The History of SNAP Benefits

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. I want to make an announcement to start this segment about something that's coming up that you can help us do well. We're working on this year's Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being, something we give out every year for people enhancing community well-being in various ways. This year, the prize will honor people who work in and around schools making an impact specifically on the social and emotional well-being of children in our area.

There's been so much need in that respect as I don't have to tell you since the pandemic, social and emotional learning and well-being. If you'd like to nominate someone who you think has done extraordinary work in that field, you can go to wnyc.org/lehrerawards2023. We've set up a nomination page, and we're looking around in various ways for some people doing extraordinary work with social and emotional well-being of children.

If you would like to nominate someone, go to this webpage, wnyc.org/lehrerawards2023. Now, if you live in New York or New Jersey and receive SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, the amount of money you're getting to buy food just went down. Why? The federal government had increased the benefit at the beginning of the pandemic, and now it's gone down to pre-pandemic levels. This is another kind of conversation like we were having before about restaurants being able to use the streets temporarily, and that's expiring and they're figuring out what to do. The same thing has happened with SNAP benefits.

Fair enough, in a way for it to go back down to pre-pandemic benefits as most pandemic unemployment is gone, but the reduction in money for food comes as the price of food has been going up as we all know due to inflation. Food pantries and soup kitchens have been preparing for a spike in demand as a result. The New York State Controller's office has figures that show food insecurity actually went down during the pandemic, but it's expected to rise again now.

According to federal government statistics cited on NPR, more than 80% of SNAP beneficiaries are working families, people with disabilities, or elderly people. A source quoted by NPR says the steepest drops will disproportionately hit elderly people. Older adults who qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit will see their amount fall, get this, from $281 a month to just $23 for the month of March with the expiration of the COVID supplement.

If you're among those affected, the NPR story reminds us there are other government programs you might qualify for children up to the age of five, and pregnant or postpartum women may qualify for WIC, the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. Low-income people who are at least 60 years old may qualify for programs targeted at seniors including the Seniors Farmers' Market Nutrition Program.

Did you know there's such a thing as that, that provides coupons for fresh produce at farmer's markets? We thought we would use this late pandemic turning point in SNAP benefits to take a step back and take a quick walk through the history of the food stamp program and wind up back at the present and alternative approaches to food insecurity. With me for this is Janet Poppendieck, professor emerita of sociology at Hunter College. She has written extensively about hunger, poverty, and food assistance in the US among her many publications. There was one just before the pandemic in 2019 called College Students and SNAP: The New Face of Food Insecurity. Professor Poppendieck, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Janet Poppendieck: Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let's do some history. When and why did the food stamp program begin in the United States?

Janet Poppendieck: It began toward the end of the Great Depression in 1939. There had been a commodity distribution program from 1933, and the economists in the Department of Agriculture were looking for an alternative that would accomplish three things. They still wanted to continue to move surplus foods into the hands of hungry people. This was a food stamp program that focused on surplus foods.

They wanted to create consumer choice. There were a lot of problems with the commodity distribution and people getting stuff they didn't know how to use or wasn't part of their diet. They wanted to include grocers in the transaction both for the convenience of the clients and because grocers had been shouldering a lot of the burden of the depression and I guess USDA, I felt they'd earned a right to be included in the transaction. That program ran from '39 to '43. It was terminated during the war. There were virtually no surpluses left and the need was much reduced.

Brian Lehrer: It's so interesting. Can I follow up on that for just a second? It wasn't just the hunger, the need for food itself that was enough for the federal government to act. It had to be that a period of high unemployment then coincided with periods of agricultural surplus and the farmers didn't have anything to do with that food and they were losing money. Is that right and is that why the food stamp program wound up in the agriculture department, the government department concerned with the producers of food not specifically the hungry people?

Janet Poppendieck: Absolutely. The origin story for food assistance. In addition to SNAP, we have the programs that you just reminded people were available and the school meal program. It adds up to 15 federal nutrition programs. The origin story is really an accident in the early years of the New Deal, the Roosevelt's administration wanted to force all that glut on the hog market, and they wanted to pump some money into the hands of Midwestern farmers. They put out a thing to buy baby pigs and pregnant sows, 6 million of them, and it was a public relations disaster. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong because the baby pigs couldn't be processed by the equipment for processing food.

They were turning it into something called tankage which is kind of liquified pig that gets dried and used for fertilizer. There wasn't time to dry it all and the processors dumped it and the weather turned hot and great stench arose from quarries and gravel pits where it had been dumped. Anti-Roosevelt newspapers got hold. It was a real-- I think of it as Roosevelt's Katrina. It was a public relations disaster. Roosevelt was smart and savvy, and he directed his Secretary of Agriculture and his Federal Emergency Relief Administrator to create a program. They create a little corporation called The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to purchase farmer surpluses and distribute them for relief.

Brian Lehrer: That is so fascinating and history that I personally didn't know. Let's flash forward to the 1960s. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson relaunched the food stamp program. Why them and why then?

Janet Poppendieck: Just FYI, there was food stamp legislation introduced into every Congress between the termination in 1943 and the eventual creation of the modern food stamp program in 1963. It had champions because it had worked well. People liked that program. Having said that, why them? President Kennedy, his first two executive orders on his first day in office, one was to increase the number of commodities in the commodity distribution program. He had seen it when he was campaigning in West Virginia and had seen how inadequate it was. The other was to direct USDA to create a pilot food stamp program. I think in Kennedy's case, it was a commitment growing out of his experiences on the campaign trail. After his death, Johnson took over pushing for food stamps.

Johnson was, as you know, a very savvy politician with a lot of roots in the farm block, as it was called back then. Agriculture had outsized power in the United States Senate because that was back when chairmanships of committees were based on seniority, longevity, not on party. Those southern Democrats that got elected for generations as it seemed ran a lot of the important committees whose cooperation Johnson knew he needed, and his Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, looked at the changing demographics and realized that in the House of Representatives, there were fewer and fewer and fewer members from farm-dominated districts.

Farms were consolidating, people were going out of the farming business as big corporations took over and there were fewer and fewer districts that could be seen as reliably pro-farm. Freeman advised that farmers are not going to be able to get their subsidies through unless they had something to trade with more urban representatives. That's how it happened.

Brian Lehrer: Again, it was the interest of the farmers meet the interest of low-income people in the cities, therefore, food stamp program. Listeners, we're talking history. If you have a food stamp history question, feel free, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Also, help us report this story in the present. We will get to that. Add a little oral history of your own if you have any as well. Are you currently receiving SNAP benefits and are you being affected by the end of the pandemic boost in their value? How will it affect you? How are you beginning to cope or compensate?

212-433-WNYC. Anyone working at food pantries or soup kitchens is already seeing in effect of this expiration report from those front lines. 212-433-9692. On the oral history track, anyone who's ever been on SNAP or food stamp benefits or seeing them benefit your parents, your grandparents, you as a kid, or anyone else you know, tell us one of those stories from an earlier time or from today. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer with Janet Poppendieck expert on all this from Hunter College.

Professor Poppendieck, the National Institutes of Health has a really good food stamps history page. Maybe you know it, I just learned about it as I was preparing for this segment. It says by 1971, 10 million Americans were receiving food stamps as part of President Johnson's war on poverty. I'm curious if there are good metrics that show how successful it was at actually reducing poverty and for whom.

Janet Poppendieck: That's a good question for which I don't have a real quick answer, but let me just talk about that 1970 period. The Act test in 1964 and the food stamp program they created was hampered at every turn by the committee, the AG Committee's desire to protect the interests of farmers within it. Instead of the benefit being calculated to meet the gap [laughs] between what people could afford and what they needed, it was prorated based on their income. There were a lot of problems with the bill that was created. In the late '60s, we had a big national discovery of hunger.

There were specials on TV. It grew out of hearings and war in poverty, but in any case, it gave birth to a whole set of advocacy organizations, which took on the task of reforming federal food assistance. They got this food stamp program extended to every county in the United States, and they got the benefits adjusted to reflect what's now the Thrifty Food Plan within then the economy food plan. Anyway, a USDA standard diet measure that made huge changes that made the program both more accessible to people in need and more worth applying for. We did see a great rise in participation.

In terms of metrics about participation, USDA not only collects that data regularly and all the time, but does a wonderful job of charting it so you can follow the rises and drops in participation and correlate them with what was going on in the economy and what was going on in the policy. That metric is there. The question of whether it really solved the hunger problem for people, it varied with households, it varied with parts of the nation. The benefits were uniform nationwide, so you can figure they made a bigger difference in areas where the cost of living was relatively low than they did in areas like New York with very high housing costs. Food stamps make a difference. Food stamps made the difference.

Brian Lehrer: We talk a lot these days about how government benefit programs of the 20th century were designed in many cases to exclude black people, GI Bill on housing and college and other examples. Food stamps or more racially equal?

Janet Poppendieck: With food stamps, the issue has to do with the behavior of welfare offices that administered the programs because they are administered locally. I am sure that there were great racial disparities in the percentage of people in need who were actually enrolled and were able to get and keep their benefits. Anytime you have local administration, particularly back then where there was less-- people weren't making cell phone videos of transactions at the welfare office back then. I'm sure that there was great racial disparity. It wasn't built in quite the way-- it wasn't social security because both farm labor and household labor were excluded and those were the two of the occupations in which African Americans predominated.

Brian Lehrer: Let me make a quick stop in the 1980s before we get to the present and ask you about backlash against the food stamp program. I'm thinking of the Reagan anti-government assistance era of the '80s, his descriptions of so-called welfare queens getting over on the taxpayers, and that was followed pretty much back-to-back by the Gingrich Congress anti-government assistance period when Bill Clinton was president and they overhauled welfare as they knew it at that time. Did new limitations or requirements get placed on food stamps at that time as well?

Janet Poppendieck: Yes, absolutely. In the beginning of the Reagan era, we had the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of '81 and '82 OBRA. They made all kinds of cuts, most of them relatively small, but cumulatively made it harder for people to apply restricted eligibility in various ways and benefits. Generally speaking, the anti-food stamp or the effort to control food stamp has three [laughs] three claims. One is that they cost too much. The second is that they create work disincentives. The third is that recipients don't use them widely, that they spend them all on cookies and soft drinks.

These are recurring tropes that we hear again and again. In the Clinton situation with 1994-- the contract with America Gingrich and his crew came in and they wanted to block grant the food stamp program. Advocates get real nervous as soon as the term block grant comes up because that turns the-- it ends the entitlement status. One of the great achievements of the work in the 1970s was that food stamps are, and in SNAP now, an entitlement. If you are eligible and you're denied, you can take it to court. There's a thing called a fair hearing, that you have a legally enforceable right to the program if you're eligible.

Congress has to use performance funding so that if the program runs out of its-- exceeds its budget, they need to appropriate more unless they're going to have special legislation that introduces a cap. Block granting ends that. Block granting, as we've seen with what used to be welfare and now TANF, gives each state a fixed amount and when they've run out of it, they've run out of it. Then it gives them a lot of discretion on how to use it so that with the-- what used to be welfare, they use very, very little of it for cash assistance to poor people. Food stamps were threatened with this, and once again, it was the agriculture committees that kept that from happening which is-- that relationship with agriculture has been a two-edged sword all along.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear what's happening with some of our listeners right now. As the boost in the pandemic year of food stamp program, SNAP benefits program, has expired this month. Emma in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi Emma.

Emma: Hi. I'm on food stamps and I started them during the pandemic and my benefits are going down. I just wanted to say that they're not putting this in context, this demotional benefits in context at all. Rents are so high right now, higher than they were during the pandemic. Inflation is so high. Honestly, what you had said before, it doesn't surprise me at all that food insecurity went down during the pandemic. There was a huge mobilization that I was a part of doing food pantries and stuff. They don't care about solving food insecurity if we're not learning from the things that worked. If it went down, why put our benefits down?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and the same thing with the child tax credit that actually reduced child poverty during the pandemic. Congress, particularly the Republicans in Congress let that expire. Emma, thank you for weighing in. Professor Poppendieck, was the SNAP program ever tied to inflation because that could keep the benefits higher? We talked about Social Security tied to inflation, and because of inflation, Social Security recipients got something like an 8% boost in their benefits this year. How about food stamps or SNAP?

Janet Poppendieck: SNAP is indeed tied to inflation and has been pretty much since the outset of the modern program. Here's the problem. They take the June Consumer Price Index for the cost of foods consumed at home. There's one for food you prepare at home and there's a different one for food that you eat out. For the last year, in 2022, the CPI for foods consumed at home went up 11.4%. That's almost a percent a month on average. They take the June figure, and they use it to calculate the benefits that will begin October 1st when the federal fiscal school year begins.

That means it's already three months out of date when they start using it. By the end, when they're ready for the next calculation, it's 16 months out of date. I am waging what feels to me like a one-woman campaign, although there are probably other people out there working on this to get them to go back to the way it was before those overcuts in 1981 to doing it at least semiannually. I actually think we could have a system where if food price inflation reaches a certain threshold, let's say, 2% over 3 months or something like that, that we do a readjustment because it's not as hard as it used to be with all the digital technology. At least go back to doing it twice a year.

Brian Lehrer: Irene in Babylon. You're on WNYC. Hi, Irene.

Irene: Hi, thank you for taking this call. I'm a caregiver for my disabled brother. We just started this month the first time with food stamps and were able to shop down fresh grocery aisle that we never did before. I'm just wondering if this is going to be affected. I don't think it has anything to do with the pandemic, but is that also going to be affected, his $200 dollars a month?

Brian Lehrer: Professor, do you know exactly what she's referring to?

Janet Poppendieck: There is a nutrition incentive program and that's still in place. You may get some extra bucks that you can only use for fresh produce. There's a similar thing at the farmers market. If you just started the benefit you got, if you started in March, the benefit he's getting would be the smaller benefit. It would not have the pandemic enhancement that it had. You won't be losing anything more.

Brian Lehrer: Irene, I hope that's helpful. Thank you very much. As we begin to run out of time, I mentioned the NPR story before, which said the steepest drops in the SNAP benefit dollar amount will disproportionately hit elderly people. Older adults who qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit will see their amount fall from $281 dollars to just $23 dollars this month. That is really steep. Do you understand the formula that results in a drop like that?

Janet Poppendieck: Yes, let me see if I can [unintelligible 00:24:28]. The minimum benefit is the benefit you get if your income approaches the eligibility level. A lot of seniors because of Social Security have not enough income to fully get by, but they're close to the cutoff level. They could continue to calculate the benefits right down until they get down to $2 or what have you. Years ago they decided, "Let's set a minimum benefit." Currently, the minimum benefit is at $23. During the pandemic, the way in which they infuse SNAP dollars into the economy. I need to point out that it's not just recipients who benefit from SNAP dollars, it's grocery store workers and people who transport food to groceries.

The whole local economy benefits from an infusion of federal dollars. Anyway, the way they infuse those dollars, the largest, there was an overall 15% increase, which has already been eliminated. Then there was a provision that allowed the benefits for all participants to rise to the level of the maximum benefit for their family size. If you were in a family of four and you had been getting 300 a month at Rhoadesville-- I'm sorry I don't have numbers in front of me, but everybody got the top benefit as if they had had zero income.

Brian Lehrer: I see and now it goes back to the--

Janet Poppendieck: For a lot of seniors--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, for a lot of seniors. Go ahead and finish the thought [crosstalk].

Janet Poppendieck: For a lot of seniors, it went from 23 to 81 because that's maximum for a single individual.

Brian Lehrer: We just have a minute left. We could do a whole show on this question I'm about to ask you. For you as a long-time student of and expert on food insecurity, do you think SNAP is the best way to address it? Are there other ways, some universal guaranteed food basket, people propose a guaranteed minimum income, or any other model?

Janet Poppendieck: I don't think there's a better food-specific way to do it. I think a guaranteed-- We need an income policy in the United States. We need much higher wages and we need income guarantees for the various things that interrupt our income, a pandemic or the climate-related disasters, and the things that happen to individuals. A guaranteed income strategy I would favor, but a guaranteed food basket-- Remember, I said what they wanted back in 1939 was consumer choice and letting people use the normal channels of trade, the grocery stores, and what have you?

I think that's important. It's important for people who are in need to be part of our society. There are people out there in your audience who have the imagination that people go on SNAP and stay on it for generations or for the rest of their life, but that's not the common pattern. The common pattern is for people to be on SNAP for a period of months, up to a couple of years at a point when their income is not meeting their needs and grow out of it. It's there to help people when they need it most. This tends to be when they are caring for young children, which inhibits their ability to get decent jobs in the workforce and imposes a lot of expenses. I think SNAP is fundamentally a very good program that needs to be modernized.

Brian Lehrer: As we said at the beginning, there are other things as well that people can apply for if their SNAP benefits are dwindling past the point of them being able to afford enough food now with these post-pandemic boost cuts. We could have a whole other conversation about universal free school lunch.

Janet Poppendieck: We certainly could.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe we will do that.

Janet Poppendieck: Which we have in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. We leave it there with Janet Poppendieck, Professor Emerita of Sociology at Hunter College. She has written extensively about hunger, poverty, and food assistance in the United States. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really interesting.

Janet Poppendieck: Good. Thanks for having me.

 

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