Anti-hunger advocates worry that the nation may be approaching a “hunger cliff,” as some states are ending emergency SNAP benefits even as demand at food pantries—and Covid case numbers—are rising again, writes Bridget Huber in FERN’s latest story.
When hunger and poverty spiked in the U.S. at the beginning of the pandemic, the government responded with a number of temporary measures to strengthen the safety net—expanding unemployment benefits and access to healthcare, halting evictions, and making school lunches free for all students, the story says. It also massively expanded SNAP, which is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and one of our largest anti-poverty programs, period, serving more than 41 million people.
Under the temporary boost, Huber writes, SNAP households got at least $95 extra per month in what are known as emergency allotments. At their peak, in May 2021, the USDA issued $4.1 billion in emergency allotments to more than 19 million households. In February, the most recent month for which data were available, $2.8 billion in emergency allotments were distributed to more than 15 million households.
These benefits are tied to the National Public Health Emergency that was declared in March 2020 and has been subsequently extended multiple times. The current pandemic state of emergency is set to expire on April 16, though it will likely be extended for at least another three months.
Yet a small but growing number of states have effectively opted out of these extra benefits already. Iowa is one of 12 states — all led by Republicans — that have ended their pandemic emergencies without putting a narrower public health emergency declaration into place that would let them continue to provide these additional benefits from the federal government. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds justified recent cuts to unemployment and other supports as a necessary step to get people back to work, warning that “the safety net has become a hammock.”