FRAC Chat

The Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program, authorized through the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, provides states a critical opportunity to provide support, efficiently and comprehensively, to families relying on free or reduced-price school meals when school is open. Through P-EBT, states can issue eligible households an EBT card with the value of the free school breakfast and lunch reimbursement rates for the number of weekdays that schools are closed due to COVID-19 (estimated to be around $5.70 per day).

A new research brief from Healthy Eating Research (HER), A National Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, underscores why it is urgent for policymakers to enact SNAP benefit increases in the next COVID-19 emergency relief package. Steps taken in prior packages are providing a modest measure of help, but, given the magnitude of the crisis, are insufficient to provide adequate nutrition assistance to meet overall need and to spur economic recovery. Now is the time to strengthen SNAP benefits.

The anti-hunger community’s work is more critical than ever as the COVID-19 pandemic presents a twin threat to public health and the economy. Even before the crisis, 37 million people across the country lived in food-insecure households, and an untold number more are expected to struggle to put food on the table as the pandemic continues to unfold.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a twin threat to public health and the American economy. It is creating significant challenges for 37 million people across the country who are living in food-insecure households and for untold others who are on the brink of poverty, which is the root cause of hunger. Social distancing, decreased work opportunities, and school, child care, and senior center closures are exacerbating the struggles of families that were already wondering how they will put their next meal on the table, and do not have the resources to stockpile food during this crisis.

The COVID-19 virus presents particular challenges for low-income people. To ensure those who lack resources to stockpile food and other basic necessities, and who rely on school breakfast and lunch to help feed their children nutritious food, administrators and legislators should consider adapting Disaster SNAP and disaster provisions of other federal nutrition programs to provide nutrition resources for low-income consumers and to make up for disrupted school meals service; suspending implementation of rules changes that weaken SNAP benefits and enrollment; and increasing SNAP benefit amounts to bolster the program’s countercyclical impacts.