When the USDA increased SNAP benefits by 21 percent last year, it relied on a re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan that should have been subjected to peer review but was not, said a congressional agency on Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office also said key decisions in the re-evaluation were not adequately explained, analyzed, or documented.
The re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), the foundation for calculating SNAP benefits, was the first since 1976. It added $20 billion a year to the cost of food stamps. The increase took effect on Oct. 1, 2021, on the same day a nine-month pandemic boost in benefits expired.
Republican leaders on the Senate and House Agriculture committees, who requested the GAO report, said it showed egregious overreach by Biden administration officials. Arkansas Sen. John Boozman said, “The department’s leadership set out to achieve a predetermined outcome and purposefully ignored important steps that would get in their way.” Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, who will head the House Agriculture Committee in the new congress, said the USDA had tried to obscure its decisions.
“We stand firm on both the quality of our work and the difference it made in millions of people’s lives,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan re-evaluation was a robust, data-driven analysis and a thoughtful and deliberate effort that resulted in a significant and tangible decrease in poverty.”
Stacy Dean, deputy undersecretary for nutrition, said that several of the GAO’s recommendations had already been implemented “in our efforts to ensure the Thrifty Food Plan represents our best estimate of the cost of a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet.”
In the 2018 farm bill, Congress directed the USDA to update the TFP. For years, analysts said the TFP was increasingly out of date due to changes in food prices, American eating patterns, dietary recommendations, and nutrients in food products. The USDA re-evaluation determined that the cost of a “nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” was 21 percent higher than previously calculated.
It was the first time in 46 years the TFP had increased beyond the rate of inflation. Republicans in Congress said previous updates had been cost-neutral.
“The re-evaluation was complex and involved several USDA offices,” said the GAO. The process was accelerated by six months in response to the pandemic, it said.
“Specifically, USDA substituted a limited internal review of the TFP report for the formal peer review it had initially planned. This review was conducted by USDA officials who had been involved in the TFP re-evaluation, and therefore were not independent,” said the GAO. As a result, there was no comprehensive, external peer review, it said, “to assess the transparency, clarity, or interpretation of the results.”
“The complexity of the economic model USDA uses to calculate the TFP led officials to make numerous methodological and policy decisions during the 2021 re-evaluation, as they had in past re-evaluations,” said the GAO report. “However, GAO found that key decisions did not fully meet standards for economic analysis, primarily due to failure to fully disclose the rationale for decisions, insufficient analysis of the effects of decisions, and lack of documentation.”
At latest count, 41.7 million people were enrolled in SNAP, with an average monthly benefit of $224 per person.
The GAO report, Thrifty Food Plan, is available here.