Do SNAP benefits fulfill their mission?
Rebecca Yap 
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Social safety net programs were designed to help poorer members of society meet their basic needs. The model in the United States was expanded by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, which focused on prevention. The president’s administration hoped to expand the federal government’s role in education and healthcare via poverty reduction strategies, and his Economic Opportunity Act executed programs aimed at eliminating poverty by improving living conditions for residents of low-income neighborhoods and helping the poor access opportunity. In particular, the Food Stamps Program, better known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), provided low-income people, generally below 130% of the U.S. poverty line, with monetary assistance for purchasing food at grocery stores. This program is now the second-largest anti-poverty program for children in the U.S. and lauded as a cornerstone for reducing child poverty. But does it work? Is it fulfilling the mission of reducing poverty by improving living conditions through food and enabling opportunity? And if so, how?
SNAP is not without legitimate criticism. A study by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found issues that stemmed from the design of President Johnson’s policy. Block grants gave states the choice to tailor the program to their specific needs. This hampered the program’s ability to respond to changes in need as a result of economic conditions (e.g., inflation, economic downturn, recession). Without national eligibility standards, two program participants with identical economic conditions could receive very different treatment simply from residing in different states. Participants were, and continue to be, limited in the kinds of food they can purchase, and store retailers are subject to restrictive standards in order to be eligible for the SNAP program. Crucially, SNAP benefits do not consider geographic variation in food prices, do not increase with the rate of inflation, and do not vary with the costs associated with the nutrient requirements of different household members. An example is the provision of food not calculated by nutritional intake, which would consider households’ nutritional needs and dietary requirements to better suit the mission of the program in the first place: to provide food to underprivileged households. Beyond those structural limitations, it also seems many who do qualify do not know it. Per Feeding America, more than 88% of eligible households qualified as income-eligible, the most straightforward eligibility, yet only 41% of eligible households enroll in SNAP. To expand the impact of SNAP, these limitations will need to be addressed to manage the qualitative issues families experience.
Accurately measuring the impact of the SNAP program is a difficult undertaking, but a recent working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research sought to do so. Martha Bailey, of the University of Michigan, and her co-authors investigated the effect of Food Stamps on child poverty and nutrition. The researchers found that when President Johnson expanded the program, it “raised food spending among participating families by 21% and improved infant health.” When combined with other safety net programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child poverty rate in the U.S. shrank from 28% in 1967 to 16% in 2016. The program continues to be important: in 2018, Food Stamps lifted 3.1 million people out of poverty with just $65 billion (Bailey, et al. 2020). Researchers also found the program created lasting effects on human capital, health, economic self-sufficiency, and overall well-being. Greater exposure in childhood to Food Stamps, and the increased food access stability that enables, led to reduced metabolic issues in adults, as well as lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
The study’s authors analyzed USDA annual reports on Food Stamps monthly caseloads by county between 1961 and 1979. The study exploited the variation in Food Stamps availability for event-study, linear, and difference-in-difference models. Data were organized by birth year, county of birth, and the survey year, separated by gender and race (white vs non-white), and then compared using randomness in time. The design relied on assuming that timing of Food Stamp rollouts were uncorrelated with other outcomes of interest, and then comparing the difference between the group that received the Food Stamps to a control group before and after receiving the Stamps – comparing the difference (before/after) of the differences (Stamp group/non-Stamp group). This approach has some downsides, particularly if counties that adopted the policies earlier had significantly different experiences than counties that adopted it later. Overall, the study’s design helps isolate the true effect of Food Stamps.
Conclusions were limited by some factors, such as small sample sizes and high attrition rates in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a household survey that attempts to track one set of people over a long period of time. Further, while exposure to Food Stamps prior to age 5 was found to increase adult earnings for women, it had insignificant effects for men. Because the study’s outcome data were limited, researchers were not able to provide comprehensive analysis of the SNAP’s impact on well-being. This meant authors were unable to evaluate the long-term efficacy of the program in reducing adult poverty – which could call into question if Food Stamps pay for themselves on a societal scale by creating more economically productive adults.
Despite these limitations, there remains plenty of evidence that SNAP works. The program was associated with increases in life expectancy, reduced chances of being incarcerated, a higher likelihood of moving away from one’s county of birth, owning their own home, and residing in a single-family home. This evidence aligns with the idea that access to Food Stamps in early life allowed individuals to move to higher quality neighborhoods.
These novel findings and long-standing criticisms combined show a complete picture of the state of the SNAP program today. A program that does fulfill its intended mission in many ways – improving health and well-being, lifting millions out of poverty, and facilitating economically disadvantaged children to become economically productive adults. SNAP also has a long way to go – it has structural limitations which facilitate distributive inconsistency, and the national program fails to address variation in need across time, geography, and diet. If policymakers can reform SNAP to address its shortcomings, the program has the potential to provide additional benefits to low-income families without additional funding.
Bailey, Martha J., Hilary W. Hoynes, Maya Rossin-Slater, and Reed Walker. Is the social safety net a long-term investment? Large-scale evidence from the food stamps program. No. w26942. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26942/w26942.pdf.
