As hunger spreads, federal government takes timid steps
Administration opts to not expand meals programs, SNAP
WASHINGTON — As hunger spreads across a locked-down nation, the Trump administration has balked at the simplest ways to feed the hardest hit, through expanding school meals programs and food-stamp benefits and waiving certain work requirements as unemployment reaches record levels.
Instead, the Department of Agriculture is focusing on giving states more flexibility to feed their citizens through regulatory waivers, many of which expire at the end of the month.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, rates of household food insecurity have doubled, and the rates of childhood food insecurity have quadrupled, according to the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
The Agriculture Department has issued waivers giving states more administrative power over the agency’s 15 nutrition assistance programs, which cover children, women and infants, and adults. The USDA also plans to send more than 5 million food boxes a week to children living in rural areas who would have difficulty getting meals still distributed at many schools.
Those waivers are modest: One allows school meals to be served outside of crowded settings; another allows meals to be distributed without some education activity.
The department has allowed 24 states to receive additional assistance through an electronic transfer of benefits that accounts for the value of free and reducedprice meals that their children no longer receive because of school closures, an average of $114 a month per child.
And families in 23 states can use benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy groceries online. Other waivers have allowed states to issue emergency allotments that increase SNAP benefits to the monthly maximum for all beneficiaries. That has expanded food assistance for some
working poor families but didn’t help the poorest, who already get the maximum benefit.
The department also has said it will send $16 billion to farmers, a group that President Donald Trump long has favored, and buy $3 billion in fresh produce, dairy and meat for food banks, community and faith-based organizations, and other nonprofit organizations.
“This is a challenging time for many people right now, and we are working every day to ensure all Americans have access to safe, affordable and nutritious food,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement.
But many of those waivers expire at the end of May, although Congress gave the department waiver authority through September.
The department won’t seek authority to reimburse local governments for meals that schools serve to hungry adults, informally rejecting a plea from California. It has turned away several state requests to waive the 20hour weekly work requirement for college students seeking SNAP. The federal government hasn’t moved to increase SNAP benefits by 15 percent, as Democrats have wanted.
And Tuesday it filed a notice that it would appeal a court ruling that blocked stricter work requirements for food stamps that were to take effect in April, stripping nearly 700,000 people from the food stamp rolls.
“It is hard to believe that this administration would still want to pursue a rule to take SNAP benefits away from hundreds of thousands of Americans during this unprecedented time,” said Chinh Le, legal director for the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, which sued the department over it.
The hunger problems are likely to worsen for people like Rhoda Johnson in St. James Parish, La. Johnson, 60, used to walk with her four grandchildren to the end of their street in the morning to pick up milk and Frosted Flakes for breakfast and corn dogs and fresh fruit for lunch from a school bus that would stop there along its meal delivery route.
But the school shut down its meal program March 22 because an employee tested positive for COVID-19.
“Now it is nothing, absolutely nothing,” Johnson said.
Her daughter uses her SNAP benefits, formerly known as the food-stamp program, to feed her children, but even before the pandemic, the benefits didn’t last the entire month. Johnson herself has depended on neighbors and friends who share their food.
“I don’t care if you’re on SNAP, on savings money, if you’re on work money, on unemployment money, whatever it is, it is a difficult time,” Johnson said.