Oh SNAP: Hochul funds food pantries, but not food assistance benefits

With federal food assistance benefits set to shut off on Nov. 1, Gov. Kathy Hochul has so far announced over $100 million in state funds to help cover meals for the three million impacted New Yorkers. But that money isn’t going towards the benefits themselves, which means those who rely on that assistance still won’t be able to use it to purchase groceries until the government reopens. Instead, the money is being earmarked for food pantries, which are expected to see increased demand.

Weeks into the federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of announcing that emergency funds would no longer cover the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP or “food stamps.” Usually, that money continues to go out even during a shutdown, similar to how certain essential government responsibilities keep running. But unless Trump changes his mind, SNAP recipients won’t have access to benefits until the government opens up again. 

Responding to the SNAP cutoff, Hochul has allocated a total of $106 million to fund tens of millions of meals in New York. “Never before have they literally said we're going to stop feeding Americans (during a shutdown), so we're not going to be passive servers to this,” Hochul said while visiting a food pantry in East Harlem on Thursday. The governor also declared a state of emergency over the impending cuts. She said the aim is to “minimize the impacts” that the SNAP cutoff will have, while blaming Republicans for the pain low-income New Yorkers will feel.

But the state money is going towards supplying food banks and other emergency food providers, not directly funding food stamps. On Thursday, for example, Hochul announced $65 million that will go towards two state programs that assist those nonprofits: the Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program and Nourish NY. That means that SNAP recipients still won’t be able to use their benefits to purchase food, even if state money is going towards funding meals they can access.

A number of groups in the state are calling on Hochul to go further and use state dollars to directly fund SNAP for the month of November – something that Louisiana, Vermont, Virginia and Delaware have already done. “While we appreciate the Governor's support for more charitable food, that only addresses a tiny portion of the need,” the groups Hunger Free America, Citizen Action of NY and VOCAL-NY said in a joint statement. “Emergency funds to food pantries will not make its way to the 3 million New Yorkers who receive SNAP … Governor Hochul's approach just won't work.” 

Of course, New York has a much larger population than the likes of Virginia or Vermont, which are using state dollars to backfill the loss of federal funds for SNAP on a temporary basis. Many other states, including those closer in size to New York, have focused emergency funding on food banks and other emergency food providers, just as Hochul is doing.

The cost of funding SNAP benefits in New York is about $650 million per month, and Hochul has consistently said that no state can afford to backfill this and other federal funding cuts on a consistent basis. She repeated that on Thursday when announcing the new funds and declaring a state of emergency. “We're bringing in resources and volunteers and people and calling for more corporate philanthropy and charitability – we're going to continue focusing on that,” Hochul told reporters when asked about the prospect of calling back the state Legislature to allocate more money. “But this is not a bailout for the federal government, because it's their job to feed Americans.”