Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
A Jefferson County student carries several days of breakfasts and lunches back to his home, March 3, 2021, in Fayette, Mississippi.
In late April, the Biden administration announced that all low-income children across the country would receive free summer meals. This was an extension of the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program, which was quickly created last year to provide food benefits for kids who would normally receive free or reduced-price lunch at school. During the first few months of the pandemic, P-EBT kept about three million children from going hungry, according to a Hamilton Project report.
Now, all 29 million kids who receive free and reduced-price lunch, plus kids under six whose families qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly called food stamps), can receive $375 through P-EBT for the summer break, as long as their states deliver the benefits.
Over the past year, state implementation of P-EBT—a completely new program created within a matter of weeks—has been full of roadblocks and complications. The struggles that states have faced may spill over into the summer P-EBT program, which the Biden administration wants to make permanent, with a $25 billion investment in the American Families Plan.
All low-income kids should already receive free meals throughout the summer. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was created to ensure that kids who receive free or reduced-price lunch during the school year can also get meals during the summer months. But as I’ve written in the Prospect, as few as 1 in 7 eligible students access SFSP, because the program requires eating at physical meal sites. Besides the fact that kids might face barriers actually getting to the sites, SFSP requirements tend to be strict, like stipulating that a site can only be located in an area where 50 percent of children are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. This makes access especially hard for kids in rural areas.
The limitations of SFSP are why the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) began piloting a project similar to P-EBT a decade ago. The Summer EBT for Children demonstration, which gave money to poorer families, rather than meals, operated in a handful of states and tribal nations, serving small numbers of kids each summer. According to a 2016 FNS evaluation, Summer EBT benefits reduced hunger and food insecurity in children by about a third.
During the first few months of the pandemic, P-EBT kept about three million children from going hungry.
Trump’s FNS did not end the Summer EBT demonstrations, but it did reduce their impact. Instead of using the approximately $30 million in appropriations authorized for Summer EBT in fiscal year 2019, the administration spread out the grants over three years by awarding three-year pilot projects to a smaller number of states and tribes—effectively cutting Summer EBT by at least two-thirds.
But now the Summer EBT pilot is essentially national policy, part of an emerging trend in anti-poverty policy that preferences simpler, more flexible benefits over service provision. This summer’s program, authorized in March in the American Rescue Plan, is using P-EBT as a foundation to quickly scale up. Now, summer benefits may serve more than 30 million kids, as opposed to a couple hundred thousand.
The benefits are more generous too; the Summer EBT demonstration allowed states and tribes to deliver either $90 or $180 for the entire summer, much less than the $375 that will go out to all kids receiving P-EBT. If kids receive free or reduced-price lunch, families will receive an EBT card in the mail if they don’t already have one. With the funds, they can purchase anything allowable under SNAP, so pretty much any grocery item except hot food and alcohol.
UP UNTIL THIS POINT, P-EBT implementation has not been simple. “One of the hardest things about [P-EBT] is that states did not have a permanent EBT program for kids [that they could] build off of,” says Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research and Action Center.
FNS interpreted the initial quickly written legislation authorizing P-EBT rather strictly. In order to limit benefits to students who weren’t in full-time, in-person school (including hybrid environments where kids were being taught in person some of the time), states had to collect school data that they’d never before had to collect. Some states, as Politico reported in April, were updating massive spreadsheets manually. And guidance for the second round of P-EBT was not announced until November 2020.
Most states have not yet submitted plans for summer P-EBT, even though school’s out in much of the country.
Michigan—the first state approved for P-EBT in early 2020—had to create a survey for their school districts, and as a result their second round for the 2020–2021 school year was delayed. They made the first payment in March, paying retroactively back to September, says Dawn Sweeney, food assistance program manager for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. That was much earlier than most states.
Louisiana, for example, has only just begun to send out retroactive P-EBT benefits. Part of the delay was due to card distribution challenges—the state’s EBT vendor can only produce 100,000 EBT cards every seven business days. Even Oregon, a previous grantee of Summer EBT that had a leg up compared to other states that were starting from scratch, won’t deliver 2020–2021 benefits until July.
Summer P-EBT benefits have been explicitly designed to be much easier to implement. Instead of having to calculate a benefit, states can choose to give all students $375, equivalent to the daily P-EBT benefit multiplied by the average number of summer break days from a sample of school districts. States can also calculate their own benefit, though that process would be more complex than picking the standard $375.
“FNS learned a lot from the complaints from the states,” says Sweeney, noting that Michigan’s summer plan was approved within two or three weeks. As a result of the simplification, states could issue summer benefits before they even deliver retroactive benefits from the 2020–2021 school year.
But it doesn’t seem like this is the strategy most states will undertake. Most states have not yet submitted plans for summer P-EBT, even though school’s out in much of the country. As a result, a number of states’ summer benefits will probably be retroactive, sent out in the fall. Most kids do not eat retroactively.
One problem is that some states have not yet operated P-EBT for the 2020–2021 school year, and you have to be approved for school year P-EBT before you can implement Summer P-EBT. As I write, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Wyoming have not had school year 2020–2021 P-EBT plans approved by FNS, though all plan to participate.
So far, only six states and Puerto Rico have been approved to start delivering summer benefits, according to FNS’s P-EBT website.
As a result, benefits given throughout the summer in many states will likely be school year P-EBT benefits—still funds on an EBT card, but with varied dollar amounts depending on whether a child’s school was virtual or hybrid during the school year. If a school was fully in-person, P-EBT benefits won’t be available at all.
LIKE OTHER PROGRAMS, the expansion of EBT benefits to all food-insecure kids during the summer is both a progressive dream realized because of the pandemic and a severe departure from how the Trump administration handled things. But the program’s success also depends on adequate implementation and delivery. Some Democrats want to make this program permanent—will they be able to point to a successful program in order to make their case?
Last month, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Reps. Mike Levin (D-CA) and Jahana Hayes (D-CT) introduced the Stop Child Hunger Act to make P-EBT permanent for the summer, and to also allow it to deliver benefits to low-income kids during any school closure. The program would operate alongside SFSP, allowing kids to get EBT funds in addition to food served at summer meal sites. Murray has been introducing a similar bill since 2014. In 2019, the short list of co-sponsors were all Democrats, though summer nutrition assistance would particularly benefit rural areas that are often represented by Republicans.
President Obama proposed a nationwide Summer EBT in his 2017 budget, and the Biden administration recently included it in the American Families Plan.
A permanent Summer EBT fits with the philosophy of the expanded Child Tax Credit as a simpler, more robust cash benefit.
Though the pandemic exacerbated child hunger, since kids lost access to school meals, and job and wage losses made it worse, in a sense, “what happened during the pandemic is what happens every summer,” says FitzSimons. The low take-up of SFSP deprives eligible kids of food benefits year after year. A permanent Summer EBT fits with the philosophy of the expanded Child Tax Credit as a simpler, more robust cash benefit, intended to ensure that no child goes hungry, or lives under crushing poverty. While Summer EBT isn’t a traditional cash benefit, as funds can only be used for food, it does free up resources that families would otherwise use on groceries, so that income can be spent on other necessities like rent or child care.
The good news is that Summer P-EBT isn’t only currently authorized for this summer, but summer 2022 too. Growing pains over the next few months may serve to prepare states for a more timely program next year.
“There’s obviously a problem in having a pandemic response program that’s delayed by so long that we’re really coming out of the pandemic by the time the benefit [is issued], but Louisiana has such high rates of poverty and such high rates of child food insecurity that there’s no scenario in which benefits are coming too late,” says Danny Mintz, director of safety net policy at the Louisiana Budget Project, a policy advocacy nonprofit.
“Even with all of these delays, having multiple, regular issuances of P-EBT will be critically important for families who have been struggling against the most difficult conditions during the pandemic.”
