“Protecting the poor should not be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D) of Maryland Wednesday at a congressional hearing on “Duplication, Overlap & Inefficiencies in Federal Welfare Programs.” It shouldn’t, but House Republicans at the hearing seemed more concerned with cutting tiny fractions of federal spending than with the men, women, and children who suffer when the services they rely on lose funding.

The Oversight and Government Reform hearing was supposedly aimed at “duplication” in welfare programs, but witnesses and Republican members of Congress used the occasion to lob many of their favorite attacks on welfare programs as a whole.

Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, criticized welfare programs, claiming that they reward people for not working and not marrying. “What welfare assistance has done is to supplant a male in the household. That may be a little crude, but yes, welfare has served as a substitute for the male breadwinner in the home. These low-income mothers would not be able to raise these kids without those welfare checks."

Crude? Try sexist.

When Patricia Dalton, COO of the Government Accountability Office, lamented that some federally funded programs provided similar services to similar populations, Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Banks, explained that program overlap doesn’t always mean duplication. Because different programs have different criteria for qualification, many families may be struggling, but not count as being “poor enough” to qualify for all the services they need.

Over and over again in this hearing, Republicans discussed “streamlining duplicative programs,” a euphemism for cutting spending on the services that struggling Americans need the most.