A SNAPshot of the Current Moment

You can learn a lot about what's right and wrong about America today through the recent adventures of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

This past week saw a flareup of interest and activity around the SNAP program, our largest federal food assistance program for low-income families. The most visible fight resulted from the Trump administration’s refusal to follow the unequivocally clear law to fund the program during the shutdown through a continency fund intended for that purpose. Yesterday, two separate courts ruled against the administration’s attempt to weaponize hunger during the shutdown fight, but that won’t alleviate shutdown-related pressures on SNAP’s 42 million recipients. The Times reports that “benefits will still most likely be interrupted.”

There are many excellent links to peruse if you want to learn more about the history of SNAP, the current structure of the program, details of its current stressors, and the states and recipients who use it. In this post, I’d like to extract some larger lessons from recent SNAP-related events.

First, for all the current tension around the program, SNAP is widely regarded by poverty analysts as a highly efficient program that quickly helps poor families meet basic needs. It has proved particularly useful in downturns as a channel to meet urgent needs (it’s also a potent macroeconomic stimulus with a high multiplier). Of course, it targets nutrition, but for low-income families that get them, SNAP dollars are fully fungible. In economically pinched households trying to keep a roof over their heads, the rent eats first. SNAP dollars free up rent dollars.

As CBPP correctly reports:

Before the federal government began providing nutrition assistance on a permanent basis in the late 1960s, hunger and severe malnutrition existed in many low-income communities in the U.S. In large part owing to these assistance programs, such conditions are no longer found in large numbers today.

Second, there’s a myth that the SNAP recipiency rolls are relentlessly growing and have been for years. Again, here’s CBPP with the facts:

The COVID-19 pandemic reversed a long decline in SNAP participation. The number of people participating in SNAP expanded significantly between 2007 and 2011, due largely to the Great Recession and subsequent slow recovery.^[3] It peaked at 47 million in December 2012, then declined over the next six years. SNAP expanded again in 2020 and 2021, but by a smaller amount than in the Great Recession, to meet the needs of struggling households during the pandemic. Participation has since remained essentially flat nationally.

One way people get this wrong is they conflate SNAP spending with the SNAP rolls. Recipiency is down slightly from its decade-ago peak, though elevated relative to pre-Great Recession (though this should really be shown as share of the population; I’ll work that up later). In fact, it is not anywhere near easy to qualify for SNAP. Eligibility is evaluated rigorously (and was so well before the harsh eligibility changes in the big budget bill) and frequently rechecked. This post-2010 level shift in recipiency is a sign that more low-income people need and are getting food support.

The link above explains that the increase in spending is not driven by higher recipiency but by an update in the costs and content of the SNAP food plan (one that I’m very proud to have worked on at CEA, though it was the USDA team led the successful fight) and by the sharp increase in grocery inflation in 2021/22. In fact, this important Urban Institute report shows that a) SNAP benefits per meal are <$3 and b) (my bold) “the maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99 percent of US counties. The benefit covered meal costs in only 41 of the 3,144 counties.”

Third, the lies told by those touting the Trump administration’s hunger-weaponization plan are egregious, even for this crew. Listen to Speaker Johnson claiming yesterday, hours before the courts firmly rejected this BS. He claims there’s “no legal mechanism” to spend the USDA’s contingency fund on SNAP benefits during the shutdown, when that is explicitly one of the things that fund is for. IOW, he’s turning the law on its head.

It’s even more ironic than that because the Rs and admin have been absolutely fine repurposing spending in cases wherein they are breaking budget laws.

In my typology of lies for this administration, this is the top-level. Saying “there’s no inflation” is a lie about a fact, easily disproved/fact-checked. That’s low-level, though highly erosive to the discourse. But this is a rule-of-law lie, the type that erodes democracy in favor of monarchy.

Finally, there's what this tells SNAP fight tells us about their priorities. I like the way Rahm Emmanuel framed this on the Gabfest podcast: Trump and the Rs are fine with a $20 billion taxpayer-dollar bailout for Argentina, while 20 million get to pay $1,000 more for health care, and, I will add, millions more face SNAP disruptions.

These priorities were elevated during the budget debate, of course, when cuts in SNAP and Medicaid were legislated to partially offset the cost of tax cuts for the wealthy.

Over 12 percent of Americans get SNAP, and many reside in red states. Of the >20 million facing higher health coverage costs, most live in places that voted for Trump. I don’t consider myself particularly skilled at picking up the general reaction of these constituents to developments like those occurring over the shutdown, along with the many other ways this administration and Congressional Rs have revealed who they’re fighting for and who they’re fighting against. But my sense is that significant swaths of people understand that they’re getting hurt, not helped, and that each day enforces a growing sense that they bet on the wrong pony.

We’ll have a test of this hypothesis on Tuesday, with potentially revealing elections around the country. So, more to come on all this later next week.