Greetings—
About 42 million people nationwide turn to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to help meet their food needs every year, but federal policymakers are considering cutting SNAP benefits. One option being explored is to roll back the update to the Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to determine SNAP benefits and was updated in 2021 to ensure that benefits reflected current dietary guidelines and food costs.
A new tool from Urban Institute experts allows users to explore how eliminating the 2021 update would create large deficits between the maximum SNAP benefit and the cost of a modestly priced meal in their state and county.
If the Thrifty Food Plan reevaluation were eliminated, the researchers find that:
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SNAP benefits would fail to cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in every county in the US. The maximum per meal SNAP benefit would be reduced from $2.84 to $2.25, and the average cost of a meal nationwide would be 51 percent higher than the maximum SNAP benefit. Over the course of a month, SNAP benefits would fall short of meal costs by $105 on average.
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Some counties will experience deeper challenges. In the 20 counties with the largest disparities, the cost of a moderately-priced meal would be twice as much as the maximum SNAP benefit. These counties include high-cost urban areas like New York County and rural areas like Custer County in Idaho.
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“As a result, families who receive SNAP benefits would have to cut back on the amount of food they eat or turn to cheaper, less healthy options,” the researchers write. “These rollbacks would be particularly hard on the nearly 4 in 10 people who qualify for the maximum benefit because of very limited resources.”
Explore the tool to see how families in your community could be affected by this policy change. If you have questions for the research team, please let us know.
Thanks,
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- The Stakeholder Outreach team
U R B A N I N S T I T U T E
www.urban.org
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Urban Institute is a nonprofit research organization that believes in the power of evidence to improve people’s lives. Urban as an organization does not take policy positions but Urban’s independent experts are empowered to make recommendations based on their research.
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