SNAP provides a lifeline during pandemic
WASHINGTON — More than 6 million people enrolled in food stamps in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented expansion that is likely to continue as more jobless people deplete their savings and billions in unemployment aid expires this month.
From February to May, the program grew by 17 percent, about three times faster than in any previous three months, according to state data collected by the New York Times. Its rapid expansion is a testament to both the hardship imposed by the pandemic and the importance of a program that until recently drew conservative attack.
Among the 42 states for which the Times collected data, caseloads grew in all but one. The rolls have surged across Appalachian hamlets, urban cores like Miami and Detroit, and whitepicket-fence suburbs outside Atlanta and Houston, rising faster in rich counties than in poor ones, as the downturn caused by the virus claimed the restaurant, cleaning and gig economy jobs that support the affluent.
Food stamps — formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — support young and old, healthy and disabled, the working and the unemployed, making it the closest thing the United States has to a guaranteed income. Though administered by states, the benefits are paid by the federal government, with no spending cap, and the program has largely avoided the delays that have plagued unemployment insurance.
“SNAP is the universal safety net,” said Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University.
Those turning to SNAP in recent months include people as varied as Musad Nasser, a Detroit truck driver, originally from Yemen, who quit for fear of infecting an asthmatic young son; Kelly Cintron, a single mother in Orlando, Fla., recovering from her fiancé’s suicide; and Desiree
Rasmer, who lost her job managing an Ann Arbor, Mich., chiropractic clinic and hopes to become a social worker to promote “holistic healing and restorative justice.”
Especially grateful was Joseph Baker, 48, a firearms instructor laid off from an Orlando pawnshop and firing range. A single father raising two big-eating teenagers, Baker exhausted his savings and watched his shelves dwindle as he waited two months for unemployment aid. When he turned to SNAP, it arrived in a week — a safety net beneath the safety net.
“Oh my God, dude, I didn’t have to worry about whether I can feed my kids,” Baker said, recalling his relief. “I don’t want to be dramatic and say it saved my life, but it saved my mental life, ’cause I was stressed out, man.”
Thirty states have experienced double-digit growth, and usage has risen in all 133 counties in the three West Coast states. About 50,000 people have joined the rolls in the county that includes Atlanta, more than 100,000 in the county that includes Detroit and more than 200,000 in those that include
Miami and Los Angeles.
About 43 million people — roughly 1 of every 8 Americans — now receive SNAP, the Times found.
That is well below the peak, nearly 48 million, reached after the Great Recession. But unless Congress acts this month, about 20 million Americans will lose a $600 weekly bonus to unemployment checks. Since that bonus disqualifies most people from SNAP, its elimination could add millions to the rolls.
To glimpse the program’s reach, consider Michigan, where caseloads have grown 30 percent, spending has grown 90 percent and 1.5 million people collected benefits in May. The rolls have grown rapidly in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, but faster in four contiguous counties — blue-collar Macomb, and Livingston, Oakland and Washtenaw, the three wealthiest in the state.
They have soared in western Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids, a manufacturing hub for office furniture, and in vacation destinations like Grand Traverse County, where SNAP growth exceeded 40 percent.
Robert Gordon, who runs the state Department of Health and Human Services, cast the expansion as a program victory and credited the effort of hundreds of employees working from home.
“In a time of unprecedented hardship, we are honored to be able to get families help they need,” he said.
In Georgia, SNAP grew by nearly 40 percent in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, but even more in affluent surrounding counties like Cobb (55 percent) and Fayette (61 percent).
No state has seen more growth than Florida, which has added nearly 1 million residents to the rolls. Among the new centers of SNAP usage is Orlando, where a region known for flights of fantasy became a center of nutritional need. With amusement parks closed and tourism vanishing, caseloads in Orange and Osceola counties rose more than 50 percent, adding nearly 125,000 people.
Many people turned to the program while awaiting jobless aid. When MaKayela Johnson, a single mother in Newport, Ky., was furloughed from her job in a medical office, she waited two months for jobless benefits, which arrived the day she returned to work. But a week after applying for SNAP, she had a debit card that allowed her to buy $355 of food at virtually any grocery store.
“It was the first safety net, because that’s what I could count on,” she said.
Along with milk and bread, the program often brings psychological relief. “It was such a weight lifted off my shoulders,” said Gabriel Ocasio Mejias, 28, who lost a sales clerk job at the Orlando airport in what he called retaliation for union organizing. “When I got the card, I teared up.” Before it arrived, he was forced to discard items in the checkout line, an experience he called “shameful and embarrassing.”
Cintron, the single mother in Florida, hesitated to use a program she associates with dependency. She spent 20 years as a job coach in the Orlando public schools before following her fiancé to Texas and returning after his death. “It was emotionally hard to apply — I’ve always had a job — but I had to do this for my kids,” she said.
Despite SNAP’s expansion, surveys continue to show high rates of “food insecurity” — reduced quality of food or uncertain access — as well as outright hunger.
A new survey by the Urban Institute found 17.7 percent of adults report food insecurity, much higher than precrisis levels. The rate for Black people and Latinos was about twice as high as for whites.
“There’s no question that both food insecurity and hunger have risen,” said Elaine Waxman, a coauthor of the study.
Johnson, the furloughed medical office assistant in Kentucky, said the $355 she received (the maximum for two people) shrank her food budget by about a third, and she ate less to feed her 5-year-old son. “I would buy him what I knew he would eat and skip breakfast myself,” she said.