This summer, parents should have a little more financial breathing room while their children were out of school. The administration has rolled out Summer EBT, the first new federal food assistance program in decades, for its first year, providing eligible families with $120 per school-age child to help them buy groceries over the summer while they go without school meals to meet their needs. to help feed children.
Nearly 21 million children are eligible for the program, but there are early warning signs that many families have not been able to take advantage of the benefits.
A prominent challenge is that the enrollment process was so opaque and complicated that hundreds of thousands of families missed out entirely, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unclaimed and returned to the government, according to policy consultant David Rubel, who has done extensive research. about the Summer EBT program and its predecessor, the Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave parents money to pay for meals while children learned remotely.
Get stories like this straight to your inbox. Sign up for the 74 newsletter
Erika Marquez’s family was one of many who did not have access to the financing. Marquez has four children: three of them attend school programs and one, her child, is at home. Her husband, from whom she is divorced, told her he had received a letter saying summer EBT benefits would be coming, but said he had received no further instructions on how to actually claim the money. “He didn’t know who to contact, how to contact them, or anything,” she said.
Summers are always harder for her family to make ends meet. When her three school-age children are at home, they miss two daily meals that they would have received for free at school. Marquez was hopeful that the incoming summer EBT money this year would help close that gap, but when her family couldn’t access the money, they suffered. Marquez works full-time and says that to ensure her children get what they need, she has to follow a strict budget to cover all their expenses, and this has been a particularly difficult summer. She was living in Las Vegas, Nevada, which was experiencing the hottest summer on record, and her electric bill went through the roof after she turned on the air conditioning. Normally the hair costs about $100 to $150 for the season; this summer she said it was about $400.
Without help from the new food assistance program, Marquez had to ignore utility bills and prioritize groceries so her children had enough to eat. “It’s just hard when you hear your child say, ‘Mom, my stomach is rumbling,’” she said. “It’s more important to be able to make sure my children are fed.” She didn’t have to pay for electricity for two months, which put her on a payment plan, with additional charges added to the bill itself. If she had received Summer EBT for her three children, it would have been $360 — almost the same cost as her electric bill, she noted.
Many other parents found themselves in a similar situation to Marquez this season. According to the state’s response to a FOIA request from Rubel, 281,690 summer EBT cards were returned in California due to incorrect address between June 1 and August 31. These have remained unused. In a state where 1 in 5 residents are food insecure, this is troubling, especially considering that California has lost out on $1 billion earmarked for P-EBT during the pandemic.
Finally, this election season, child hunger is on the table
Propel, a financial technology company that helps low-income Americans with banking and public benefits, conducted a survey of low-income families in August, which found anecdotal evidence supporting Rubel’s finding that some eligible families struggled to get the money. The survey revealed scattered reports of access barriers. “No, not received yet,” wrote one respondent from Missouri, adding, “It would help me not skip meals to feed my kids.” Another from Michigan wrote, “No, it would make a big difference. We haven’t received them yet, nor the card.”
Most families who received summer EBT dollars received their cards automatically through a process known as streamlined certification. States enrolled them without requiring them to take any action if they participated in certain public programs, including free or reduced-price school lunches, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. For example, in some states, if a family already had an EBT card for SNAP benefits, the money was automatically loaded onto it; other states decided to send out separate cards.
But some eligible families did not automatically receive the benefits. For example, families who do not participate in other programs but whose children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school are eligible for summer EBT, but they must register, which has proven challenging. In part, that’s because Congress made school meals universally free in 2020 so families didn’t have to sign up, but that expired last fall, and some parents are no longer in the practice of signing up. In the 41 states without universal school meals, many parents fail to sign up for free, reduced-price meals, let alone summer EBT. Meanwhile, nine states have implemented universal school meals, which require no paperwork during the school year, so parents needed to know to sign up for Summer EBT separately.
Kelsey Boone, senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit, said her organization has heard anecdotally that while the streamlined application has had a lot of success and delivered benefits to families, states are seeing “lower than expected return rates” for everyone else. For example, Kansas had received more than 2,000 applications for Summer EBT by mid-September, even though the Kansas Department for Children and Families estimates there are more than 100,000 families who are eligible for the program but must enroll.
One problem is that some states have not created specific applications for summer EBT, making it challenging for parents to figure out where and how to apply, and some have hidden the applications deep within their websites. Another is that efforts to let parents know what to do “haven’t been as robust as it could be,” Boone said. She added that states don’t always have up-to-date household addresses, especially for low-income families who move frequently, so mail or even the EBT cards themselves may not reach parents. In some states, she noted, school districts didn’t even know to tell parents to sign up.
The same problems plagued the P-EBT program. When summer P-EBT cards were distributed in 2022 and 2023, approximately $1 billion in benefits went unclaimed by eligible families, and approximately 4.5 million cards were removed or at risk of being removed, according to Rubel’s research deleted. Instead of providing extensive education to ensure parents were aware of the benefits and how to claim them, Rubel was told that many state departments of education had posted the information on their websites and passed it on to parents left to find it.
The problem with Summer EBT promises to be even more pressing. Families had 274 days to realize they were missing out on P-EBT funds and sign up for the benefits, and if they spent at least a dollar the clock would be reset, giving them another 274 days . The Summer EBT program gives families just 122 days from the date the money is loaded onto a card to spend it all before it is forfeited and returned to the federal government. “This is a very short period of time,” Rubel said. Nebraska started sending out eviction letters in early September. Rubel estimates that most of the money will be gone by the end of November.
The good news is that states have been able to move up application deadlines so more families can apply and receive their money before it is lost. In an email response to a question about the timeline, a USDA spokesperson said the agency was offering “additional flexibility” to allow all states participating in the program this year to extend their application deadlines to ensure “sufficient time for applications to be submitted and processed.” The spokesperson said the agency will work with each state individually to determine the “appropriate” amount of time in which a state can extend a deadline.
Some states have already taken the agency up on the offer. Kansas and Oregon both announced they would push back their application deadlines.
But Rubel insists school districts must take action to ensure eligible families get the money they’re entitled to before it’s too late. “They have the capacity, they have the infrastructure,” he said, adding that districts have up-to-date contact information for families. “They need to be given some incentive to help their families.”
It is even more urgent because the families who received summer EBT dollars saw a huge benefit. In Propel’s August 2024 survey, fewer families reported having to eat less, skipping meals or not being able to buy the food they wanted, compared to August 2023. Fewer families lacked household necessities, owed money on utility bills or had their utilities turned off. ; fewer were evicted or lived in unstable housing. Summer EBT “was a life saver,” said one respondent. “I didn’t know where my next meal was going to be [from].” Another said: “It helped a lot with groceries for me and my daughter, just when we really needed it.”
“This money could really mean the difference between food on the table and no food on the table for a family during the summer,” Boone said.
There is a chance to solve this problem before next summer starts. First, advocates hope that more states will decide to join the Summer EBT program, allowing more families to participate. By 2024, 13 states have opted out, but Alabama, for example, has already said it will join in 2025. The application period for next summer is currently open and will remain so until August next year. For the states that participated this year, there are lessons to be learned about increasing accessibility. “There’s a lot of discussion about that right now,” says Boone. Part of that is about how states can improve their reach, including putting more resources into it, trying to reach families in a variety of ways and providing better customer service.
“Many of our problems are so difficult to solve,” Rubel said. “This is very easy to solve.”
