SNAP Effective Now – GOP Farm Bill Proposal Looking to Change That

Research shows that SNAP is one of our most effective tools in reducing hunger and food insecurity. Much of SNAP’s success is due to its structure: it is designed so that everyone who is eligible can get benefits; it expands automatically to meet needs during tough times; and it focuses its benefits to the households with the least resources available to purchase groceries, assisting families with low incomes to obtain adequate nutrition, regardless of where they live. As of December 2022, SNAP was helping more than 42 million low-income people in the U.S. to afford a nutritionally adequate diet by providing them with benefits on a debit card that can be used only to purchase food at about 254,000 retailers across the country. On average, SNAP recipients receive about $6 per person per day in food benefits, now that the temporary additional benefits during the COVID-19 public health emergency have ended. SNAP’s reach shows the extensive need for nutrition assistance and SNAP’s critical role in addressing it. FIGURE 1 Food Insecurity by Race and Ethnicity Reveals Stark Disparities Despite SNAP’s success in reaching people with low incomes, large numbers of households across all backgrounds still struggle to afford food each month. Given this ongoing need, as I will discuss below, I urge you to protect SNAP from efforts to cut it and make it less responsive to people’s needs and to take opportunities to strengthen the program, particularly for racial and ethnic groups that continue to face far higher levels of food hardship than white households, often due to a long history of racism and discrimination that has resulted in less opportunity in education, housing, and employment. (See Figure 1.) SNAP reaches about 80 percent of eligible households. It delivers the largest benefits to those least able to afford an adequate diet. About 92 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with incomes at or below the poverty line, and 54 percent go to households at or below half of the poverty line (about $12,430 for a family of three in 2023). Families with the greatest need receive the largest benefits; these households, particularly households with children, also have higher rates of participation in the program. Nearly 90 percent of SNAP participants are in households that contain a child under age 18, an older adult 60 years or older, or an individual with a disability. SNAP is also an important support for workers who are paid low wages. Millions of people in the U.S. work in jobs with low wages, unpredictable schedules, and no benefits such as paid sick leave — all of which contribute to high turnover and spells of unemployment. SNAP provides monthly benefits that help fill gaps for workers with low and inconsistent pay and can help workers afford food during periods when they are looking for work. The majority of SNAP participants who can work do so, either while receiving SNAP or before and after. Among SNAP participants who are working-age, non-disabled adults, more than half work while receiving SNAP — and 74 percent work in the year prior to or the year after receiving SNAP. For families with children and at least one working-age, non-disabled adult the work rates are even higher: 75 percent of households with children include someone who works while receiving SNAP and nearly 90 percent of such households include someone who works in the year prior to or the year after receiving SNAP. This shows that joblessness is often temporary for SNAP participants. SNAP is also highly responsive to the economy. When more households are out of work or see their earnings fall, SNAP automatically expands to serve everyone who is eligible and applies. This mitigates hardship during a recession and gets money into the economy quickly, acting as stimulus for the economy overall. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, SNAP responded quickly to deteriorating economic conditions, pushed back against food insecurity and other forms of hardship, and supported families during periods of unemployment, earnings loss, and uncertainty. Moreover, Congress acted expeditiously to temporarily modify and expand SNAP ― changes that states implemented quickly and effectively ― to deliver additional food assistance to households in communities across the country. Those temporary pandemic measures have now ended, or will soon end. SNAP and other forms of economic support prevented food insecurity from surging during the pandemic. But annual measures of food insecurity did rise for households with children and for households headed by Black adults; people of color have faced higher levels of food insecurity for decades. SNAP is a powerful anti-poverty tool, keeping nearly 8 million people above the poverty line in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, including 3.6 million children. SNAP not only alleviates near-term hardship, but it is also an investment in the future, as participation is associated with improved long-term outcomes in health, education, and labor market outcomes. Participants are more likely to report excellent or very good health than low-income non-participants and studies have linked SNAP to improved educational attainment, higher rates of high school completion, and improved labor market outcomes in adulthood. Older SNAP participants are less likely than similar non-participants to forgo their full prescribed dosage of medicine due to cost. SNAP may also help low-income seniors live independently in their communities and avoid hospitalization. The program’s effectiveness has been boosted by the recent update to the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) to better reflect the modern cost of a healthy diet, as directed by the bipartisan 2018 farm bill. The TFP update, which took effect at the start of fiscal year 2022, raises the average benefit per person per day by about $1.35 in fiscal year 2023, which is boosting millions of families’ ability to add a greater variety of fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods to their diet. Going forward, the statutorily required reevaluation every five years will ensure that SNAP’s benefit amounts reflect the latest research evidence and stay up to date as these factors continue to evolve. While the SNAP program is strong, some elements of its program design make it less effective in combatting food hardship than it could be. For example, SNAP’s harsh three-month time limit for many unemployed adults not raising children cuts off benefits for participants who may be looking for work, who face barriers to work, or who should have been exempted but the state did not correctly screen them, creating hardship with no significant impact on employment among those affected. Policymakers could also improve SNAP’s effectiveness by expanding access to food assistance for groups such as low-income seniors, people in Puerto Rico and certain other U.S. Territories, college students, people who are immigrants, and people with prior drug felony convictions; improving performance metrics so they measure program accessibility; and ensuring that SNAP operations keep pace with emerging technology. The farm bill should seek to address some of these shortcomings in the program to ensure that more people are able to access the food assistance they need. Unfortunately, rather than focus on these areas for improvement, some Republican members are calling for cuts to SNAP as part of budget negotiations on the farm bill, and have put forward proposals that would undercut SNAP’s effectiveness. A bill from House Agriculture Committee member Dusty Johnson and more than 20 other House Republicans would dramatically expand SNAP’s three-month time limit, including by applying it to additional groups of people, such as parents of school-age children and older adults, and severely restricting or eliminating states’ flexibility to waive the time limit in areas where there are insufficient jobs. This would double down on a policy that has been studied and shown to be highly ineffective. Two peer-reviewed papers published in the last two months (whose findings are consistent with other SNAP time limit studies) showed that SNAP’s harsh time limit reduced participation in the program by as much as 53 percent among those subject to the time limit, but achieved no effects on employment. Evidence both from the existing SNAP time limit and work requirement experiments in Medicaid show that these policies often hurt people who have disabilities who the state should have exempted but didn’t, and can even take away SNAP from people who are working but can’t navigate the bureaucratic reporting requirements. The proposals in the Johnson legislation would put more than 10 million people, about 1 in 4 SNAP participants, at risk of losing some or all of their food assistance. This includes 6 million people who would be newly subject to the time limit and at risk of losing eligibility for SNAP, and about 4 million children who live in families that could have their SNAP benefits reduced, harming the entire household. House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington has similarly called for stricter work requirements in SNAP, and Senator John Kennedy introduced an even harsher bill in the Senate. In addition, budget plans put forward by the Republican Study Committee and by Trump-era Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought propose to take food assistance away through harmful work requirements while, respectively, turning SNAP into a strict block grant (often used to promote large, unspecified cuts) and radically restructuring SNAP by capping program spending. Ironically, some have also put forward proposals to deny SNAP to working households whose income is modestly about the standard income limit but whose high expenses for things like housing, child care, or health care strain their food budgets. Some 37 states have recognized the benefit to allowing these households to receive modest SNAP benefits to supplement their low earnings and have used flexibility in the SNAP law to do so, but some want to take away this state flexibility and cut food assistance to working households even as they insist that more SNAP recipients should be working. SNAP is a highly effective program that alleviates hunger and poverty, has positive impacts on the long-term outcomes of those who receive its benefits, and supports people in low-paid jobs and those between jobs. This effectiveness is threatened, however, by proposals that would impose harsh new policies that take benefits away from people not meeting work-reporting requirements and other possible cuts or structural changes. Indeed, SNAP proposals should be evaluated on whether they are likely to reduce food insecurity overall and, in particular, among Black, Indigenous, and Latino households, who face unconscionably high levels of food hardship. I discuss these issues in more depth in the remainder of my testimony.