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“Families in Crisis: Report Warns of Dire Need for Funding Boost to Avoid Food Aid Denial

Millions of Parents and Young Kids Could be Denied Food Aid Next Year Without Funding Boost, Report Warns

Millions of parents and young kids in the United States are at risk of being deprived of food aid next year without an increase in funding, a report from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) warns.

The report states that funding for food aid programs is set to expire after September 2021, when it will be replaced with a far less generous program. This new system could lead to 800,000 households with 1.8 million young kids being removed from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC). This could cause hundreds of thousands of households to cut back on their food spending, or to not be able to provide enough food for their kids.

In addition, CBPP notes that the current system already shortchanges many households. Nearly half of low-income households have insufficient food at least one day a month, and 10 percent of them do not have enough food every day. For households with children, those numbers are even higher.

The report comes at a time when affordable housing is hard to come by, and many people are still out of work as a result of pandemic-related job losses. If the current system is replaced in September 2021, it could lead to a surge of poverty-related hunger amongst families with young kids.

The existing aid programs were already inadequate in providing enough nutritious food for families with young children. The replacement program will be even less generous than the one that exists now, leaving millions of families without enough food.

It is clear that Congress needs to act to ensure that millions of American families do not go hungry. Increasing the funding of SNAP and WIC would provide a much-needed lifeline to families with young kids who are struggling to make ends meet. It would also help to ensure that these families do not run into a financial crisis next year.

Congress should act now, as the crisis of poverty-related hunger can have long-lasting effects on young kids. Not only do young kids from food-insecure families have an increased risk of poor health outcomes, but they have also been shown to struggle more in education than their peers with enough food to eat. Ensuring parents and their kids will have enough to eat is necessary for the development of millions of children and for the future of our country.