As health researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, we used U.S. Census Bureau survey data from over 7 million people to examine what happened when 18 states ended SNAP Emergency Allotments even before the federal government ended the policy nationwide in March 2023.
Our findings are disturbing. The reduction in benefits resulted in an additional one in 20 SNAP households not having enough to eat, putting over 2 million more Americans in that predicament. These harmful consequences began immediately after the higher payments ended and worsened over the next 15 months.
Our findings are especially pertinent because of the impending reauthorization of the Farm Bill, which funds SNAP and is set to expire on Sept. 30. This is an opportunity to fully realize SNAP’s potential to eliminate hunger in one of the richest countries in the world.
Currently, one in eight Americans participate in SNAP. The program is the largest federal safety-net effort designed to ease food insecurity, which is a lack of stable access to adequate amounts of food.
The pandemic led many Americans to experience this level of hunger for the first time. The vast majority of households on SNAP include either a child, an elderly person, or someone with a disability, and live at or below the federal poverty line.
The dramatic health consequences of food insecurity are well established. Babies born to pregnant women without enough food are more likely to have low birth weight, a key risk factor for short- and long-term health complications. Children raised in households short of food face higher risk of anemia, thinking and memory problems, tooth decay, hospitalization and many other bad outcomes. Food insecurity also doubles the risk of diabetes, which affects one in 10 Americans. And among elderly adults, food insecurity has been linked to functional limitations, equivalent to being over 10 years older.
We know through decades of research that SNAP is effective at reducing both food insecurity and its harmful health effects. Some of the most striking evidence comes from analyses of the staggered introduction of SNAP (then known as Food Stamps) in the 1960s and 1970s. People who had access to SNAP as children went on to have higher rates of economic self-sufficiency decades later during adulthood, as well as lower likelihood of incarceration; lower risks of obesity and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of conditions that raise the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke); and longer life expectancies.
