New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office are likely to intensify the debate around one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will pass this year: the $1.3 trillion farm bill. 

The CBO on Wednesday released a report showing an increase in the number of people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps. Over the next 10 years, it projects that an additional $100 billion will be required to meet demand. In a statement, the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Boozman, said the increase is “unsustainable and must be thoroughly debated as Congress considers the next farm bill.”

In an attempt to tamp down the number of SNAP recipients, some Republicans want to add a work requirement to the federal program that provides food aid to the poor. Last week, five House Republicans — technically enough to end Speaker McCarthy’s tenure — sent a letter to the White House saying they want full-time work requirements for “able-bodied adults” who receive SNAP money. 

Mr. McCarthy said he wants to find a way for people to move toward employment while remaining on the program. “You’ve got work requirements, and then you want to look, are they working?” he asked while speaking to reporters this week. “How do you help people to be able to get the job and be able to move upward? … People want to have help. We want to provide that.”

The farm bill under which the SNAP program sits is reauthorized every five years. During the last authorization, in 2018, Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency, and more than 75 percent of the bill’s cost was attributable to nutrition programs. 

The Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee said at a press conference that the work requirement was not likely to be included in the final package. Congressman G.T. Thompson said “irrelevant” members of Congress will not interfere with crafting the bill. “If those folks really wanted to be involved and be influential, maybe they should have signed up for the Agriculture Committee,” Mr. Thompson said. 

Republicans are reportedly looking at cutting SNAP benefits as either part of the farm bill negotiations or the debt limit fight later this year. The chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, Kay Granger of Texas, told Politico that her party was “still looking at” cutting SNAP, but that it hasn’t made a decision yet.

A secretary of agriculture during the Clinton administration, Dan Glickman, told the Sun that SNAP and other nutrition programs need more funding, and are something on which Congress should come to a consensus. 

The farm bill “has to ensure the viability” of those programs, Mr. Glickman said in a phone interview. “In 2018, an assortment of SNAP-related programs were cut when compromises were made. They are vital.”

In a statement to the Sun, Mr. Boozman’s office said it is already working on the text in a “bipartisan” way on “financial and risk management tools, rural development, trade promotion, research and innovation, disease and pest prevention and supporting the development of tools and technologies for the future.” 

Senator Stabenow, chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Mr. Boozman began holding hearings on the topic in their home states last year. At a public meeting in Ms. Stabenow’s home state of Michigan, farmers testified on the importance of the farm bill reauthorization. At the meeting, a local farmer, Jake Isley, spoke to the importance of crop insurance, farm safety, and conservation programs.

Mr. Isley said Congress needs to make sure “farm safety nets are really in line in covering all commodities when we have a disruption in the market.” He added that as a young farmer, he needs farm insurance because he is “putting a lot of investment into that crop to plant it and hopefully get a return off of that.”

At a Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on Monday, members described their priorities in the upcoming bill. Mr. Boozman lamented that the Department of Agriculture sent out $65 billion in emergency aid to farmers between 2018 and 2021 due to pandemic disruption and the trade war with China. 

“We owe it to all Americans to ensure the bottom does not fall out of agriculture,” Mr. Boozman said in his opening statement. “We cannot only focus on certain programs and not others when all farm bill programs are necessary to achieve economic sustainability for our farmers, ranchers and rural communities.”

Mr. Glickman also spoke to the far-reaching implications of the bill. “The farm bill affects everybody in this country in terms of commodities, conservation, health, nutrition, small farms, and diversified agriculture. It is one of the most bipartisan things Congress does.”

The aging population of farmers is also a concern for the committee. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 62 percent of American farmers are over the age of 55. The number of farms in America has also decreased by nearly 10 percent since 2007.