Several prominent Democratic campaign groups accessed Republican voter data as a result of what Snap, the owner of Snapchat, called an unintentional data leak, allowing those groups to optimize midterm ads, Axios reported.
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Spending on food stamps has increased by $53.5 billion – an 89% increase – in the two pandemic years. By comparison, that’s how much the entire program cost in 2009 during the Great Recession.
Spending on the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program grew 88.5% from $60.3 billion in 2019 to $113.8 billion in 2021. Spending on the SNAP program had previously peaked at $79.8 billion in 2013 before declining for the next six years.
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A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.
The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food…”
To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.
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The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Sunday blocked a Trump administration change to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that could have removed eligibility for almost 700,000 unemployed, able-bodied Americans.
A lawsuit filed in January by a multistate coalition alleged a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rule wrongly reversed a decades-old policy that allowed states to waive SNAP work requirements. The previous rules granted waivers for larger geographic areas by lumping certain regions with lower unemployment with locations registering higher unemployment, as well as carryover unused exemptions.
Read More Many of the costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t easily visible, such as Michigan’s 2,000 COVID-19 nursing home residents’ deaths, the increasing number of opioid overdoses, and the bankrupted businesses due to government-mandated restrictions and less consumer demand.
More than 2 million people lost their jobs within months after Michigan’s first case of the virus, pushing hundreds of thousands of people onto federally bankrolled food assistance programs, spiking costs by nearly $60 million over two months.
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The Trump administration officially implemented its public charge rule for foreign nationals seeking permanent status, following two key victories in the nation’s highest court.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday put into effect the administration’s new public charge rule, which takes into account a foreign national’s past use of taxpayer-funded benefits when determining whether that individual qualifies for a green card. The rule, which the White House first introduced in 2019, survived a lawsuit that reached all the way to the Supreme Court.
Read More The U.S. House Committee on Oversight is holding hearings to analyze the Trump administration’s rule change designed to end automatic eligibility to the federal food stamp program for recipients of another federal welfare program.
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The Supreme Court Monday allowed the Trump administration to enforce a new rule that will deny green cards to foreign nationals who use taxpayer-funded social services, lifting lower court injunctions that blocked the change.
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Long-awaited changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) being unveiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Trump administration are once again making obtaining work a key emphasis of the program by conforming to statutory requirements that single, work capable people with no dependents between the ages of 18 and 49 are required to work in order to qualify for benefits.
Read More Nearly 700,000 Americans will lose their access to federal food stamps under new rules formalized by the Trump administration, the Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday.
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Michiganders in need of food or cash assistance will now have an easier time obtaining those services after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer raised the personal asset thresholds needing to qualify for these programs Thursday.
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The Democratic governors of several states – including Colorado, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – signed a letter sent to the Trump administration formally opposing rule changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps.
Read More The number of households receiving federal benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, is at its lowest level in nine years, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the program.
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by Whitney Tipton The United States Department of Agriculture proposed Monday eliminating a loophole in food stamp eligibility requirements that would cut 3.1 million people from the program and save $2.5 billion. Those who receive temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) will not longer be automatically eligible to get…
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