Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

It is scandalous that Texas is letting so many of its residents go hungry when the resources exist to feed them. But those resources — food stamps — are being processed at a snail's pace because the state has not been able to get its act together.

Texans deserve a better, more compassionate solution than state leaders have proposed so far.

The massive backlog that has left low-income families hungry and waiting for weeks and months for government food assistance has reached a critical level. In September 2009, Texas processed 58.6 percent of new applications on time.

That means that the state failed to process 41.4 percent of applications by deadlines required by the federal government, which is 30 days for regular applications and seven days for emergency applications.

Corrie MacLaggan of the American-Statesman reported those abysmal figures from state data in articles that examined the state's food stamp program, which is administered by the state Health and Human Services Commission.

Those aren't just numbers; they are people. Those people include children who are hungry when they don't have to be.

Tragically, state lawmakers did not act to address the issue until the federal government issued a stern warning to Texas to speed up processing food stamps or risk losing them.

It should come as no surprise that the federal government has lost confidence in — and patience with — state officials and is urging them to appoint a food stamp czar to take charge of fixing application backlogs and high error rates. That is a good idea, given the scope of the problem and inability of state leaders to fix it.

In some Texas cities, the wait for federal food assistance has grown to five months. That is the average processing time for a state office in Dallas. Houston has an office that takes 125 days to process food stamp applications, and San Antonio has one that is taking 94 days. Little wonder the feds are losing patience.

The problem comes down to a shortage of state workers to do the job. And that crisis appears to be a product of the Legislature's efforts to privatize a government program that was working well.

From 1998 to 2004, Texas received bonus payments for accuracy. Now its food stamp program is rife with errors in addition to long wait times. State workers fled in droves in 2005, after former Health and Human Services Commissioner Albert Hawkins issued pink slips to 2,900 state workers slated to lose jobs that would be outsourced to private contractors, as ordered by the Legislature.

That privatization effort failed, and state workers were retained and called back. But the damage was done as many experienced workers had already left.

In August, the Health and Human Services agency asked the Legislative Budget Board and Gov. Rick Perry to approve hiring 650 workers to address problems — a request that the board initially denied.

On Friday, the board approved hiring up to 250 workers, directed the agency to fill 400 vacant jobs, and left open the possibility of hiring 399 more workers.

That's a start. But the state needs someone with a singular focus on the food stamp program to fix this broken system. The job does not have to be permanent.

Higher unemployment and a weak economy have increased the rolls of the hungry. About 2.8 million Texans are on food stamps, an 11 percent increase from last year. It is wrong to make people wait for weeks and months for something as basic as food.