Thrifty Food Plan

And so one of the things that happened during the Biden administration is that there was a desire to increase the overall size of the SNAP benefit to meet the needs of people who were on the program.

And essentially what happened is there's something called the Thrifty Food Plan, which is basically a calculator that's used to figure out how big should the SNAP benefit be.

That was evaluated based on the request of Congress, and what that reevaluation did is it increased the overall size of the SNAP benefit by about twenty-nine dollars per person per month, which sounds small, but what that is doing is putting healthy food within reach for tens of millions of people.

And that is one critical step To ensuring that people have what they need to help avoid things like hospital readmissions.

Another thing that happened through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now there are stricter work requirements for SNAP.

There are also limits on future benefit increases.

We talked, for example, about the Thrifty Food Plan.

The bill requires that all updates be cost neutral, meaning that it can't go up over time.

Um, it was-

Oh, you're talking about the Thrifty Food Plan?

Yes.

The increase in the cost of-

And then also, yes, the, uh, also this week, benefit amounts went up because of a cost of living increase, but it didn't go up as much as it could have because also in the, uh, bill last year, the, um, HR1 or the Big, uh, Ugly Bill, they also reduced the amount that the benefits would go up.

They decreased, um, this, the Thrifty Food Plan, which is basically how they determine SNAP.

So a lot of stuff happened at a lot of different times.

The big thing for most people to really understand is right now even just saying, "Hey, states have to pay more for SNAP," what that means for the administrative costs is less money to hire staff, right? Less, uh, money to, um, for training.