Food stamps are overly generous, because Joe Biden increased them by 21% more than was needed to keep up with inflation. That big increase will add over $180 billion to America’s national debt during the first decade affected by the increase.
So explains the Cato Institute, which has routinely criticized both Trump and Biden for running big budget deficits:
With a shutdown deal in sight, legislators are planning to fund SNAP for the entirety of this fiscal year, while other parts of the federal government could face another shutdown standoff at the end of January. While the 42 million Americans on SNAP may soon see their benefits restored, policymakers should focus on reducing the program’s rising costs. Top of the list is the multi-billion-dollar liability embedded into SNAP’s budget by the Biden administration’s unilateral overhaul of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) in 2021. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that this reevaluation would cost at least $180 billion over the 2022–2031 period.
The USDA’s TFP update burdened taxpayers with a costly, permanent SNAP spending increase that Congress never approved. Republicans should eliminate billions in unnecessary annual spending by rescinding this unlawful, partisan entitlement expansion.
TFP’s Unprecedented Spending Surge
The Thrifty Food Plan is the USDA’s model for a minimal but nutritionally adequate diet for a typical family of four. Importantly, TFP is SNAP’s baseline for calculating the maximum amount of benefits a household can receive—higher TFP values mean elevated spending obligations. USDA periodically conducts comprehensive reevaluations of the TFP model to reflect changes in dietary recommendations, consumption patterns, and food composition. Historically, these reevaluations were all conducted on a “cost-neutral” basis. To be clear, cost-neutral does not mean that benefits remained flat year-over-year. USDA already performs annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to the TFP to ensure that SNAP benefits keep pace with inflation. These reevaluations updated the combinations of foods in the TFP model to reflect modern nutritional guidelines, but what remained “neutral” is that they did not increase the cost of the plan beyond adjusting for inflation.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden’s USDA circumvented congressional spending authority by using a TFP reevaluation to trigger an unprecedented 21 percent benefit expansion….This reevaluation accounted for 95 percent of SNAP’s benefit cost hikes in 2021, and was a major factor in SNAP’s inflation-adjusted spending almost doubling from FY 2019 to FY 2022. SNAP’s current spending still has not returned to pre-COVID levels because, unlike Biden’s temporary pandemic measures, the price tag of the TFP reevaluation is permanently baked into the cake….
The 2018 Farm Bill directed USDA to reevaluate TFP, but it made no provision granting USDA the authority to single-handedly increase SNAP spending through TFP reevaluations. Republican lawmakers at the time believed the cost-neutral principle still applied, and CBO made no mention of the reevaluation requirements adding to the deficit by 2028. The absence of explicit prohibition does not grant agencies carte blanche to abandon longstanding policy constraints.
The question wasn’t whether SNAP should respond to higher grocery costs or update periodically to reflect modern nutritional standards. It already does. It was whether the Biden administration had the authority to unilaterally lock in a permanent federal spending hike without congressional approval. The answer, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled, is a resounding no. This move clearly violated the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (which requires government agencies to submit significant policy updates to Congress).
Receiving food stamps makes some recipients fatter and less healthy (even as though receiving food stamps can also make recipients feel less stressed about money). As was noted in the past, “It’s not clear why, but receiving food stamps appears to make recipients less healthy and more obese. If there are two households with the same income, and one gets food stamps, while the other doesn’t, the one that gets food stamps is, on average, fatter, less healthy, and more likely to end up with diseases, than the one that doesn’t get food stamps.”
As an economist noted, the food stamp program is known officially as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” but it doesn’t improve the diets of the average person who receives food stamps, even though food stamps comprise the lion’s share of the Agriculture Department’s budget, typically over $100 billion since the COVID pandemic:
The N in SNAP is for nutrition, but studies have found the opposite. One USDA study found that “lower nutritional quality of household food acquisitions was associated with SNAP participation status.” A recent review by Jerold Mande and Grace Flaherty found, “Children participating in SNAP were more likely to have elevated disease risk and consume more sugar‐sweetened beverages (SSBs), more high‐fat dairy, and more processed meats than income‐eligible nonparticipants.” The USDA has found that SNAP recipients are more obese than similar‐income nonrecipients.
Food stamps tend to more than cover the cost of food for people who are thrifty and use coupons, which can result in recipients reselling surplus food. In 2007, The Washington Post ran a story in its health section about how prosperous people, such as a chef and a natural foods store owner, were able to live quite well on a food stamps budget. For example, Rick Hindle, executive chef for the Skadden, Arps law firm, showed “that you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen to prepare healthful food for $1 or less per meal.” You can easily spend less on food than the poorest food stamp recipients and still enjoy a healthy, low-fat diet rich in vitamins and fiber. That’s what a Quaker vegetarian found when he decided to limit his weekly spending on food to a food stamp budget, even though he ate only organic food (which costs more).
Even the mostly liberal readers of the Daily Dish blog admitted over a decade ago that food stamps covered far more than the amount needed to get enough nutritious food to eat. As one noted, he spent more money on food while on food stamps than ever he did before going on food stamps.
