SNAP’s Problems Started Long Before the Shutdown

The government-shutdown crisis may be coming to an end, but for SNAP recipients the inadequacies of the program still persist, and may get worse.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has long used an esoteric formula to determine how much people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program get to spend on groceries each month. Experts say the calculations, which are based on a subsistence-level diet, rely on unrealistic and out-of-date ideas of how Americans eat. And recipients typically end up using 80 percent of their benefits in the first half of each month.

Kris Adler, a single mother of two in Los Angeles who was laid off a year ago, said she feels that as she struggles to feed her family. “It’s just barely enough, we have to be really careful,” she said. “Toward the end of month, it starts to get scary.”

Ms. Adler sometimes skips meals when food gets short. “I need to make sure the kids have their food,” she said, “and I would rather just not eat and make sure they have what they need.”

50 Years of Thrift

Since the mid-1970s, a formula called the Thrifty Food Plan has determined the amount of benefits the millions of Americans on SNAP receive. For just as long, advocates for the program have argued that the formula, which is meant to provide a “nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet,” is deeply insufficient.

As far back as 1975, “it does not meet that test,” said Ronald Pollack, the director of the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that supports anti-hunger programs.

And for more than 45 years afterward, the plan remained more or less unchanged, even as culinary and social developments — like the proliferation of microwave ovens or the vast increase in households with two working parents — changed the way Americans ate, cooked and used their time.

In 2021, the monthly value of the Thrifty Food Plan was adjusted for the first time in its history. The revision, which allowed changes like substituting canned beans for dried, raised the benefit by 21 percent, to about $190 a person per month — or about $6.30 a day.

There was also a provision for the plan to be updated every five years to reflect changing food budgets.

Since the beginning of November, millions of Americans who rely on SNAP have been flooding food banks as they wait for this month’s benefits to arrive, after the Trump administration declined to further fund the program during the government shutdown. But the current, seemingly temporary, delay may be the least of their worries in the long term.

“Six dollars a day is not a lot,” said Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “There are people in this country who spend more on a cup of coffee.”

Millions Affected

SNAP is by far the largest food-relief effort in the United States.

About 42 million people were receiving SNAP benefits as of May, according to Drew DeSilver a senior writer at the Pew Research Center — more than the entire population of California.

In 2023, the latest year for which demographic data is available, recipients included 23 million adults, of whom 6.2 million were steadily employed, often in sectors like food service, child care or the gig economy. About 40 percent of recipients are children under 18.

According to Pew’s analysis of the 2023 data, SNAP recipients are a diverse group: About 44 percent of adult users are non-Hispanic white, about 27 percent are Black and about 22 percent are Hispanic.

“If you asked me to design from scratch the optimal anti-hunger program for the United States, it would be SNAP, only better,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Now, she is concerned about what will happen in the wake of the budget cuts. She said the cuts in President Trump’s signature policy legislation “could be the end of this national program.”

Policy experts say the cuts threaten SNAP’s status as what economists call an “automatic stabilizer” for Americans whose incomes fall below a certain threshold, its payments easily accessible to those in need and spent in their local communities.

While SNAP beneficiaries are currently allowed to buy whatever food items they choose — except hot foods like rotisserie chickens — the Thrifty Food Plan determines the amount of benefits they get each month.

So while single parents — about one-third of SNAP recipients — with a job may need to buy frozen chicken dinners in the interest of time, the plan is far more geared toward buying the ingredients it would take to build those dinners from scratch.

The Thrifty Food Plan was in some ways based on a model developed for a different American economy, particularly before the 2021 revision.

“SNAP’s budget basically had an expectation of you spending roughly two hours a day preparing food,” said James Ziliak, a professor at the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. “Time-use surveys suggest no household was spending two hours a day preparing food.”

The Thrifty plan “was built in the 1970s when some women didn’t work and soaked beans for hours,” said Ty Jones Cox, the vice president for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning group.

A 2006 analysis by the Food Research and Action Center also found that the old plan accounted for unreasonably small amounts of prepared foods, say, three fish sticks and eight slices of cheese for a family of four per month. The variety of foods was constrained as well; the only fruits allowed were apples, bananas, oranges and watermelon. Fish was limited to canned tuna and salmon.

Even after the update, eating with the Thrifty Food Plan still requires cooking from scratch and nutritional know-how, skills that have atrophied over the past decades in the United States. Some of those knowledge gaps were addressed by a national educational program for SNAP recipients, called SNAP-Ed. The Trump legislation cut that program entirely.

At the Checkout

While the Thrifty Food Plan determines how much recipients can spend, new efforts are now aimed at what they will be allowed to buy.

Driven by the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, in line with a public campaign by the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S.D.A. has approved waivers that allow a dozen states to limit the types of foods SNAP recipients can buy with their benefits. The forbidden foods include obvious targets like candy and soda, but also, in the case of Arkansas, fruit drinks that contain less than 50 percent fruit juice. A waiver for Iowa includes a ban on granola bars that do not contain flour.

Until recently, the U.S.D.A. had refused state requests for food restrictions, based on its own 2007 finding that they would be costly to implement and would stigmatize recipients. That report noted that an average of 12,000 new food products were introduced to the market every year from 1990 to 2000, and substantial education would be needed to help SNAP recipients understand what they could and could not buy, lest they be stopped and shamed in public at the checkout counter.

Lisa Kingery, the chief executive of the Milwaukee-based nonprofit Food Right, used SNAP-Ed to teach middle school students to make the kinds of plant-based meals the Thrifty Food Plan requires. (Three-bean chili was the biggest hit.) Since the funding ran out in September, she’s had to lay off much of her staff and is now consumed by fund-raising.

The 2021 changes to the Thrifty Food Plan were welcome, she said, but she still saw the people she served struggling to adhere to the time-consuming and complex cooking methods needed to survive on the plan.

The silver lining was that the plan worked best if people cooked plant-based meals of grains, beans and beans. Ms. Kingery said, “If we’re going to make America healthy again, I don’t think SNAP-Ed was the program to cut.”

More to Come

The general economic conditions over the last 15 years have made SNAP ripe for cost-cutting, in the view of many lawmakers.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, SNAP participation mostly mirrored the country’s economic conditions. When recessions hit, the program’s rolls expanded. When the economy started booming again, the number of Americans on SNAP dropped off.

Since the 2008 mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, though, SNAP numbers have stayed elevated.

In some ways, this has created a feedback loop: The more people who use SNAP, the more the program costs. Those increased costs have drawn the attention of Congress. In 2013, House Republicans pushed through the Farm Bill without SNAP provisions, and later passed a measure to drastically cut the program.

In 2024, the government spent $99.8 billion on SNAP, roughly one percent of the $6.9 trillion national budget.

“It is a big program, and that has put a target on SNAP over the last 10 to 15 years,” said Emily Broad Leib, a clinical professor at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic.

The Thrifty Food Plan is just one of the parts of SNAP being used to cut back the program in the Trump administration’s signature legislation.

Ms. Bauer of the Brookings Institution called one provision in particular — error-rate penalties, which could result in states shouldering up to 15 percent of the cost of their SNAP benefits — “a poison pill.” Officials from states like West Virginia and Alabama have said that their states would struggle to find additional funds and could potentially cut services if those penalties hit. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said that if costs were pushed onto states, his state might not to be able to participate at all.

The bill greatly expanded work requirements. Now, recipients ages 55 to 64, and parents with children over the age of 14 will be newly required to work, volunteer or undertake training for at least 20 hours a week. Exemptions for veterans, youths transitioning out of foster care, and the unhoused have been cut. Anyone who fails to meet the work requirements can receive only three months of SNAP assistance over a 36-month period.

Ms. Adler, the single mother in Los Angeles, believes SNAP should be serving more Americans, not fewer.