SNAP cards are issued by state and may be swiped to pay for food in the same way that debit cards are used. Nutritional assistance is issued monthly, and 12% of Americans collect benefits. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture)
By Anna Ridilla
The national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was first established in 1933 during the Great Depression. The program, which is entirely federally funded, was created to provide nutritional assistance for low-income families. Families receive a monthly allowance based on income level that they can then use to purchase groceries, similar to how one would use a debit card. SNAP benefits reach nearly 40 million Americans every year. In 2022, SNAP helped 794,600 Virginians — 9% of the state’s population.
To understand what the program looks like in 2023, I spoke to Tracy Roof (right), associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond. She studies American labor and welfare, and is currently writing a book on the political history of the food stamps program.
Anna Ridilla: What do food stamps look like today?
Tracy Roof: It’s now on an electric card, they call it electronic benefits transfer. But it was designed to get at fraud because in the old days, when you used to have coupons — they kind of almost looked like Monopoly money — you would carry it in and have to sign them, and you could sell them on the street for a fraction of their cash value. And it was kind of hard to crack down on fraud, so they moved over to the card. An unintended effect was that it eased the stigma that was associated, because it’s not that obvious in the line, you swipe it just like you would a debit card. And the benefits are just loaded on that card every month.
AR: Do all stores take this card?
TR: Most do. You’ll see a sign that says EBT accepted here, or SNAP accepted. There are rules about the retailers … you have to offer certain nutritional foods. You don’t have to buy that, but the store has to have that. So it can’t just all be like soda, snacks, it has to have some fresh foods … And you can use it at farmers markets if vendors have gone to the trouble to apply as a retailer.
AR: Can people use the card for any kinds of food?
TR: There are just a few limitations. It can’t be used for alcohol or hygiene products, like cleaning products, any of that. It has to be for food, and beverages. And it can’t be used for hot prepared food. It has to be food that is not intended to be consumed on site. Because you’re paying for the labor cost to prepare that food, it generally costs more than a meal that you fixed on your own.
AR: Are benefits based on how many people live in a household?
TR: It’s based on the family size. And so they take your income, and then they take certain deductions from it. Like if you’ve got childcare expenses, or really high medical expenses or something like that. Or really high high housing costs, that you can deduct that off the top, and then you’re expected to spend 30% of your own money on food. And then they look at what it would take to achieve a decent diet for your family size.
AR: So these cards get reloaded every month?
TR: Yeah, it varies by state. Some states stagger it, because otherwise, there’ll be a surge of shopping at the grocery stores on the day that the benefits are loaded. So some states do it twice a month. I think Virginia is just once a month.
AR: What is the application process like?
TR: They have to verify your income, which is one of the big parts of it — and your assets. So like, now, most of the states allow you to have a car and that doesn’t count. But it used to be that there was a cap on the value of the car of like, $4,000, something ridiculous. Because you’d see stories like somebody driving a Cadillac to go get their food stamps. But now most states just disregard one car for a household, and they may disregard two cars for a household.
AR: Is there a world in which a family wouldn’t want to apply because of the amount of information they have to provide?
TR: I mean, the administrative hurdles can be pretty high. They put in place a lot of hoops that people had to go through to apply. If you’re like maybe operating your own daycare and you take care of people’s kids, and they may pay you in cash or something like that, you’ve got to somehow show how much you’re actually bringing in. And that can be hard to do. And you have to document your assets. So if you had a car you had to document that, if you have any savings you have to document that, if you get child support, anything you own or any source of income you have to document. You have to have an in-person interview, or at least a phone interview. And then you have to recertify people every three months to six months to 12 months.
AR: Were there changes to this during COVID?
TR: So, there were several changes, the first, the big thing that they did was they created what they called emergency allotments, which meant that every household could get that maximum benefit size. So during COVID, they allowed everybody regardless of their income to get the maximum benefit. So especially for elderly people, because they’re single-person households oftentimes, they don’t qualify for much because they’d have social security or whatever. And so they may only qualify for the minimum benefit, which is just like around $20. But they were able to get the maximum for the household size [during COVID], which was over $200.
And then the Biden administration did a reformulation of how the diet is calculated … the Department of Agriculture goes in and they use like a family of four with, I think, a 10 year old and a 12 year old, and they determine how much it would take to feed that family. And that had never been adjusted. It was adjusted every year for inflation, but they worked to get nutritionally adequate diets that represent how people actually prepare food now.
TR: For some families who were kind of minimum wage working families, it was a big supplement to their income. And that has just ended. There’s been a huge demand on food banks. So it [emergency allotments] ended at the end of March, and so the demand at food banks has jumped.
SNAP benefits are vital for more than 10% of Americans, and though the emergency allotments from the pandemic have expired, families will continue to feel the financial effects of COVID long after. Now that families can no longer rely on the maximum monthly allotment, nutritional assistance will fall more heavily on food banks that already experience extremely high demand.