The United States federal government is heading toward the longest government shutdown. Aside from the COVID-era Obamacare premium tax credits that precipitated the shutdown, another piece of policy was caught in the crossfire of this debacle: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More colloquially known as food stamps, SNAP is a federal welfare program to provide monthly food benefits to low-income households. The reason why this became a point of contention is that without a budget passed, SNAP benefits would be paused effective November 1. Last Friday, a couple of federal judges ordered the Trump administration to continue SNAP benefits amid the shutdown. There is still a possibility of those benefits being delayed a bit.
It was not simply that the SNAP program was saved by a federal injunction that made me think more profoundly about SNAP benefits, an injunction that shows how its near-total reliance on federal funding makes the SNAP program fragile. According to the calculations of the Right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), if the SNAP benefits had been paused, 2.9 million people would have been pushed into poverty. When I read that, I thought to myself, "Really? That many?" The average monthly SNAP payment is $190.59 per person or $356.41 per household (or $4,276 per annum). After accounting for government transfers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that average household income for a low-income household was $48,700 (CBO, p. 18). This would mean that slightly less than 10 percent of income post-transfer came from SNAP.
Although the average enrollment period for SNAP is under a year, the fact that a one-month disruption can cause so much chaos shows how reliant people have become on the government for something as basic as food. It is quite the indictment of the welfare state when nearly 3 million people can end up in poverty due to administrative or political shifts. While it illustrates SNAP's role as short-term relief, it does not contradict the concern that the very existence of SNAP creates structural dependency. This structural dependency is not the only systemic issue with the SNAP program.
- Poverty Relief: SNAP benefits are modest and temporary. They only help against short-term shocks and do not pull a household out of poverty. Furthermore, this program does not address the root causes of poverty in the way that a program such as workforce development would. The fact that SNAP benefits are created to help households survive instead of improving upward mobility shows the limits of the program.
- Administrative Issues: As I pointed out last May, the SNAP program has had a rising overpayment problem in the past decade. SNAP overpayments have increased from 2 percent in 2012 to 10 percent in 2023. How can people rely on such a program for food delivery when it is prone to basic administrative failure?
- Unintended Health Consequences: In another piece, I wrote about how SNAP exacerbates obesity. SNAP might address immediate hunger, but it doesn't help with long-term health issues or economic mobility, especially since SNAP subsidizes caloric intake without accounting for nutritional value. If a recipient has worse health outcomes as a result of SNAP, it hampers their ability to work or advance economically. In other words, it perpetuates poverty and keeping people on government supports instead of helping alleviate poverty.
- Disincentive to Earn More: SNAP's eligibility cliffs, which are where benefits phase out sharply as income rises, create a modest disincentive for recipients to increase earnings because small pay raises can lead to a disproportionate loss of support. This can make low-income households more reluctant to move upward financially, thereby staying in a lower income bracket.
- Disincentive for Self-Sufficiency: Research suggests that children exposed to welfare programs often develop more favorable attitudes toward government dependence and place less emphasis on work (e.g., Hartley et al., 2024; Barón et al., 2008). Although SNAP benefits last less than a year on average, some households participate repeatedly or episodically, which exposes children to government support. This repeated exposure, especially combined with the exposure of other welfare programs, can signal that the government is the primary safety net in life, thereby dampening the incentive for economic self-sufficiency.
Ultimately, SNAP symbolizes the tension between wanting to provide short-term relief for those in need versus long-term economic mobility. It is true that there is evidence that SNAP benefits can help with hunger relief, especially when dealing with such short-term shocks as job loss or sudden illness. It is also true that its modest benefits, the administrative inefficiency, eligibility cliffs, and unintended consequences (e.g., poorer health outcomes) do little to lift SNAP beneficiaries out of poverty. One of the core problems is that a program designed as a temporary safety net becomes a crutch for longer-term dependence a variety of government programs. That is when the focus shifts from self-reliance to dependence.
By creating a system in which people rely on the government for something as essential as food, it perpetuates economic vulnerability instead of promoting economic self-sufficiency. If the idea is to help low-income Americans thrive, policymakers need to take a harder look at reforms that steer people more toward economic stability rather than temporary sustenance and perpetually being in survival mode.
