Pandemic Emergency Food Stamp Benefits End For 1.9M IL Residents

ILLINOIS — The 1.9 million people in Illinois who depend on federal food assistance to feed themselves and their families will face harder choices at the grocery store after the government’s pandemic-era emergency SNAP program ended Wednesday.

The move by the Agriculture Department, which manages the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, comes as Americans are already paying about 11.3 percent more for groceries than they did at this time last year, according to the Labor Department’s most recent inflation report.

For the 31 million Americans who live in the 32 states and the District of Columbia who have received the SNAP emergency allotments, it means their monthly benefits will be reduced by an average of $182. As the program ends, SNAP benefits for those families could be about $6 per person per day, The Washington Post reported.

In Illinois, once the COVID-19-related benefits end, the average person receiving benefits will receive an average of $189 per month or an average of $6.20 per person in households that receive funding.

SNAP participants in Illinois received a total of $5.69 billion in 2022, which was up from 2021 by about $690 million and more than double than the benefits were paid out in 2019 when a total of $2.65 billion was paid out, federal officials announced. In fiscal year 2020, the average household receiving SNAP benefits was provided $226 per month and households with children received an average of $361 per month.

Benefits automatically adjust for the cost of living every October, increasing 12.5 percent in October 2022, but significant gains are quickly erased with persistently high food prices.

From Feb. 4-13, more than 25.5 million Americans lived in households where there was sometimes or often not enough to eat, according to the latest data available from Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse Survey. In Illinois, about 1.1 million people were food insecure during that time period.

“People are making agonizing choices between whether to pay their rent, pay a medical bill, pay a credit card bill or buy food,” Vince Hall, the chief government relations officer for Feeding America, a nonprofit network of more than 200 food banks that provided more than 5 billion meals last year, told The Washington Post.

Food stamp recipients in 18 states have already seen their benefits return to normal levels after their state governments declined the extra food assistance, reasoning that pandemic assistance programs contributed to a worker shortage, according to a Pew Research study.

Overall, the SNAP program provides critical food assistance to about 41 million Americans. The program has kept about 4.2 million Americans out of poverty at the end of 2021, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study from the Urban Institute.

The study also found that states that were still offering the emergency food assistance had reduced poverty overall by 9.6 percent and child poverty by 14 percent.

Experts on food insecurity have long argued that SNAP benefits are historically too low. In 2021, the Agriculture Department updated its “Thrifty Food Plan,” the standard used to set SNAP benefits based on the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet, and that increased benefits by an average of $36 a month, a 21 percent increase.

Several Democrats have introduced legislation to boost SNAP benefits over time. They face an unfriendly battleground in the Republican-controlled House, where leaders plan to cut food stamp benefits and add more work requirements as part of a broader plan to cut government spending.