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More Than 500,000 Americans Stand to Lose SNAP Benefits [CityLab.com]

 

On April 1, at least half a million Americans will wake up no longer eligible for the food assistance benefits that have, for decades, been a crucial lifeline for the poor in a harsh economic landscape.

A clause in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act limited Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to three months in any given 36-month period for unemployed adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who are not working or enrolled in a job-training or community service program at least 20 hours per week.

During the economic downturn, many states instituted waivers to override these limits. But now that the employment rate has improved, the restrictions came back into effect in 40 states on January 1, 2016β€”meaning that some recipients will start feeling the impacts in April. The possibility of the time limit’s reimplementation began to trickle down from the federal government to the states around this time last year, but the exact areas and the precise number of people to be affected remained unclear until national and regional unemployment rates were confirmed around November of 2015.



[For more of this story, written by Ellie Anzilotti, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...nap-benefits/475842/]

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