A bipartisan bill, introduced on Tuesday by Sens. Tammy Duckworth, Lisa Murkowski and 12 other senators, aims to make it easier for servicemembers to receive SNAP benefits.
As many as one in five members of the U.S. military experience food insecurity, but many are unable to get SNAP benefits because they receive housing allowances that are counted as income, which puts them over the limit for eligibility.
The new bill, the Military Family Nutrition Access Act, would prevent the Basic Allowance for Housing — intended to cover the cost of off-base housing — from being counted as income for SNAP purposes. There is some precedent for treating the housing allowance differently than other income: The IRS does not tax the housing allowance, and some states do not count it as income when determining eligibility for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program.
“Far too many of our military families are going hungry because of unintended barriers that make them unable to access essential nutrition assistance programs that they should be eligible for,” Duckworth said.
An Iraq war veteran whose family received food stamps when she was a child, Duckworth has been at the forefront of addressing the issue of food insecurity in the military. She spearheaded a provision in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that provides a Basic Needs Allowance for servicemembers making at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty guideline.
It is not clear how many military households would be affected by the bill, if enacted. MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger – an advocacy group that works in the U.S. and Israel – has previously estimated that about 25,000 military families might become eligible for SNAP if the housing allowance was no longer counted as income. But that calculation doesn’t take into account the spike in unemployment caused by the pandemic or the new Basic Needs Allowance.
“SNAP is one of the federal government’s most effective, powerful programs, benefitting nearly 40 million hungry Americans every year. Yet, low-income service members who struggle with food insecurity are shut out of it,” said Abby Leibman, MAZON’s president and CEO. “If Congress is truly committed to supporting our troops, it must stop forcing military families to suffer from hunger needlessly and pass this bill without delay.”