The federal government shutdown is disrupting major federal programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Now one in five children nationwide risks losing benefits because Congress has failed to pass a budget. On October 30, a federal judge ordered the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draw from SNAP’s contingency fund to cover payments, but that fund holds roughly $5–6 billion—barely enough to cover three weeks of payments for a program that spends more than $8 billion each month.
The ongoing deadlock highlights SNAP’s fragility due to its near-total reliance on federal funding. More importantly, its chronic dependency on Washington’s one-size-fits-all solutions has left it failing the very children it’s supposed to help. The best way to ensure healthy outcomes for kids and protect them from the partisan crossfire of D.C. politicking is to break the federal grip on nutrition programs.
Washington has become a permanent fixture of childhood in low-income America. The N in SNAP stands for “nutrition,” but federal food aid has routinely failed to deliver healthy diets for low-income families despite nearly $2 trillion in spending since 2000. Almost one-quarter of food purchases by SNAP households are for junk food, which undermines the efforts of doctors and other federal agencies to promote healthy diets. SNAP participants also have higher rates of obesity and poorer nutrition than nonparticipants, regularly failing to meet dietary guidelines while performing poorly on key health indicators. All of this has helped drive child obesity to nearly one in five children and adolescents as of 2020.
SNAP may provide assistance to families, but a program that consistently fails to deliver positive outcomes for the children it aims to serve falls far short of its purpose.
We’ve seen this problem before—and its solution. Like SNAP, Congress designed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to assist low-income households, but its structure created perverse incentives that encouraged single motherhood, punished work, and trapped families in dependency for years. The 1996 welfare reforms replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a fixed block grant program that provided states with much-needed flexibility to innovate and tailor their programs to fit the needs of their residents.
States leveraged TANF’s block grant flexibility by shifting funds from pure cash assistance to targeted supports such as childcare subsidies, job training, and education programs. These reforms helped parents—especially single mothers—overcome employment barriers and increase their income. The results surpassed everyone’s predictions. Within a decade, more than 1.6 million children were lifted out of poverty. Additionally, poverty in single-mother families fell to record lows, and overall poverty and child hunger declined substantially. All of this occurred while welfare caseloads declined by more than half.
By converting SNAP into a block grant and gradually decoupling it from federal dollars, states would be able to take on decision-making and responsibility for their programs, controlling funding and tailoring solutions to the needs of their low-income families. Just as TANF prioritized economic independence and employment, state SNAP reforms could prioritize better health and self-sufficiency.
The current shutdown should serve as a catalyst for Congress to reassess the federal role in welfare. Children shouldn’t go hungry because Congress can’t govern—nor should they be dependent on the D.C. bureaucracy for their food. SNAP’s centralization and reliance on federal dollars have caused it to fail at meeting the nutritional needs of children, and now, millions of families face the prospect of sudden benefit disruptions.
Congress should stop treating Americans as collateral damage in their fight over extending Obamacare subsidies and end the shutdown immediately. While restoring federal funding will avoid immediate disruptions to benefits, Congress should also reform welfare to ensure it helps rather than hinders the families who rely on it.
SNAP is outdated. Congress should devolve funding and administration to the states, allowing them to pursue more effective nutrition policies for low-income families.
