Millions of struggling American families in 32 states are now receiving less federal aid to buy food as the emergency funding for the SNAP food stamps program has expired. The emergency allotment, spurred by the COVID-19 outbreak, boosted the money that recipients received by at least $95 per month from SNAP, which stands for “supplemental nutrition assistance program.”

Straight Arrow News contributor Robert Doar says the SNAP program is important and offers necessary aid to low-income families. However, he says stronger requirements and better federal guidance would make the program more effective at helping people get back on their feet.

SNAP appropriately provides aid to millions of working Americans, and it aids senior citizens and people with disabilities. But it also provides aid to millions of working-age adults who do not work at all. And for these Americans, SNAP needs a work requirement, more than anything else to help lift these individuals out of poverty. Overwhelming evidence shows that a combination of work and government support provides the best path out of poverty. Earnings from work supplemented by government aid help recipients financially but you can’t combine earnings with aid if you are not employed. And SNAP does very little to help recipients find a job. 

The program’s weak support for work can be seen in the low share of its recipients with jobs. According to an upcoming report from AEI scholars, less than 48% of all parents receiving SNAP worked in 2019. And only about 27% of SNAP recipients without children and who aren’t disabled had jobs. These non-working recipients on SNAP are almost surely in poverty and they are not benefiting from the income and social benefits that come from being employed. To help these individuals, non-disabled adult recipients should only receive SNAP with the requirement that they work, look for work, or enter some kind of training or education program. They need to be engaged in these activities for at least one day of every week. We don’t need to enforce long hours or specific choices but we have to push a little to help people move up economically. 

This will require greater engagement from local social services departments. These agencies could help recipients find jobs or enter training programs. Right now, social workers only sign up SNAP recipients and hand out benefits.

In effect, they say to a struggling adult, “Here’s your debit card. See you in a year.”

If they had stronger engagement requirements and more federal guidance, social services providers could do a lot more.