDA official, “Is that not civil rights legislation?”Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the latter issue proved initially crippling to the bill following Kennedy’s death, when Lyndon Johnson sought passage of a national food stamp program in the midst of his push for civil rights. In a surprise rebuke, five southern Democrats on the Agriculture Committee, including Grant and Gathings, joined the Republicans in tabling the bill in February 1964.Footnote ¹⁸

What, finally, broke the impasse to establishing a national food stamp program? A tenuous justification still allowed rural legislators to tout the program as a boost for food demand and surplus commodity use, but the claim was undermined by the fact that under the Kennedy-era pilot program stamps were exchangeable for any foods rather than only surplus commodities. Instrumental politics proved far more significant than such muddy intellectual rationales in garnering rural Democratic support. Specifically, a succession of two classic legislative log-rolls between rural lawmakers and urban liberals secured passage of the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and set the template for further legislative reforms over the next decade.Footnote ¹⁹ First, in February, a liberal Rules Committee member blocked approval of a bill funding tobacco research sought by legislators from tobacco-producing districts and made it clear that he was holding the bill hostage until the Agriculture Committee agreed to report out the food stamp bill. The panel so agreed. The next legislative trade occurred on the House floor in April, this time at the instigation of rural legislators. Democrats scheduled the vote on a controversial bill boosting subsidies for cotton and wheat growers directly after consideration of the food stamp bill, using the promise of rural Democratic support for food stamps to secure urban Democratic votes for the subsidies. The trade worked: the House passed both bills. Senate passage of the food stamp bill proved less difficult, given Senate Agriculture and Forestry Committee chairman Allen Ellender’s general if limited support for the program. President Johnson signed the bill into law in August.

This log-rolling dynamic would largely define the legislative politics of food stamps through the remainder of the prereform congressional era. Freeman described the strategy bluntly in a 1968 memo to President Johnson explaining his plan to pass a new food stamp bill liberalizing eligibility and benefits: “Currently the plan is to pass the Farm Bill first, to be followed immediately by Food Stamps with clear commitments running both ways between the pro-food stamp people and the pro-farm commodity program people. This was done successfully in 1964.”Footnote ²⁰ As late as 1973, such a strategy remained central to securing food stamp expansions, even as urban and suburban Democrats increasingly predominated in the caucus.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, during an era when Democratic majorities supported food stamps and endorsed the program’s expansion, the persistent necessity of log-rolling served as testament to the disproportionate power that conservative southern Democrats continued to enjoy.

In the politics of food stamps, no such southern conservative proved more significant than Representative W. R. (“Bob”) Poage of Texas. Poage had assumed unusual clout on the Agriculture Committee long before his formal ascension to the chairmanship in 1967, and he dominated the food stamp program’s early legislative history.Footnote ²² Several times beginning in 1964, Poage pushed amendments over advocates’ strong objections mandating that states share in the costs of the bonus stamps; only last-minute votes overrode him in both 1964 and 1967.Footnote ²³ He also insisted on short-term authorization periods for the program so as to limit the prerogative of USDA administrators.Footnote ²⁴ Both his capacity for intransigence and his clout were such that, during one legislative impasse over the program in 1967, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield expressed hope that the president would intervene by talking with Poage directly.Footnote ²⁵ He continually expressed skepticism about expanding a food program that he believed ill-fit his committee’s mission. Still, he led most of the log-rolls that ensured the program’s survival.

While instrumental deal-making greased the wheels for what little legislative activity on food stamps took place in the mid-1960s, the actual impetus for serious expansion of the program came from social movements outside Congress and congressional advocacy outside the agricultural panels.Footnote ²⁶ Efforts in 1966 and 1967 by civil rights- and labor-affiliated activists to highlight the problems with local administration of federal food programs in the South soon triggered an explosion of national attention on the issue of domestic hunger. In 1966, NAACP activists along with the Walter Reuther–backed Citizens Crusade Against Poverty began publicizing an agricultural crisis in rural Mississippi for which locally administered USDA food programs were ill-equipped. They coordinated with staffers for Senators Robert Kennedy of New York and Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, who brought their Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare down to Mississippi for a series of fact-finding hearings in April 1967.Footnote ²⁷ This subcommittee, far more liberal in its membership than the Agriculture Committee, lacked actual jurisdiction over the food programs. But the witness testimony of physicians, poverty experts, and impoverished rural residents garnered media attention while galvanizing others to step up their activities related to the issue. Unsurprisingly, it took a congressional panel with an enduring reputation as a “policy committee” par excellence—characterized by partisan and ideologically charged fights over salient national policy issues—to build political momentum in Congress for further action.Footnote ²⁸

The trickle of attention on hunger and USDA food programs turned into a flood in 1968. Reuther’s Citizens Crusade, rechristened as the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry, produced a one-hundred-page report called Hunger, U.S.A. that documented the issue and the failures of federal policy in vivid detail.Footnote ²⁹ In May, CBS aired a blistering documentary called “Hunger in America,” opening with footage of a baby that narrator Charles Kuralt identified as “dying of starvation. He was an American. Now he is dead.”Footnote ³⁰ Print journalists like Nick Kotz produced investigative exposés of hunger and food policy malfeasance.Footnote ³¹ The Southern Christian Leadership Council’s Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, meanwhile, brought low-income Americans directly to the Agriculture Department in Washington, where they demanded an accounting from Secretary Freeman for the shortcomings of the food programs.Footnote ³² Experts and activists taking part in these efforts coalesced around a few key substantive criticisms of the food stamp program. They argued that the purchase requirement—the monthly cash payment participants had to make to receive their book of food stamps—posed a decisive obstacle to millions of Americans who otherwise would participate in the program, and should be lowered for all income levels and eliminated for the lowest. Additionally, they advocated national administrative standards and across-the-board increases in food stamp bonus allotments in order to meet minimal nutritional requirements. Hunger activists also developed a shared institutional critique of food stamp politics, highlighting the program’s problematic jurisdiction and the reactionary beliefs of individual congressional agricultural leaders like Poage, Whitten, Ellender, and second-ranking Senate Agriculture Committee member Herman Talmadge of Georgia.Footnote ³³

This wave of activism and public outrage inspired a defensive but anguished response from Freeman’s Agriculture Department and a scornfully dismissive one from those very congressional agricultural leaders.Footnote ³⁴ Freeman felt restricted both by Johnson’s limited interest in expanding food stamps (a program the president associated with the Kennedy brothers) and by the resistance of the conservative Agriculture Committee chairmen in Congress, whose response to the new hunger advocacy was, indeed, anything but anguished. Jamie Whitten dispatched FBI investigators to interview researchers involved in the production of the CBS special as well as Hunger, U.S.A., ostensibly to identify any instances of fraud. (None were found.)Footnote ³⁵ Poage, meanwhile, initiated a House Agriculture Committee “hunger study” in April 1968 to counter the claims made in Hunger, U.S.A. He sent letters of inquiry to health administrators in each of the 256 counties that Hunger, U.S.A. had designated “emergency hunger counties,” asking them to “advise me whether you have any personal knowledge of actual starvation in your county.”Footnote ³⁶ The House study, consisting of summary remarks drawn from the administrators’ responses, attacked Hunger, U.S.A. as grossly misleading. To the extent that malnutrition existed, the study argued, it stemmed from ignorance of proper nutrition and misbehavior. “Time and again,” the authors reported of local officials’ responses, “there was the observation that jobs were available in a community, but rejected by able-bodied men who apparently preferred to remain on welfare rolls.” The report referenced relief recipients who “had television sets and nice automobiles” or “spen[t] money on whiskey that was needed for the purchase of food for the children,” and households whose income exceeded eligibility for relief “but where children suffered because a father spent disproportionately large sums on liquor and/or extra-marital sexual relations.”Footnote ³⁷

Responses like these from congressional gatekeepers to the new hunger-related activism prompted a fateful institutional innovation by key food stamp proponents in Congress: the establishment of a select Senate committee that would spotlight hunger-related policy issues and bypass the Agriculture Committees. Building off the attention and momentum of the Clark-Kennedy subcommittee hearings, George McGovern of South Dakota initiated a proposal in the summer of 1968 to establish the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.Footnote ³⁸ The new panel would enjoy investigative authority over hunger policies in several different agencies, though it would have no lawmaking powers. That perceived problems with the current committee politics surrounding food stamps served as the main impetus for the select panel’s establishment was hardly a secret. Joseph Clark cited the need for “a new attitude and approach” from federal policymakers on hunger in a speech on the Senate floor. He argued that a special committee looking comprehensively across agencies could help facilitate administrative coordination and national standards for programs that “have as their primary goal the feeding of the poor” rather than being mere “byproducts of farm policy.”Footnote ³⁹ McGovern echoed these arguments in his resolution proposing the committee.Footnote ⁴⁰ Media coverage was more explicit, with the Wall Street Journal ascribing to hunger advocates the “notion that a special committee wouldn’t be needed if the regular Senate and House Agriculture Committees had been more aggressive.”Footnote ⁴¹

Southern Democrats made their resentment over the new panel known quickly. The Senate Rules Committee, chaired by North Carolina’s Everett Jordan, reduced the select committee’s funding authorization by $100,000 in early 1969. (Following media criticism, the Senate restored the full authorization in a floor vote.)Footnote ⁴² Poage, for his part, responded to a 1970 newspaper article criticizing his record on food stamps by pointing out that it was his committee, not McGovern’s grandstanding special panel or Clark’s Labor subcommittee, that actually made substantive legislation regarding the program. “Can any of the Senate committees which have so loudly proclaimed themselves patrons of all of the poor and the hungry,” he asked rhetorically, “point to a record of having done so much for those who need help in America?”Footnote ⁴³

The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs did in fact exert enormous influence over food stamp policy from 1969 into the mid-1970s. Consistently garnering reauthorizations to continue its work, the panel provided a friendly and highly visible forum for the country’s leading hunger experts and antipoverty activists—including the nascent network of legal and advocacy outfits soon known as the “hunger lobby”—to articulate a coherent liberal critique of existing U.S. policy and outline proposed reforms. The key substantive reform priorities remained those first articulated in 1967: reduction of the purchase price and its outright elimination for those at the bottom of the income scale; the imposition of national standards; and the liberalization of benefits and coverage to assure minimal nutrition levels for all Americans.

Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its original establishment, the committee also focused much attention on the institutional problems besetting U.S. hunger policy in both the legislative and executive branches. Speaking to a health-clinic worker at one of the select committee’s first hearings in 1969, McGovern alluded to Poage’s “hunger study” of the previous year, describing it as an impetus for establishing the new panel and a reminder that “there are still many people in high places in this country who don’t believe that the problems are as severe as you have described them.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The select committee also aired the arguments of those calling for the transfer of food stamps and other hunger programs out of the USDA’s jurisdiction into that of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). During testimony in 1969, the former Johnson-era undersecretary of agriculture bolstered his case for such a move partly by pointing out that “the time and interest of the Agricultural Committee is preempted by the farm programs. They tend to be people from farm areas who have that as their primary interest.” He also cited the difficulties the Johnson administration had encountered in securing adequate appropriations for the program as a result of Jamie Whitten’s actions in the House.Footnote ⁴⁵

As the presidency passed to Richard Nixon, the peculiar dynamics of congressional food stamp politics remained influential in shaping the new Republican administration’s approach to the issue. Popular attention and adept elite advocacy sustained the momentum for transformative expansions of the food stamp program’s benefits and coverage under Nixon, and particularly during his first term the president proved more than willing to push for such expansions. Though personally ambivalent and facing administrative divisions over food stamps, Nixon sensed at the outset of his presidency the salience and political potential of the hunger issue—“the hottest item on the domestic front,” as his Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin put it in 1969.Footnote ⁴⁶ His administration’s food-stamp policy agenda would take competitive cues from the Senate select committee far more than the congressional Agriculture Committees, while his party affiliation ensured at least some degree of Republican congressional acquiescence.

Nixon grappled with the continued opposition of southern Democrats in charge of congressional food stamp policy through both high-profile publicity efforts and the exercise of administrative fiat. He put renowned nutritionist Jean Mayer in charge of a widely publicized White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health in 1969; Mayer, in turn, hired a leading hunger lobby operative, Robert Choate, to organize the conference and ensure that civil rights and hunger activists enjoyed ample representation there.Footnote ⁴⁷ Besides employing the bully pulpit, the Nixon administration overrode its congressional food stamp opponents through a much more aggressive exercise of unilateral executive authority than that employed by its predecessors.Footnote ⁴⁸ By administrative action unattached to any new legislation, for example, the USDA in 1969 increased stamp allotments to meet a national nutritional standard regardless of household income while reducing purchase prices across the board. Poage and Whitten objected, but proved reluctant to expend energy mobilizing a reversal of the new president’s actions. These regulations had the effect of increasing food stamp participation from 4.3 million to 9.4 million people in the span of just one year.Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, in another round of regulatory adjustments in 1971, USDA administrators significantly diluted the impact of a work requirement provision that Poage had attached to 1970 food stamp legislation. To be sure, food stamp advocates were alarmed by Nixon’s appointment of Earl Butz as his new USDA secretary in late 1971. The outspoken conservative had earlier described the Nixon-era expansions of the food stamp program as “so generous, so extensive—that it’s just short of ridiculous.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But it was Butz who, once in office in early 1972, rescinded scheduled purchase price increases for higher-income food stamp recipients in response to pressure from congressional advocates and the hunger lobby. This administrative walk-back was just one illustration of the generally expansionist atmosphere characterizing food stamp politics in the early 1970s despite the continued resistance of the agriculture committee chairmen and the personal beliefs of certain Nixon officials.Footnote ⁵¹

All in all, the Nixon years saw the growth of food stamps into a more fully national program as county participation, national standardization, and federal funding increased apace.Footnote ⁵² Still, the opposition of congressional conservatives remained potent enough to limit the administration’s efforts. And throughout these years, liberal Democrats who trusted neither the Republican administration nor the southern conservatives in their own party—on food stamps as much as other policies—looked to more far-reaching reforms to diminish the latter’s power.

REFORMING CONGRESS, TRANSFORMING THE AGRICULTURE COMMITTEE

The effective opposition of senior southern conservatives to food stamp policies endorsed by congressional Democratic majorities reflected in heightened form a more general predicament for liberals in the “textbook Congress” of midcentury. Strict seniority rules, in the context of the dispersed, committee-centric institutional structure of Congress, ensured that most of the important loci of congressional power were under the control of southern Democrats significantly more conservative than the median caucus members. This fact motivated attempts to curb the autonomy of committees and the sanctity of seniority. Though the reform bodies operating in and outside Congress in the 1960s and 1970s—outfits like the Democratic Study Group (DSG), Common Cause, and Ralph Nader’s citizens’ lobbies—often emphasized procedural principles like fairness, democratic openness, and accountability in their efforts to alter institutional rules, substantive and ideological goals always remained central to their rationale.Footnote ⁵³ And with Poage and Whitten featuring prominently in the rogues’ gallery of committee barons targeted during these years, reformers explicitly connected the food stamp program to the question of procedural change.

Advocates of congressional reform had emphasized the problems with the Agriculture Committee as it related to food programs for years prior to the watershed institutional changes of the mid-1970s. The DSG, the organized liberal wing of the Democratic congressional caucus, released a report in early 1969 on committee chairmen who frequently opposed party policies and supported the Republicans’ positions on key issues and votes. The report included Poage among the “opposition chairmen,” and advocated changes in internal Democratic rules to require a caucus vote on all committee chairmanships.Footnote ⁵⁴ A year later, a Washington Post columnist drew an explicit connection between policy and process by citing Poage’s “indifference to the poor” and opposition to food stamp expansions as reasons why he “typifies all that is wrong with the congressional seniority system.”Footnote ⁵⁵

While the DSG operated as the internal reform arm in Congress, an organization started in 1970 by Washington veterans of antipoverty and civil rights battles served as the new outside organizational focal point. Former Johnson-era HEW secretary John Gardner founded Common Cause as an outgrowth of his Urban Coalition Action Council, which had coordinated Hill lobbying on urban and poverty issues. In developing a program for seniority reform in Congress, Common Cause worked closely with the DSG and hired former Robert Kennedy staffer Peter Edelman as a consultant.Footnote ⁵⁶ In January 1971, during the first organizational meetings of the Democratic Caucus in which considerations other than seniority were allowed in picking committee chairmen, Common Cause advocated that the caucus oust Poage for “promot[ing] the interests of influential farmers and block[ing] legislation to feed hungry Americans.”Footnote ⁵⁷ By the 1972 elections, Common Cause had made congressional reform a central feature of its campaign activities through Operation Open Up the System, in which members would mobilize popular engagement and submit to congressional candidates questions on key reform issues related to seniority, finance, and other topics.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thanks to Common Cause’s coordinated lobbying efforts with groups such as Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Democratic House caucus continued to take incremental steps to curb the independence of committee chairmen—“the feudal barons of Congress,” as Gardner called them in December 1972.Footnote ⁵⁹ The 93rd Congress would be the first in which automatic caucus votes were required for approval of all committee chairmanships, for example. No chairmen lost their seats as a result of the caucus votes in 1973, but, in a hint of rapidly growing opposition, 48 House Democrats voted against Poage, the second largest “Nay” vote for any committee chairman.Footnote ⁶⁰

The breakthrough came in 1974, when the first congressional elections since the Watergate crisis and Nixon’s resignation ushered in an enormous crop of freshman Democrats to the House and Senate, many of whom had run explicitly on congressional reform platforms in coordination with the reform coalition and with financial support from the DSG.Footnote ⁶¹ In the House, moreover, the disproportionately urban and suburban cast of the new Democrats (an acceleration of long-standing demographic trends in Congress) made them particularly inclined to target agricultural leaders like Poage and Whitten for removal. Those efforts came together in a series of dramatic meetings in January 1975. First, the seventy-five-member-strong freshman caucus invited every committee chairman to meet with it in closed-door session for what many perceived to be an implicit audition to retain their jobs. Poage’s meeting did not go well by any account, including his own. “I found that they simply wanted to prove that I was quite arbitrary in my operation of the committee and that I opposed spending as much money as most of them felt we should on social programs,” he later recalled.Footnote ⁶²

Meanwhile, seizing the opportunity provided by the election results and the increased media attention concerning the Democratic caucus’s upcoming organizational meeting, Common Cause issued a new “Report on House Committee Chairmen,” which ranked all chairs according to three criteria: compliance with rules, personal and procedural fairness, and use of power. The last category included the question, “Does he use [power] to further the programs and policies favored by the Democratic majority or does he use power to undercut such programs?” The report classified Poage along with two other chairmen as demonstrating a pattern of “serious abuses.” Poage violated rules ranging from regulations on congressional travel to minimal requirements for funding and staffing subcommittees. He also failed to meet required party ratios for the subcommittees, with the result that Republicans “have more influence than they would under proper application of the rule.” Using Congressional Quarterly statistics, the report pointed out that “Chairman Poage is one of six chairmen who consistently votes against the majority of his own party (and with the majority of the Republicans) more often than he votes with his Democratic colleagues.” It also named Appropriations chairman George Mahon a “serious” abuser, citing his practice of systematically benefiting four of his subcommittees—the so-called “Big Four,” controlled by conservative allies like Jamie Whitten—with jurisdiction over 80 percent of all spending considered by the committee while ghettoizing liberal members in the remaining nine subcommittees.Footnote ⁶³

Aided by data from Common Cause’s report and by the broader reform network’s sophisticated lobbying and media efforts, reformers carried their momentum through two crucial rounds of Democratic voting on organizational matters in January. First, the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee voted to recommend the ouster of three chairmen for the first time ever; Poage managed to win the panel’s endorsement, but by a notably narrow fourteen-to-ten margin. Then, at the full caucus meeting on January 16, House Democrats took a vote on upholding the Steering Committee’s recommendation to retain Poage as head of the Agriculture Committee—and rejected the recommendation by a three-vote margin, 141–44.Footnote ⁶⁴ Poage became one of three chairmen rejected by the full caucus that week, in an unprecedented overturning of long-standing norms and practices.

As old guard members castigated the barbarians at the gate, reformers charged ahead with plans for further efforts against committee leaders the following week. Freshmen activists organized to oust Whitten from his subcommittee chairmanship, for example.Footnote ⁶⁵ Their plans posed a sufficiently dire threat that it provoked Whitten to forfeit preemptively his panel’s jurisdiction over both environmental and consumer affairs so as to diffuse and diminish the intensity of his opposition. The gambit worked. At a caucus meeting on January 22, liberal David Obey spoke in favor of retaining Whitten, citing as one reason the fact that Whitten’s subcommittee would no longer have jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Trade Commission. Obey assured the caucus that if Whitten’s panel “does not provide adequate budgets for food stamps or for other agricultural programs, I will be the first one on the line objecting,” but he insisted that for now a tamed Whitten deserved the caucus’s support.Footnote ⁶⁶ The freshmen insurgents, sensing the need for restraint, backed off their challenge and the chairman secured reelection.

At the same January 22 meeting, Poage—who had clearly been stunned by the caucus’s vote against him—won kudos from colleagues with a gracious speech accepting the wishes of his party and strongly endorsing the second-ranking Democrat on Agriculture, Tom Foley, to succeed him as chairman. Poage’s comments about the liberal Foley underlined the substantive policy issues that had led to his ouster: “His views are doubtless much closer to the views of the majority of the Members of this Caucus than are mine. He believes that government can and should do far more for our people and far more for our Members than seems possible to me.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Foley, a forty-five-year-old representative from Spokane, Washington, did in fact possess solid liberal domestic-policy credentials, most notably concerning food stamps. He had formed a “Coalition to Help Malnourished Americans” in the House in 1968 to sponsor legislation creating a Presidential Commission on Hunger.Footnote ⁶⁸ Two years later, he worked with McGovern in the Senate on behalf of substitute food stamp legislation at odds with, and more generous than, the House Agriculture Committee’s official bill.Footnote ⁶⁹ An ambitious caucus member and supporter of reform, in 1974 he became chairman of the DSG, though he deliberately avoided any involvement in the move to strip Poage of his chairmanship. Once Poage fell, Foley proved a widely popular and uncontested choice for successor. But in a reflection of both the heady atmosphere of reformist strength at the time as well as the continued centrality of policy concerns to reformers’ personnel and procedural decisions, Foley still had to make assurances to caucus members about his commitments on issues like food stamps to garner their support. One ambitious and aggressively liberal freshman, Fred Richmond, for example, “secured a promise from [Foley] that attention would be paid to the nutritional needs of urban areas” prior to voting for him, according to the New York Times.Footnote ⁷⁰

Even more telling than Richmond’s demand was the fact that this brash New York City liberal had taken a position on the Agriculture Committee itself—an indication that the committee was changing in more ways than merely at the top. Partly as a direct result of other caucus action, partly through strategic reorganizations made by the new chairman, and partly as a result of the very electoral developments that had allowed for reform to occur in the first place, the House Agriculture Committee changed dramatically in its political approach to food stamps in 1975. The broadest relevant developments were demographic. The increasing predominance of urban and suburban representatives within both parties coincided with the emergence of two-party competition in the South. Foley’s rapid ascent within the Agriculture Committee from seventh-ranking Democrat in 1970 to second-ranking in January 1975 reflected the latter process: within those four years, two senior southern Democrats on the committee lost reelection fights, while three others decided to retire.Footnote ⁷¹ Among the freshmen of 1974, meanwhile, the Agriculture Committee led all other panels in terms of requests for seats. Footnote ⁷² This partly stemmed from the large number of Agriculture vacancies the election had created, but it also illustrated growing interest among nonrural, nonfarm bloc lawmakers in the consumer and poverty-related policy aspects of the committee’s jurisdiction.

If these broader trends served to alter the outlook of the committee’s majority wing, rendering it more liberal on issues like food stamps, more specific postreform organizational changes also played an important role in altering the dynamics of food stamp politics. Thanks to powers granted by an earlier statutory success of the reform movement, 1970’s Legislative Reorganization Act, the caucus was able to allocate bigger staff and office budgets for all committees in 1975. It singled out for particularly large boosts those committees whose chairmen had been ousted, “an indication,” according to the New York Times, “that the new leaders of the panels intended to investigate their areas of jurisdiction more stringently.”Footnote ⁷³ The Agriculture Committee’s budget increased fivefold overnight, from $155,000 to $788,000. As I will show below, this funding boost turned out to have direct relevance to food stamp policymaking. Also significant was Foley’s decision to give freshman Fred Richmond the chairmanship of the nutrition subcommittee that had jurisdiction over food stamps, and to fill the panel with fellow liberal northerners. As Richmond himself later put it, his was “probably the most liberal subcommittee of the entire Committee on Agriculture,” and it could formulate policy on food stamps secure in the knowledge that it had the committee chairman’s support.Footnote ⁷⁴

All told, the politics of food stamps in the postreform House Agriculture Committee stood as an exemplar of what congressional activists on behalf of institutional change had long envisioned. Agriculture may have remained the textbook example of a constituency committee in Richard Fenno’s terms, but the area within the panel’s jurisdiction that more closely resembled a policy committee dynamic became, as a result of congressional reform, a site of cohesive Democratic activism and (as we shall see below) heightened partisanship. As the reformers had intended, the committee’s leadership finally shared with the Democratic caucus as a whole the same substantive commitment to the food stamp program. To be sure, the general liberalization of the Agriculture Committee during these years—which saw the panel delegation’s voting affinity with the conservative coalition decline to 56 percent in 1977, down from 88 percent in 1959—stemmed partly from demographic changes related to southern partisan realignment and gradual Dixiecrat attrition.Footnote ⁷⁵ But congressional reform exerted its own independent effect, in agriculture as much as in other areas, by forcing on formerly independent conservative Democratic members a new accountability to the caucus and its leadership. The case of Jamie Whitten offers an instructive example, one that reveals David Obey’s prescience in endorsing his reelection as appropriations subcommittee chairman in 1975. For years to come, the permanent threat of removal exerted a strong moderating effect on the once-irascible Whitten regarding issues important to the party, including food stamps; his voting record grew steadily closer to the Democratic median during the later 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁶ The same dynamic pertained to other formerly recalcitrant Democratic conservatives in the postreform era.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the timing of reform proved particularly consequential for the politics of food stamps in ways that neither reformers nor program advocates had foreseen. For the consolidation and empowerment of the liberals on the agriculture committee occurred just in time for advocates to engage partisan opponents then emerging in a new era of popular backlash against food stamps.

THE NEW POLITICS OF FOOD STAMPS

Back in his interview in 1970 with the New York Times Magazine, Foley had remarked ironically on how his conservative Democratic colleagues’ ideological opposition to food stamps and other social policies actually jeopardized the kind of log-rolling opportunities on which the Agriculture Committee relied. “The majority of the committee agree so strongly that the social-welfare climate is wrong and devastating of national strength, they believe it so sincerely that they are willing to act unpolitically with respect to their immediate constituent interests,” he said. “If politics were their motive, they would come out with the best damn food bill ever conceived to get the city guys to back their farm subsidy. … It isn’t politics. They are ideologically hung up.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, their personal policy qualms were jeopardizing the very distributive deals that were this classic constituency committee’s bread and butter. Tellingly, and fittingly for the time, Foley presumed in his observation that ideological opposition to food stamps could not in itself constitute a kind of effective politics. But the mid-1970s would witness the emergence of just such a politics of backlash. Indeed, if congressional reformers in general and food stamp advocates in particular had conceived of reform as a means of removing roadblocks to continued government activism endorsed by the public, developments in public opinion and new Republican political mobilization quickly complicated such a notion.

Stagflation sparked an explosion in the food stamp program’s costs and, soon enough, a dramatic deterioration of the program’s public image. The national unemployment rate jumped from 5.5 to 8.9 percent between the summers of 1974 and 1975, triggering a jump in food stamp participation over that period from 15 million to 19.4 million. That participation spike coincided with dramatic inflation of food prices, such that the total cost of the food stamp program reached $4.3 billion in 1975—triple the level of four years earlier.Footnote ⁷⁹ As more and more Americans personally encountered people using food stamps at the check-out line and eyed the items being purchased, sensitive politicians began to take note of a taxpayer backlash. “Food stamps have become the most controversial social program in the country,” declared the New York Times in April 1975.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Chicago Tribune cited “thousands” of constituent letters to Congress critical of food stamps that year, including one from a California housewife who saw a neighbor using stamps in their local market: “If my tax money is going to feed her family, I want to know why.”Footnote ⁸¹ Outrage was hardly confined to conservative areas. House majority whip Tip O’Neill received letters from his liberal Massachusetts district making similar complaints, including one from a Watertown resident demanding “some good honest investigation into the people who are receiving food stamps. … [I] have seen with my own eyes people presenting food stamps who have been very nicely dressed in expensive clothing and driving late model cars.”Footnote ⁸² Within two years, Democratic congressman Ike Skelton could state at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing that “if I have heard any complaints about our Federal Government, it has been on the food stamp program.”Footnote ⁸³ Exposés from conservative media outlets of waste, fraud, and abuse in the administration of the program helped fuel popular discontent.Footnote ⁸⁴ Such allegations, largely unsubstantiated, created a political context in which program critics felt freer to advocate specific new restrictions on eligibility (particularly by eliminating provisions allowing for the deductibility of specific kinds of income and expenses) and direct reductions in benefits.

The Ford administration proved notably and uncharacteristically aggressive in seizing the political initiative on food stamps, targeting the program for retrenchment early in its tenure. In late 1974, as part of a budget-cutting package intended to combat inflation, Ford announced a plan to save $650 million annually in food stamp spending by raising the purchase price for all except the very poorest recipients; the move was to be implemented by administrative regulation rather than legislation. USDA Secretary Butz enthusiastically encouraged this and other measures to scale back food stamps, as did Ford’s budget-hawk Treasury Secretary William Simon, who attacked the program in an August 1975 speech as “a well-known haven for the chiselers and rip-off artists.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In his State of the Union address in 1976, Ford reiterated his commitment to reforming “the scandal-riddled food stamp program,” and that spring attempted to lower income eligibility and strengthen the work requirement by administrative fiat.Footnote ⁸⁶ Though this approach resonated with Butz’s own long-standing view of the program, the USDA chief had not pursued such changes during his first two and a half years in charge, underscoring how the national political context for food stamps had itself changed decisively by the mid-1970s.

Indeed, on this issue, Ford felt pressure on his right flank from both Republican policy entrepreneurs in Congress as well as a former California governor mounting a primary challenge against the president in late 1975 and early 1976. Ronald Reagan included the growth of food stamps and other social programs among his major domestic policy–related attacks on Ford. He proposed the complete transfer of federal programs including food stamps, Medicaid, and AFDC to state and local governments, where he acknowledged they could face sharp reductions.Footnote ⁸⁷ In Congress, meanwhile, Republicans coalesced around an attack on the alleged dysfunctions and excesses of the food stamp program. GOP leaders released a “Leadership Agenda” in 1975 claiming that the program, with its overly generous benefits and susceptibility to fraud, had “bypassed the real intent of Congress to provide help only for the needy.”Footnote ⁸⁸ A bill sponsored in the House by Illinois Republican Bob Michel and in the Senate by New York’s James Buckley proposed making the federal poverty line a strict eligibility ceiling, eliminating all deductions, and counting benefits from other assistance programs as income. The provisions would reduce the effective eligibility level by about $1,000 for an average family and, combined with banning most students and striking workers from the program, would cut total food stamp expenditures by 40 percent.Footnote ⁸⁹ David Swoap, a former California welfare official for Reagan, drafted the bill.

Though it was likely too stringent to pass in its original form, most observers in 1975 and early 1976 saw the Buckley-Michel bill as indicative of the general framework that new food stamp legislation would take. “Pressure to reform is strong,” the Chicago Tribune reported in August 1975, “and a new food stamp program along the lines of the Buckley-Michel bill is expected to come from Congress this year.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The bill received its most extensive and favorable hearings in the Senate Agriculture Committee, which unlike its House counterpart had seen no dramatic reform-driven changes in personnel or structure and still featured at its helm such conservative southern Democrats as Chairman Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James B. Allen of Alabama. Allen held subcommittee hearings in October 1975 on food stamps, declaring in his opening statement that “what began as a rather modest program a little over a decade ago, intended to improve the nutrition of the truly needy, has become a financial nightmare.”Footnote ⁹¹ Congressional action to reform the program seemed imminent, and likely to take its shape from the conservative critiques that had proven so resonant with the public.

But that did not in fact happen. Neither the Ford administration’s two rounds of administrative reforms nor the proposals of congressional Republicans took effect, and indeed, when large-scale changes to the program did finally come about through major reform legislation in 1977, they did so largely on liberal terms that further expanded the program’s size and reach. What explains this development? Certainly no evidence exists that public support for food stamps grew between 1974 and 1977. Food stamp advocates’ victories came rather as fruits of congressional reform. Defenders of the program, though embattled in the prevailing political climate, could count as an ally the reformed, reenergized, and newly resourced House Agricultural Committee. Both the House panel and McGovern’s select committee pursued a careful strategy on food stamps in 1975 and 1976, overturning the president’s administrative efforts while holding extensive hearings in order to forestall any reform legislation until a new administration might take office in 1977. With the arrival of that new Democratic administration, the stage was then set for a coordinated legislative push on food stamps—one that never would have happened under an unreformed Congress.

Congressional reform’s initial benefit to food stamp advocates was the means for an effective defense. In its very first action following Foley’s replacement of Poage as chairman in January 1975, the House Agriculture committee acted “with unusual speed,” in the Washington Post’s words, to overturn Ford’s administrative price hikes on food stamps, acting “more speedily and decisively than it would have in the past,” when Poage ran the panel.Footnote ⁹² Later that year, Foley took $200,000 of the increased funding party leaders had allocated to his committee and committed it to a major staff study of all aspects of the food stamp program.Footnote ⁹³ The study, not completed and published until September 1976, ran 565 pages and offered comprehensive analyses of the program’s operations and the demographics of participants, all of which served to undermine and contradict the major allegations of waste and fraud in the program.Footnote ⁹⁴ During the year that his staffers worked on the report, Foley used the fact that it was in the works as a pretext for delaying legislative action on food stamps in his panel—a strategic delay, given the dominant policy options on the table at that time. In the Senate, meanwhile, McGovern’s select committee held hearings in which activists and hunger lobby experts excoriated both the Ford administration’s actions related to food stamps and the Buckley-Michel bill.Footnote ⁹⁵

House Agriculture Committee hearings in 1976, during the peak of the political mobilization against the food stamp program, revealed just how much the panel had changed as a result of the previous year’s reforms. In a January hearing, Chairman Foley took wry note of the recent controversy surrounding food stamps. “Not since the late ‘60s have so many said so much about the operation, merits, and demerits of this program,” he observed. “At that time, the principle concern was lack of participation in the program. Today the principle concern, at least as reflected in the media, is too much participation.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Foley’s admonition to the panel to “first do no harm” set the tone for a series of hearings at which conservative Republicans had their say but hunger-lobby advocates and their political allies dominated the discussion. Foley himself had fun mocking the pervasiveness of easily disprovable rumors about the program perpetuated by its critics, citing one member who said he had heard that 40 percent of food stamp recipients were college students: “I told him that I did not think it was true because it seemed to me, based on information from other sources, that 65 percent of those receiving food were strikers.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Liberal witnesses at these hearings, such as leading hunger lobby expert Robert Greenstein of the Community Nutrition Institute (CNI), not only attacked the Republicans’ food stamp proposals but also broached the subject of eliminating the purchase requirement. Greenstein argued that this move would not only boost access but also reduce administrative costs and eliminate fraud associated with food stamp vendors pocketing the cash payments. Foley expressed ambivalence but an open mind about the measure, which McGovern and Republican Bob Dole were already pushing in the Senate. But committee conservatives blanched at the idea of further liberalizing and expanding the program at a time when the public was registering mounting displeasure with it. As Iowa Republican Charles Grassley put it, “To state that this is unacceptable is an understatement of the first order. It is an outrage.” Poage, isolated among his fellow Democrats now that he had dropped in committee rank, characterized eliminating the purchase requirement as a policy out of Soviet communism, and observed—not without merit—that the food stamp program “could never have passed 15 years ago except as a food program. This was not passed as a welfare program.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In 1976, however, Poage’s words, like those of minority members of the committee, had limited practical impact.

Once Democratic supporters of food stamps (along with scattered Republican allies like Javits and Dole) had successfully run out the clock on the Ford presidency, the advent of unified Democratic control in Congress and the White House put the policymaking potential of congressional reform to the acid test. To be sure, Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976 hardly guaranteed that food stamp reform would now come about on terms favored by the program’s advocates. Carter’s views on the subject were neither well developed nor widely known. His appointment of Bob Bergland as Secretary of Agriculture, however, was a crucial development—one that might partly account for the success Carter would have in coordinating effectively with congressional Democrats on food stamp policy as compared with his difficulties doing so on so many other issues. Likely recommended to Carter by his friend Walter Mondale, Bergland was a liberal Democratic congressman from Minnesota and a member of the House Agriculture Committee since 1971. His views on food stamps resembled those of his fellow northern liberal congressmen much more than those of conservative Republicans or old-guard southern Democrats like Poage.Footnote ⁹⁹ Bergland hired prominent and active hunger lobby experts to administer the food stamp program in the USDA, including CNI’s Robert Greenstein.

As Bergland and his staff set to work in early 1977 devising the Carter administration’s food stamp reform proposal, they quickly decided to make elimination of the purchase requirement the bill’s centerpiece, justified in part on antifraud grounds.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For the proposal, Bergland strategically combined this liberalizing measure with other reforms meant to address certain popular criticisms of the program and offset some of the anticipated cost increases stemming from participation expansion. These included modestly lowering the top income eligibility line, replacing itemized deductions with a standard deduction, and drastically restricting the eligibility of certain categories of recipients, including college students.

Bergland worked successfully with his former colleagues in the postreform House to bring the administration’s proposal to legislative fruition. Fred Richmond’s nutrition subcommittee as well as the full Agriculture panel held hearings in February and March 1977 in which Foley and other senior Democrats expressed support for the Carter food stamp package. Richmond referenced the shift in political circumstances since Carter’s election, declaring that “this year I am hopeful that we can legislate without the burden of myths and distortions.” Michel and his conservative allies still testified on behalf of their favored reforms, but it was clear that the election had turned the momentum against them—a fact made vivid by witnesses, such as Greenstein, now appearing as senior USDA officials before the very same panel where they had testified only recently as ardent food stamp activists. At a hearing in March, Democratic member John Jenrette joked to Bergland that the last time he had seen Greenstein appear before the committee, the expert wore blue jeans: “This is … the first time I have seen Mr. Greenstein in a new suit and I appreciate you doing that.” “He is making money now, Mr. Jenrette,” Bergland replied. “For years he was a critic of the Department of Agriculture. We thought he was so good, we brought him on board.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Bergland faced more difficulty in the Senate, where Agriculture Chairman Talmadge denounced the proposed elimination of the purchase requirement as threatening the “destruction of the program.”Footnote ¹⁰² As Bergland later recalled, “I went over to see Chairman Talmadge and the more conservative Senators, and they just had a fit. They said, ‘What? You are going to give these things away for free? Free food stamps? It’s a mistake.’” But with the president’s support as well as that of House Democrats, Bergland orchestrated what he called “a full court press” to induce action from the Senate committee, mobilizing outside pressure from organized labor, antipoverty activists, and church groups to complement his direct lobbying of the panel.Footnote ¹⁰³ To be sure, Talmadge’s eventual, grudging acquiescence to the Carter proposal (he personally voted against the bill but allowed a panel majority to report it out of committee) did not stem entirely from such advocacy. The fact that, once again, food stamp reforms were being considered together with commodity price supports that year likely played a role in winning Talmadge over, a demonstration of the continued significance of log-rolling to food stamp politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

All told, however, when Congress finally passed the Carter administration’s food stamp reform bill in September 1977, the victory stood as a striking illustration of the substantive impact of congressional reform. The dramatic institutional changes that had recently come to Congress had enhanced food stamp advocates’ capacity, given the proper alignment of partisan forces, to implement a liberalization of the program even during a period of intense public controversy concerning the policy. (This liberalization was indeed substantial: the reform’s elimination of the purchase requirement would have the effect of attracting four million more participants to the program over the next three years.)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The connection between congressional reform and food stamp program expansion was hardly lost on Bob Bergland. In a 1986 interview, political scientist James Sterling Young asked Bergland whether he would have been able to accomplish the 1977 reform in a prereform Congress: “Would it have been different if it had been done ten years before with the old-style Congress, with the Titans around?” Bergland’s reply was unambiguous: “I think ten years before had we tried it, we would have failed. … In the old days you couldn’t buck a committee chairman. But after the reforms you could.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The remainder of Carter’s presidency saw a holding pattern on food stamp policy in Congress that came increasingly to resemble a partisan deadlock. An amendment to the 1977 bill had placed annual spending caps on food stamp outlays that required individual votes to override; for the remainder of the decade, each fiscal year saw food stamp expenditures exceed the budget level set by the cap, with Congress forced to vote on new appropriations to pay the excess each time. Given the commitment of both the president and the Democratic Congress to the program, those votes succeeded every year, but they proved to be occasions for increasingly polarized partisan fights.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ One Republican scourge of the program, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, became notably active during those years as ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee in pushing amendments for the categorical removal of certain food stamp recipients and the strengthening of the budget caps. These skirmishes, assuming an ever stricter partisan cast in the postreform Congress, were harbingers of bigger battles to come.