A thread on nutrition aid during Covid>>> For all the political wrangling over SNAP (aka food stamps) in the aid deal, the 15% increase comes out to be $27/per person per month. So a 3 person household will see bump of around $81/month. The bill provides this boost Jan-June.

One reason anti-hunger & Dems pushed hard for this: 40% of SNAP households - the lowest-income or no-income households - haven't seen a real increase in their monthly benefits during the pandemic. 60% have seen a substantial increase thanks to an earlier Covid aid bill.

Because of this disparity, P-EBT has been seen as a particularly important lifeline for very low-income households w/school-aged kids.

Nearly 1 in 5 households w/children recently reported not having enough to eat, per new Census Bureau data. By all accounts, this is VERY high.

Most states did one P-EBT payment over the summer to replace school meals missed March-end of the year (it came out to about $5.71 per kid, per day of school missed).

That benefit is supposed to essentially replace the subsidized breakfast & lunch that many low-income kids normally get at school each day. It adds up. For ex, in Kentucky, a single parent household w/two kids could have gotten up to $627 in P-EBT as a lump sum over the summer.

All 50 states, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands participated in P-EBT last school year, but most states have not distributed any aid for this school year even though the $$ has been authorized since Oct. 1, as I reported over the weekend: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/20/usda-pandemic-ebt-food-aid-448558

(TL; DR Congress almost let the program expire, extended and expanded it at the last possible minute and the money has since been stuck in bureaucracy at USDA. So billions in aid that could have been going out simply hasn't.)

While it is likely to be several weeks, if not months, before the P-EBT aid for this school year reaches families, the SNAP bump in today's Covid aid deal should go out relatively quickly (in January).

This all means that millions of very low-income households w/kids are going to soon see their first real increase in nutrition assistance *since last summer.*

For millions of very low-income households w/o kids, this will be their first real increase *since the pandemic began.*