Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT), or SUN Bucks, is a new federal program that provides grocery benefits to low-income families with children during the summer months, when children no longer have access to free or reduced-price meals at school.
However, 13 states did not opt into the program when it launched in 2024.
To understand how the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) could improve the program and drive more states to opt in, we asked 42 state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) directors what barriers they faced to implementing the new program.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Families, especially in rural areas, struggle to access existing summer meal programs designed to reduce summer hunger, as they require travel to a specific distribution site. In 2023, only about one in six students who received free or reduced-price meals during the school year received a summer lunch.
Research has shown that grocery benefit programs like Summer EBT can reduce food insecurity among children by giving families the flexibility to purchase the food they need when they need it. Understanding and addressing the challenges state SNAP agencies face when implementing the program can lead more states to opt into the program and ultimately reduce food insecurity across the US.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
States reported limited time to develop their implementation plans and delayed guidance from the USDA. Two out of five survey respondents reported waiting over three months after submitting their plans to receive final approval from USDA.
States struggled to cover the program’s costs. Under federal law, state agencies can only be reimbursed for 50 percent of Summer EBT’s administrative costs. Survey respondents said this reimbursement level was insufficient to develop and operate an entirely new program, and exacerbated capacity issues.
Summer EBT requires state SNAP agencies to partner with other human services agencies to identify all automatically eligible children—a level of coordination other federal nutrition programs do not require. Despite the expectation of partnership, our survey showed that state SNAP agencies were primarily responsible for running the program.
About half of respondents (55 percent) said creating the necessary data infrastructure to run the program was difficult. In our survey, four in five (79 percent) state SNAP agencies reported dealing with or anticipating dealing with out-of-date or incomplete student data to implement the program.
Issuing benefits in a timely manner is critical to fulfilling the program’s goal of reducing food insecurity. But most state agencies predicted they would not be able to issue summer EBT before the summer began due to the complexity of collecting and cleaning data. In our survey, almost half (42 percent) of states said they planned to issue benefits to students who were automatically eligible within one month of the start of the summer.
Our findings suggest the USDA could improve Summer EBT and reduce barriers to state uptake by
- providing clearer guidance on how agencies can share data and program responsibilities,
- offering more support for states to develop data-management systems, and
- giving states the flexibility to waive administrative requirements, such as when they must issue benefits, as they figure out how to run the new program.
HOW WE DID IT
From May to June 2024, the Urban Institute and the American Public Human Services Association surveyed state SNAP directors. We asked them what challenges they faced during the Summer EBT plan writing and approval process, while building or managing data infrastructure for the program, when working with state agencies, and with issuing benefits.
Among the 42 SNAP directors who completed our online survey, 33 implemented the Summer EBT program in 2024.