Hunger program’s slow start leaves millions waiting
WASHINGTON — As child hunger soars to levels without modern precedent, an emergency program Congress created two months ago has reached only a small fraction of the 30 million children it was intended to help.
The program, Pandemic-EBT, aims to compensate for the declining reach of school meals by placing their value on electronic cards that families can use in grocery stores. But collecting lunch lists from thousands of school districts, transferring them to often-outdated state computers and issuing specialized cards has proved much harder than envisioned, leaving millions of needy families waiting to buy food.
Congress approved the effort in mid-March as part of the Families First act, its first major coronavirus relief package. By May 15, only about 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Just 12 states, including New Mexico, had started sending money, and Michigan and Rhode Island alone had finished.
The pace is accelerating, with millions of families expected to receive payments in the coming weeks. But 16 states still lack federal approval to begin the payments and Utah declined to participate, saying it did not have the administrative capacity to distribute the money. Many Southern states with high rates of child hunger have gotten a slow start.
As of May 15, states had issued payments for about 4.4 million children, out of the 30 million who potentially qualify, the Times analysis shows. If all states reached everyone eligible, an unlikely prospect, families could receive as much as $10 billion.
“The program’s going to be very important, but it hasn’t been fast,” said Duke Storen, a former nutrition advocate who leads the Virginia Department of Social Services, which began sending money last week. “The intent is to replace lost meals at school, but the meals have been lost for months, and few benefits have gone out.”
Among pandemic-related hardship, child hunger stands out for its urgency and symbolic resonance — after decades of exposés and reforms, a country of vast wealth still struggles to feed its young. So vital are school meals in some places, states are issuing replacement benefits in waves to keep grocers from being overwhelmed.
The lag between congressional action and families buying food is, in many places, less a story of bureaucratic indifference than a testament to the convoluted nature of the American safety net.
Many officials have worked overtime to start the program amid competing crises. Yet even in delivering a benefit as simple as a school meal, federal, state and local governments can all add delays, as can the private companies that print the cards, which can only buy food.
Aid in the United States generally follows a patchwork logic, but the arbitrary nature of the moment is especially pronounced: Families with three children in Jacksonville, N.C., have received $1,100, while families in Jacksonville, Fla., have received nothing. One corner of red-state America (Fredonia, Ariz.) can get help, while 7 miles away, another (Kanab, Utah) cannot.
“This is why we need a federal nutrition safety net — hunger does not have state borders,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group.
Many anti-hunger experts still think the program will make a big difference, and advocates generally have been reluctant to fault the states. “Obviously we feel a lot of urgency,” said Lisa Davis of Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger group. But she called the administrative challenge — old computers, multiple state agencies — “a Herculean task.”
But Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, who runs the Ohio Association of Food Banks, said the money was coming “as a trickle, not a fire hose as it should have been.”
More than half of schoolchildren qualify for subsidized meals — 78 percent in Louisiana and 85 percent in West Virginia. The program reaches higher up the income ladder than most aid efforts, to families with incomes up to 185 percent of the poverty line, or $48,000 for a family of four.
After classrooms closed in mid-March, most schools continued to serve meals in grab-and-go lines or along bus routes. But despite tenacious efforts, the meals have reached a small share of those who previously got them. National data is lacking, but weekly surveys of low-income families in Philadelphia found the share ranged from 11 percent to 36 percent.
All signs show child hunger is soaring. In a survey of mothers with young children by the Brookings Institution, nearly one-fifth said their children were not getting enough to eat — a rate three times higher than the worst of the Great Recession. The Census Bureau reported last week that 31 percent of households with children lacked the amount or quality of food they desired because they “couldn’t afford to buy more.”