The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, provides extra cash for food to tens of millions of Americans. Like many government assistance programs, SNAP discourages work by reducing benefits as participants earn more. To compensate for this disincentive, the program requires adults without children and without disabilities to work about 20 hours each week to receive benefits.
States can request that the federal government temporarily waive this work requirement in areas where there aren’t many available jobs. Ideally, this avoids punishing people who can’t find employment. Unfortunately, weak federal guidelines have allowed states to use these waivers in places that don’t need them—and to decline to use them in places that do.
Waiver misuse is problematic because the best evidence suggests that SNAP’s work requirements can reduce barriers to upward mobility when used as intended. A new Manhattan Institute report sheds light on this misuse and proposes reforms.
In 2019, nearly 60 percent of SNAP recipients lived in a county with a waiver, even as national unemployment was below 4 percent. Around half of 2019 waiver counties qualified through federal-requirement loopholes, and nearly all of these were in states with a Democratic governor.
Meantime, another 44 counties, cumulatively home to over 500,000 SNAP recipients, kept the work requirement in place despite jobs being scarce in those areas; each was in a state with a Republican governor. In many of these counties, unemployment was severe, reaching up to 16 percent—nearly twice the national average during the Great Recession.
Both kinds of waiver misuse hurt SNAP recipients. Waiver overuse in strong labor markets has disincentivized millions from seeking more or better employment, as their welfare benefits decrease with each additional dollar earned. This hurts their chances of escaping poverty in the long run. Underuse in distressed areas, by contrast, has deprived thousands of low-income Americans from food assistance as they struggle to find a consistent source of income.
Congress must act to ensure that waivers are consistently granted in high-unemployment areas and withheld from low-unemployment ones. Today, states that overuse waivers often do so by lumping high- and low-unemployment areas together in the same waiver application. Policymakers should require states to apply for waivers only for individual counties or metropolitan statistical areas, ensuring that waiver decisions are driven exclusively by local labor market circumstances, not state politics.
States also take advantage of the federal government’s requirement that they send two full years of an area’s unemployment data to determine if a waiver is needed. This has allowed counties with plenty of jobs now to use old data from previous dips to suspend the work requirement. Congress should shorten this data requirement to one year of the most recent unemployment figures.
Currently, states can receive a waiver when an area’s unemployment rate exceeds the national rate by at least 20 percent over a two-year period. But tying the waiver to national unemployment data is counterproductive: it makes it too easy for states to get a waiver when the economy is doing well and too hard for them to get one in an economic downturn. It also means that large portions of the country will always qualify for a waiver no matter how low national unemployment falls.
Policymakers should fix these contradictions by setting standard unemployment levels at which counties or metro areas automatically qualify for or are barred from using a waiver. This would ensure that waivers are always available in high-unemployment labor markets and banned in low-unemployment ones. While the specific cutoff rates are up for debate, waiver use should be driven by local job availability, not by random fluctuations in the national economy or by state politics.
A few changes to SNAP’s waiver process will help encourage employment without penalizing people living in truly weak labor markets. These seemingly small reforms would have a large effect, promoting economic mobility for millions of low-income Americans while preserving assistance for those who need it most.
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