Key Points
- The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is one of the nation’s largest safety-net programs for low-income households in the US, distributing over $94 billion in food benefits in fiscal year 2024.
- SNAP’s benefit design results in large benefit cliffs that discourage employment among participants, jeopardizing the program’s overall effectiveness.
- This proposal would align the four components of the SNAP benefit structure—the maximum benefit levels, the tapering point, the benefit reduction rate, and the exit point—to eliminate benefit cliffs and improve employment outcomes for participants while reducing program costs.
- Total SNAP benefit costs would remain consistent with historic norms and Congressional Budget Office baseline projections as recently as 2021, and savings could be repurposed to other safety-net reforms, such as improving the refundable child tax credit in this year’s tax legislation, or used to reduce the deficit.
