How Does SNAP Work?

Should we be surprised by how many people receive food stamps?

Good morning, and thanks for waking up to politics. At around 2:30 p.m. ET, the House is expected to vote on a bill requiring release of the so-called “Epstein files.” I’ll be on the Hill all day today and will have a full report for you tomorrow.

But today, I want to continue my two-part series from last week, breaking down two government programs that have been in the news, based on a pair of questions I received. Last week, I covered the Obamacare premium tax credits. This morning, we’ll dive into SNAP.

As I wrote last week, these pieces included a lot of research, but I wanted to put them in front of the paywall because I felt they included civic-minded content I wanted to be made available to everybody. However, if you’re in a position where you’re able to set up a paid subscription, I’d really appreciate if you take this opportunity to do so. Wake Up To Politics runs on your support.

And now: to today’s question!

---

SNAP

Q: Can you do an investigative piece on the SNAP program? It is a $100 billion dollar/yr program that one in eight Americans apparently receive. Over 40 million Americans, every month. That sounds hard to believe. What are the qualifications for receiving the assistance?

As we did last week, let’s start on the broadest level first, to make sure we’re all on the same page. Then, we’ll zoom in a bit and answer the specific question.

The earliest iteration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dates back to 1939, with the creation of what was then known as the Food Stamp Program. At the time, the program involved literal pieces of paper (“food stamps”) which people in need could redeem for food at grocery stores.

The program was initiated both to help impoverished people and to support farmers, by increasing demand for their products and ensuring that someone (even if it was the government) was there to pay them for all the food they were producing, so they could still support themselves during the Great Depression. “We got a picture of a gorge, with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other. We set out to find a practical way to build a bridge across that chasm,” Milo Perkins, the program’s first administrator, put it.

Food stamps are administered by the federal government (by the Agriculture Department, a nod to its roots as a program to help farmers) but distributed by the various states. In the 1990s, states started phasing out the actual stamps and replacing them with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, which look like credit cards instead of paper coupons. A SNAP recipient’s benefits are loaded onto their EBT card every month. The program was officially renamed SNAP in 2008.

The questioner asked how a recipient becomes eligible for SNAP. The rules offer some latitude to state governments, so the exact answer varies state by state. But, as a general guideline, these two rules exist for a household to qualify for SNAP:

• Their gross income must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line, which currently comes out to $20,345 annually for an individual or $41,795 for a family of four. (The number continues to scale up and down for each person added or subtracted to a household. Everyone counts as part of a “household” if they live together and purchase and prepare meals together.)

• Then, households are asked to make certain deductions from their gross income, include removing the amount a household pays towards rent, child care, and other key expenses. Their net income, after any of these deductions are applied, must be at or below the federal poverty line. So, your income can start out slightly above the federal poverty line, but has to be at or below the poverty line after accounting for deductions. The federal poverty line is currently an income of $15,650 annually for an individual or $32,150 annually for a family of four, continuing to scale up or down. (The numbers for every family size are here.)

Again, there is some variability by state; 13 states, for example, also have asset limits, which set a maximum amount of assets a household can hold to be eligible for the program. And there are also different rules around eligibility for seniors and people with disabilities who aren’t expected to make income. But the above two benchmarks should give you a general idea.

As the questioner notes, 41.7 million Americans — or roughly 12% of the country’s population — currently receive SNAP benefits. Should this be a surprising amount, as the questioner suggests? I don’t think so.

I put together this chart, comparing the percentage of Americans enrolled in SNAP since 1990 to the percentage of Americans in poverty (per the Census Bureau) over the same time period:

We would not expect these numbers to be exactly the same, since a) SNAP eligibility is a little bit more complicated than just the poverty level, as discussed, b) not everyone eligible for SNAP is going to enroll in it, and c) the Census Bureau’s poverty calculations are slightly different than the poverty line used to determine SNAP eligibility.

But, still, based on what we learned about SNAP eligibility, we would expect the two numbers to be closely correlated, since — if everything is going according to the guidelines — roughly speaking, as more people are impoverished, we would expect more people to using SNAP, and if fewer people are impoverished, we would expect the opposite.

If these two numbers were not tracking each other, and the poverty rate, for example, was falling, but SNAP enrollment was climbing, we would maybe stop and ask whether something odd was going on.

But these numbers do track each other, remarkably well, as the chart above shows. In general, SNAP enrollment rises and falls with the poverty rate, which is exactly what we’d expect from the eligibility standards. Right now, 10.6% of Americans are considered to be living in poverty by the Census Bureau. And 12.3% are enrolled in SNAP. Based on the first number, the second really shouldn’t be surprising.

According to Harvard professor Sara Bleich, 70% of SNAP recipients are elderly, disabled, or children.

SNAP has been in the news lately because benefits were thrown into uncertainty during the government shutdown (eventually sparking a legal battle as certain groups sued in a bid to force the Trump administration to use a contingency fund to continue paying benefits).

Even though the program’s funding has been restored now that the shutdown is over (and won’t be at risk in a January shutdown because Agriculture was one of the three appropriations bills fully funded for the rest of the fiscal year), SNAP is still undergoing big changes.

SNAP benefits already come with 20-hour-a-week work requirements, but as I covered in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will shrink the pool of people exempt from those requirements. The work requirements currently lapse at age 55; the new law will change that to age 65. Parents with responsibility for a dependent child are currently exempt; that will change to parents with responsibility for dependent children under 14. Veterans and homeless people are also currently exempt but no longer will be.

These changes went into effect on November 1.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act also increases the cost of SNAP for state governments. Currently, the federal government pays 100% of the cost of benefits, and split the administrative costs with states, but the new law will require states with larger SNAP error rates to pay more benefit costs, which will phase in between October 2027 and October 2029.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than 3 million Americans could lose their SNAP benefits as a result of these changes, due to the new work requirements (not necessarily because they aren’t complying with them, but also because of the paperwork burden) and the fact that state governments might not have enough room in their budgets once more costs shift onto them.

As of Fiscal Year 2024, the federal government spent about $100 billion a year on SNAP, or roughly 1.5% of the federal budget. SNAP recipients receive an average of around $6 per person per day. Benefit amounts vary due to income and household size, relying on a benchmark known as the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), the Agriculture Department’s estimate of how much money a “healthy, budget-conscious” family needs for groceries.

The TFP amount has traditionally increased according to inflation, but in 2021, the Biden administration used that power to unilaterally implement a 21% increase, the largest in history. (Vox has called it “the best thing that Joe Biden did,” while the Cato Institute called it an “unprecedented, unlawful expansion.”) The One Big Beautiful Bill Act requires that all future TFP increases be strictly pegged to inflation.

SNAP beneficiaries must recertify their eligibility at least every six months, but Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced this week that all recipients will be required to reapply to the program entirely — a much longer process — in an effort to root out fraud.

According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last year, 11.7% of the SNAP benefits the government paid — totaling $10.5 billion — were improper, meaning either that the payments were too high, too low, or shouldn’t have been received at all.