By Sam Schaeffer, Chief Executive Officer, Center for Employment Opportunities
Every day, I meet people who want exactly what public policy says it should encourage: work, responsibility, and independence.
They are parents coming home from incarceration determined to provide for their families. Young adults trying to gain their first real foothold in the labor market. People who show up on time, work hard, and enroll in training programs because they believe—rightly—that work is the surest path to stability.
And yet, under current federal law, we often force them to choose between working and eating.
This is not a philosophical problem. It is a technical one. And Congress has the power to fix it.
A Policy That Punishes Progress
In the bipartisan 2018 Farm Bill, Congress made an important and overdue improvement to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment & Training (SNAP E&T). Lawmakers recognized what decades of evidence already showed: paid, work-based learning—such as transitional jobs and apprenticeships—leads to better employment outcomes, especially for people facing high barriers to work.
So Congress allowed paid training to count as an allowable SNAP E&T activity.
But an unintended consequence followed.
Across the country, people participating in paid SNAP E&T programs are seeing their SNAP benefits sharply reduced or eliminated altogether because the modest wages they earn during training are counted as income for eligibility purposes. Since SNAP E&T is only available to people receiving SNAP, losing food assistance can also mean losing access to the training program itself.
In plain terms: people are being penalized for doing exactly what the program is designed to promote.
We have created a Catch-22 that undermines work, weakens training programs, and destabilizes families at the precise moment they are trying to get back on their feet.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
At the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), we operate in 30 cities across 12 states, serving people returning home from incarceration—one of the most underemployed populations in the country. Employment is not just an economic issue for this group; it is a public safety issue. Stable work reduces recidivism, strengthens families, and makes communities safer.
Many of our participants rely on SNAP in the early weeks after release. Food assistance allows them to focus on job training, parole requirements, housing searches, and basic stabilization. When SNAP benefits are cut because someone earns temporary training wages—often less than minimum wage—the consequences are immediate and severe.
People skip meals. Drop out of training. Take unstable, low-quality jobs simply to survive in the short term. Some disengage from the workforce system altogether.
This is not because they don’t want to work. It’s because policy has made work riskier than hunger.
The Training & Nutrition Stability Act: A Common-Sense Fix
The bipartisan Training & Nutrition Stability Act (TNSA) offers a straightforward solution: exclude temporary income earned through federally funded job training programs from SNAP eligibility calculations.
That’s it.
This fix restores congressional intent. It allows SNAP and SNAP E&T to function together as a bridge—not a barrier—to self-sufficiency. It supports people while they are gaining skills, so they can transition into unsubsidized employment and ultimately off public assistance altogether.
It is pro-work. It is pro-family. And it is fiscally responsible.
Evidence-based employment programs reduce long-term reliance on public benefits, lower reincarceration rates, and generate measurable returns for taxpayers. At CEO, rigorous evaluations show our participants are significantly more likely to be employed and less likely to return to prison—outcomes that save public dollars and strengthen local economies.
Why This Matters Now
As Congress debates the next Farm Bill, the stakes could not be higher. Recent changes to SNAP—particularly expanded work requirements—place even greater pressure on programs to actually work as intended. If we demand work, we must also remove policies that punish people for working.
The Training & Nutrition Stability Act has bipartisan support because it reflects a shared value: people who are trying to better themselves should not be pushed backwards by the systems meant to help them.
A strong Farm Bill has always recognized the interconnectedness of food security, work, agriculture, and economic growth. Fixing SNAP E&T is not a departure from that tradition—it is a reaffirmation of it.
The Choice Before Us
We can continue to operate a system that forces families to choose between food and opportunity.
Or we can make a targeted, bipartisan fix that allows work to do what it is supposed to do: create stability, dignity, and independence.
The people we serve have already chosen work. Congress should choose to support them.
