Aiden Irish

May 1, 2026

As I was setting out my booth on the first market of the season, I found myself pausing over the materials from the market managers about food assistance programs. On the surface, this information only applies to the people visiting my booth who use these programs. But as I was stacking beets, I was thinking about how we are all impacted by them, whether or not we have ever directly received them.

So, let’s talk about U.S. food assistance, why it’s so important, and why current changes should concern us all.

A Brief Overview of U.S. Food Assistance

When we talk about “food assistance” in the U.S. we are talking about a litany of public and private charitable assistance programs. First, let’s deal with the private, mostly nonprofit sector that encompasses food banks and food pantries. This sector is not the primary focus of this article, but it’s critical to acknowledge that private nonprofit food assistance is both essential in the U.S. and wholly insufficient, only meeting about 10% of estimated need nationally.

The private food sector is also subject to myriad criticisms. Arguably the most important of these is that the sector as a whole does not do enough to address the foundational causes of food insecurity. Yet at the same time, food banks and pantries are also a critical last lifeline for many people, particularly the 21 million people experiencing food insecurity who do not financially qualify for the public food programs we’re going to talk about next (See pg. 12 here).

The real power when it comes to addressing U.S. food insecurity lies in an array of government-funded food assistance programs, largely funded at the level of the U.S. Federal government. The largest of these is SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program previously known as “food stamps”. SNAP makes up approximately three-quarters of the U.S. Farm Bill and accounts for 70% of all U.S. federal spending on food assistance (If you’re interested in why food assistance is in the Farm Bill, let me know and I can write an explainer on that topic, because it deserves its own discussion). SNAP spending in 2024 totaled nearly $100 billion and reached approximately 42 million recipients, averaging about $187 in benefits per person, per month.

Those last two numbers should really stand out to you. Forty-two million means that approximately one out of every eight people in the U.S., including one-in-five children, depend on food assistance. Additionally, $100 billion sounds like a large number, but $187 per person, per month isn’t. Even despite this low per capita spending, SNAP still reduces the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity by nearly 30 percent. That’s not enough, but it’s one of the most potent tools we currently have.

Total spending on SNAP fluctuates depending on need, which in turn follows economic conditions. As a result, you will see the total number change in response to the economy. In the last two decades, SNAP usage spiked in response to the housing crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Importantly, the rate of participation in SNAP (i.e., the percent of the population using the program) had not returned to pre-2008 levels by the time that COVID hit in 2020 (See this USDA chart for more details). The food insecurity impacts of COVID were a bit like being punched in the face just as much of the U.S. population was starting to get back on its knees after being punched in the gut in 2008.

SNAP is the largest program in the U.S., but it’s not alone. It is aided by and connected to a variety of other federal food programs, including The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (simply known as WIC), various child nutrition programs including free/reduced cost school lunch and breakfast programs, and a variety of other group specific programs, such as the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Unlike SNAP, these programs target more specific populations, have different funding structures, and different eligibility requirements. Just as one final note, it is also critical to know that the private nonprofit food assistance sector also depends on funding and assistance from the U.S. Federal government.

All of these programs are administered by individual states, which often add their own twists – for better or worse – on how each program is implemented. Washington State has long been a leader in streamlining applications and expanding access. SNAP in Washington, for example, is called “Basic Food” and starting in the 1990s it greatly expanded access (If you are needing food assistance, this site has information on how to enroll in the program). Other states are much more restrictive, with stronger restrictions on who can apply, what can be purchased, and more complicated enrollment processes.

The Built-In Inefficiency of U.S. Food Assistance

If you’re feeling at all lost in all of these programs, you’re not alone. Confusion about eligibility and lack of awareness is a significant reason why many people don’t know that they might be eligible. In Washington State, 44 percent of people who are eligible for SNAP (aka Basic Food) are not enrolled. Lack of eligibility awareness is particularly acute for seniors. Nationally, as much as 70 percent of seniors who are eligible for SNAP are not enrolled. Additionally, variations in administration, eligibility, and how program benefits can be used between programs like SNAP, WIC, etc. all further limit clarity and efficient use of resources. Take SNAP and WIC. Both offer food assistance, but for different items, using different allotment systems, and over different time periods.

At the state and local level, there are important efforts to streamline applications for these programs. Washington State has long been a leader on these kinds of efforts to make access to assistance easier. But at the end of the day, these streamlining efforts are band-aids on a convoluted and confusing national system.

In addition to under enrollment, public food assistance programs like SNAP are also costly to simply implement before a single benefit has been paid out to a recipient. All of these programs are what we call “means tested” benefits. To put it bluntly, this just means that you have to prove that you’re poor enough to receive the benefits. In addition to the paperwork and confusion that such processes shoulder on potential program beneficiaries, it also creates significant work for state and federal program administrators. In 2019, for example, state and federal governments combined spent approximately $8.5 billion in administrative costs to operate SNAP. Historically, these costs have been split 50-50 between each state and the federal government in a cost-share arrangement. One of the many changes that the second Trump Administration has implemented is a move that will shift more of the costs of these programs on to states. This wonky administrative change will have catastrophic consequences for the ability of states to continue these programs.

In addition to the direct administrative costs involved in running SNAP and other food assistance programs, the complexity of the system requires a sizeable industry – both in the public and private sectors – dedicated to helping people learn about and access these programs. Food banks, pantries, and myriad nonprofits play crucial roles in helping people navigate food assistance eligibility and applications. Until the start of the second Trump administration, there was even a federally-funded program called SNAP-Ed that was dedicated to helping people effectively use their benefits. Crucially, this program was eliminated early in the Trump Administration.

There isn’t space here to summarize all of the inefficiencies of U.S. public food assistance – and I really need to get back to the farm – but I want to highlight one additional inefficiency that is baked into food assistance. This is the “benefits cliff”, which impacts practically all U.S. poverty alleviation programs (This Oregon Public Broadcasting report provides an effective illustration). The short explainer is that economic improvement – if and when it is possible – occurs on a continuous scale often in very small increments. However, public assistance is cut-off at specific income thresholds with dramatic consequences. As a result, when on these programs, you can find yourself in the paradoxical situation of needing to refuse pay raises, promotions, or any other economic improvement in your life because doing so would result in exceeding an arbitrary threshold where losing benefits would exceed the value of your economic gain. Effectively, our assistance programs penalize people who are trying to pull themselves out of poverty.

Despite all of these shortcomings, public food assistance is still absolutely essential, both morally and economically. Without them – or a similar replacement – one-in-eight Americans would starve and we all would suffer. So, let’s turn now to the reasons why we all benefit from the existence of publicly provided food assistance.

Why We All Benefit from Public Food Assistance

There are myriad reasons that we all benefit from the availability of public food assistance. Before I get into the economic reasons, I want to start with the moral necessity of these programs that is too often neglected in policy discussions.

Public policy reflects a society’s actual values. They communicate to the world what that society believes in practice. Policies also communicate to the people of a country what their government thinks of them. The convoluted and callously labyrinthian system that we currently have sends a message that the poorest among us deserve to suffer, that their hunger is their own problem, and that they should jump through hoops to receive a modest publicly assisted meal. But the elimination or reduction of these programs that we’ll talk about shortly would sentence tens of millions of people to further deprivation and starvation. It sends the message that the people who benefit from these programs simply don’t deserve to exist. We should all be morally ashamed of such a message.

In addition to the moral necessity of public food assistance, there are a variety of economic reasons – both personal and societal – that make food assistance a valuable investment. First, we live in a country where economic security and associated food security is, more often than not, a tenuous condition. Just to use one example, almost all of us are at risk of unexpected health crises that could upend whatever economic security we might currently enjoy. About 40% of U.S. adults owe some kind medical debt, it is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S., and it is associated with a four-fold increase in the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity regardless of income level. Under our current policy and economic regime, almost none of us are free from the likelihood that we may, at some point, need a helping hand.  

Second, public food assistance makes good investment sense. Remember when I talked about the economic multiplier effect in my post on why I prefer cash? In that article, I said that any time a dollar invested results in more than a dollar of increased economic activity, then that investment was a good one. Invest a dollar in the local food economy, and you get about $1.50 to $2 (or more) in increased economic activity. That’s a pretty good investment. But investments in food assistance make that look like chump change.

For every dollar invested in food assistance for children – and one-in-five children in the U.S. need it – analysis suggests that there are $62 of economic improvement over the life of that child. This benefit results from improvements in educational outcomes, lower school dropout rates, higher resulting wages, longer life expectancy, fewer emergency hospitalizations and chronic illnesses, etc. All of these benefits stem from simply getting enough food, particularly healthy food.

Additionally, spending on food assistance benefits local economies, particularly during economic downturns. Every dollar spent on SNAP results in $1.54 in economic activity when recipients spend that money at local grocery stores, retailers, and farmers markets. The benefits of that spending are compounded when spent with local businesses, like I talked about in the article on cash.

Furthermore, spending on food assistance results in reduced medical spending. One study found that, as a result of receiving SNAP benefits, recipients were more likely to visit a doctor for checkups, take prescribed medications to completion, and avoid unexpected hospitalization because they had more financial ability to afford these things. The result was that a typical SNAP recipient incurred $1,400 less in medical costs on public spending, 25% less than an equivalent person not receiving food assistance.

All of these are moral, security, and economic reasons to maintain and further invest in public food assistance programs. But let’s talk about what’s currently happening.

Current Trends

Part of the reason that I’m writing this post is because food assistance programs at the federal level are under attack. These federal changes undermine food assistance everywhere, including individual state programs. I was going to try and review those changes here, but as this NY Times article aptly summarizes, that task is daunting because the Trump Administration is trying to upend everything about food assistance. The administration has implemented new work requirements, rolled back funding, cancelled funding sources, shifted more of the administrative costs to states, and generally undermined all of the most critical food assistance programs at the federal level (see the previously mentioned NYT article for more detail).

Additionally, the administration has attacked the very research that helps us know how many people are experiencing food insecurity. In a truly astounding move, the administration simply stopped releasing data collected by the federal government that tracks how many people have difficulty getting enough to eat. If we cannot know the scope of the problem, our ability to effectively address it is fundamentally undermined (This is a tactic this administration has taken in several areas of government data).

Perhaps the most dramatic action came during the government shutdown in the autumn of 2025. During the shutdown, the Trump Administration held back emergency funding for SNAP in order to use it as a bargaining chip during budget negotiations. Food assistance has been a contentious topic since public programs were first established in the latter half of the 20th Century. But this action marked a dramatic shift in the politics of food assistance, one that was willing to let people starve for the sake of political theater, a decision that communicated to 42 million people that their lives don’t matter.

It is important to state here that many of the actions being taken by the Trump administration are not fundamentally new in nature. Efforts to limit or eliminate food assistance have existed as long as the programs have. What is critically different here is the severity and speed of rollbacks to these programs.  

Policy Actions Now and Going Forward

The list of actions that are needed to “fix” U.S. public food assistance is long, too long to fully address here. Instead, I want to highlight three categories of changes on three different time horizons; short-, mid-, and long-term.

In the short-term, policy around food assistance needs to protect and restore the programs that are already in place. SNAP and associated federal food assistance programs may be deeply flawed, but they are also essential. Without them, tens of millions of U.S. residents will experience immediate food insecurity. In short, they will starve. This has already started as a result of cuts and rollbacks to benefits. The consequences of this are not only economically and financially harmful, but morally catastrophic.

In the mid-term, reforms to food assistance need to expand access, streamline administrative connection between various programs, and implement reforms that eliminate the benefits cliff. Economically and administratively, one strategy that would be more efficient and effective is to replace means testing with direct cash assistance; in short, just give people money rather than tokens that are only usable for specific things. Ideally, this would be on a sliding scale that reflects need without resulting in a benefits cliff. This would streamline administration by eliminating duplication, simplify access by creating a single assistance program, and improve flexibility for recipients by allowing them to use the assistance in a way that meets their needs. The U.S. already has a direct cash assistance poverty alleviation program. It is called TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But, in addition to the demeaning name, it’s small – only totaling $37 billion in 2024 – and also highly limited in who is eligible. 

In addition to the administrative and economic reasons that direct-cash is preferable, cash assistance also better respects the autonomy of those receiving it. Social stigma is a significant barrier to people using food assistance programs and creates unnecessary shame by forcing public signals of suffering. This is particularly important for children in school settings. If you have ever fumbled with your EBT card (the card that is used to administer SNAP benefits) in line at the grocery store, you’ll know what I mean. Direct-cash-assistance minimizes this public shame in addition to improving the efficiency of assistance.

Most importantly, while advocating for all of these short and mid-term efforts, food security policy advocacy also cannot lose sight of a long-term focus on structural causes of food insecurity. Ultimately, food insecurity is a symptom of larger systemic problems. The fact that one-in-eight Americans, including one-in-five children depend on food assistance is not an inevitable fact of life, it is a byproduct of a larger economic system. The fact that an unexpected medical crisis quadruples your risk of food insecurity is not an inevitability, it’s a public policy choice. The fact that Black Americans and rural Americans experience food insecurity at higher rates than the population at large is not inevitable, it’s the result of policy and history. We can and must address the underlying histories and policies that create these conditions.  

There is likely always going to be a need for a safety net that can help people who fall through the proverbial cracks, but that number should be far fewer than it currently is. A society where more than one-in-seven people experience food insecurity - including those on food assistance and those who are not - is not a society with a few cracks in the floor, it is a society without a floor.

We all benefit from living in a society with a solid floor.