More than two months since the Biden administration announced the most ambitious summer food program in U.S. history, the USDA has approved benefits distribution plans for just 18 states — even with school out of session across the country.
In April, the administration expanded the pandemic-era benefit known as Pandemic-EBT, or P-EBT, which was established when schools shut down in March 2020. Despite rollout issues, P-EBT has helped ease childhood hunger when most schools were virtual, providing families with funds to make up for meals children would have eaten at school. The April expansion extended those benefits through the summer months, giving more than 34 million kids monthly benefits cards worth up to $375, or around $7 per weekday.
Advocates lauded the expansion as a much-needed complement to existing summer feeding programs, which reach just a small fraction of in-need kids — fewer than 20 percent of those served during the school year. And while the school-year P-EBT program was difficult to implement and experienced significant delays, summer benefits were anticipated to be far easier to disburse.
Experts attribute the slow rollout of summer benefits to ongoing delays in the school-year program. “States are still working on the school-year program, just getting benefits out now, and have yet to turn their focus to Summer EBT,” said Crystal FitzSimons, who focuses on child nutrition programs at the Food Research & Action Center.
In New Jersey, for example, families are still waiting on benefits from last year; more than 840,000 kids haven’t received any of the emergency assistance for which they’ve been eligible since last fall. In Tennessee, ongoing delays have led families to file appeals, to receive missed benefits.
In Louisiana, families are just now beginning to receive benefits from the school year. “My hunch is that Summer-EBT won’t be loaded until the end of the summer, because other school-year benefits would be first in line,” said Danny Mintz, the safety-net policy advocate at the Louisiana Budget Project, which assists low-income families.
Once it’s off the ground, though, implementation of the summer program shouldn’t face the same hurdles as its school-year predecessor. “During the school year, states had to figure out how much of the time children were learning remotely versus in person,” explained Zoë Neuberger, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “which made it much harder to calculate the benefit level. But these complexities don’t apply to the summer program.”
These “stumbling blocks at the federal level” shouldn’t apply to the summer program, she explained. During the school year, states had to determine student eligibility on a case-by-case basis, calculating benefits according to the number of days children attended in-person classes—and navigating hybrid learning models that often varied even within a given school district.
A USDA spokesperson told FERN that the department was in the process of approving 10 additional states’ plans for summer benefits, and creating a summer P-EBT state plan template to facilitate the process. But until families receive overdue school-year benefits, summer assistance will remain on hold.