You may have seen the message on a billboard: “Hunger doesn’t take a summer vacation.”
On average, children are in school about 180 days a year, roughly half the year. This means that kids and teens whose families struggle to put food on the table may spend many days—weekends, summer vacations, and other breaks—without enough nutritious food.
Bread for the World and other anti-hunger advocacy groups continue to emphasize that the United States can afford to feed all its children. Ideally, every family would earn enough to meet its basic needs or, where adults are living with disabilities or of retirement age, have access to sufficient grocery money through programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bread advocates for wider policies to resolve the root causes of U.S. hunger—whether race and gender pay inequities, jobs that pay too little to cover household bills, or other problems.
Until such policies are a reality for all families, parents and the wider community face a dilemma. In 2022, 22 million children ate breakfast and lunch at school through federal nutrition programs. But in July of that year, budgetary constraints meant that fewer than 3 million children had lunch provided by summer nutrition programs.
In 2023, Congress took a big step forward by permanently authorizing the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer Program for Children (Summer EBT). The law is going into effect this year, summer 2024.
The U.S has made progress previously toward ensuring that children have sufficient food every day. For example, expansion of the School Breakfast Program meant that many more children who eat lunch at school are also offered breakfast. The hard work of members of the community helped meet other needs—after-school programs with snacks or supper, backpack programs for weekends, and more.
But Summer EBT, introduced to help fill the wide gap between the number of children served during the school year and those served over the summer, offers a simpler and more flexible approach. Launched in 2011 as a limited demonstration project, it mirrors the structure of SNAP, providing families with an electronic benefits card to use at the supermarket. Children who participate in free or reduced-price school meal programs are automatically enrolled, but other families can also apply for the program. In most states, the benefit is in the range of $40 per month per child.
While Summer EBT continued to operate as a demonstration project until Congress made it permanent in 2023, children also received EBT benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many states and territories offered a similar benefit as part of their pandemic response. Now that Summer EBT is a permanent federal program, low-income families should have access to the grocery money they need to feed kids who usually eat at school. In this first year, 35 states, the District of Columbia, all five U.S. territories, and four Indian Tribal Organizations have adopted Summer EBT. Additional states and territories are planning to participate in the future.
However, there are a number of states whose leaders have indicated that they do not intend to take advantage of the program, despite the millions of food insecure children they represent. They have cited a variety of reasons for not participating, including lack of funding to administer the program, lack of infrastructure, and disagreements over eligibility criteria. Some states seem to believe incorrectly that Summer EBT is a pandemic program that is no longer needed.
Most disappointing of all, several states are refusing to opt into the program for ideological reasons. One governor told the media, “I don’t believe in welfare.”
This is reminiscent of what happened back in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law. Many of the same states that have not signed up for Summer EBT refused to expand Medicaid—even though the expansion is federally funded. Voters in some of these states forced the expansion by passing ballot initiatives. In at least one such state, Medicaid expansion went into effect more than a decade later. And as of 2023, 10 states still haven’t implemented Medicaid expansion.
It is possible that advocates who want to see Summer EBT put in place in their states could learn from earlier efforts to ensure that states expanded Medicaid—particularly if those expansions brought better results than governors had argued they would.
Eric Mitchell, president of Bread’s sister organization the Alliance to End Hunger, said that for children who are food insecure, “access to Summer EBT can be the difference between getting the meals they need to stay healthy and thrive, or going hungry. That is why Congress recently made the program permanent, and why every state should participate.”
Andre Gobbo is a domestic policy analyst with Bread for the World.
