I Earn a Six Figure Income, So Why Did the Government Just Give Me $750 in Food Stamps?
More than half a billion dollars in debit cards were recently issued to Alabama students for free lunches missed while in virtual school last year, but were they all eligible for the money?
Two of my children recently received something in the mail called a Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer debit card, known as a P-EBT, each loaded with $375 that they could purchase food with anywhere you see those “EBT Accepted” signs.
The accompanying letter explained that the money was for school children in grades K-12 who were enrolled in the National School Lunch Program — free and reduced lunch — during the 2020-2021 school year but who missed those meals while their schools were closed due to COVID-19.
But here’s the problem: my income exceeds the eligibility ceiling for such a thing, and even so, my children weren’t actually enrolled in the program during the 2020-2021 academic year … because they weren’t even enrolled in public schools at all! They attended a private school and we packed or paid for their lunches ourselves.
I smelled the stench of government waste, followed it back to its source, and this is what I found.
P-EBT
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, low income families immediately faced the financial challenge of how to feed their children in a world that was locked down. They had grown to depend upon the free or reduced breakfasts and lunches their kids received every weekday at school. Suddenly, those meals were gone and their kids were home — eating food in amounts that families weren’t used to purchasing, and in some cases couldn’t, since they lost their jobs.
Many school systems and food banks began operating curb-side pick-up for meals but that could only solve a small portion of the need.
Enter Congress.
The P-EBT cards were made possible by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act of 2020, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump on March 18, 2020. All of Alabama’s delegation at the time voted in favor of the bill except for former U.S. Rep. Bradly Byrne, R-Fairhope, who voted no, and U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Saks, who didn’t vote at all.
These pandemic-based cards piggy-back on the process and technology used for EBT cards, which replaced paper food stamps years ago.
As explained on the website of the Food and Nutrition Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the P-EBT program:
“… eligible school children receive temporary emergency nutrition benefits loaded on EBT cards that are used to purchase food. Children who would have received free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Act if their schools were not closed or operating with reduced hours or attendance for at least 5 consecutive days are eligible to receive P-EBT benefits.”
The program is funded by the federal government but executed by the states.
By early May of 2020, P-EBT cards were being mailed to thousands of eligible students in Alabama, according to a news release from the Alabama Department of Human Resources, which oversees the distribution of the cards with assistance from the Alabama Department of Education.
The program is retroactive in nature, since you cannot buy someone a lunch they should have eaten six months ago. One justification for it goes something like this: a family may have had to spend an extra $375 in groceries for a semester, and they had to pay for that out of their cash that might have normally covered a necessity, like a utility bill or car payment, so they fell behind. Now, with a $375 in P-EBT card, they can buy some groceries and free-up their cash to catch-up on those other bills. At least in theory.
As the pandemic dragged on and school closures continued, so did the P-EBT program.
The state announced last April that a second round of benefits would be issued, and advisories posted in June, August, and December stated additional funds would be distributed across the state.
A spokesman for the Alabama Department of Human Resources told me that 460,958 students received more than $144,279,786 in benefits for the 2019-2020 school year, the first academic year of the pandemic. For the following school year, 2020-2021, he said that 477,172 students were issued $326,682,316 in benefits, and when the summer months were added, the total for the year increased to 503,040 students and $507,913,066 in funds.
That’s a little more than $652 million in benefits distributed across 19 months.
So how did $750 of that end up in my mailbox?
The Problem Then — Chaos
The federal government funds the cards. The state government oversees their distribution. But the actual work is done by a private company.
Records provided by the Department of Human Resources show that Conduent State & Local Services of Washington, D.C., was issued a contract to manage distribution of the cards. While records show various costs for the contract, past and potential, the department’s spokesman told me that it cost approximately $11 million to distribute the cards.
But the data — the actual names of those who are eligible and the amount of the financial benefit they should receive — came from the Alabama Department of Education.
Now, remember back to the spring and summer of 2020. We didn’t know how bad the pandemic was, how long it would last, and what we needed to prepare for.
People were hoarding toilet paper. It was crazy out there.
And against that backdrop, school officials were trying to not only get meals to those who had already signed up for the free and reduced lunch program, but the thousands more who signed up since the pandemic began.
I spoke with the director of the Alabama Department of Education’s Child Nutrition Program, and the department’s spokesman. They both described a chaotic and confusing process of collecting and sorting through those existing and incoming accounts while at the same time navigating the process of moving to a new student data management system.
Records show that during the 2020-2021 school year, 347,663 students in Alabama’s public schools were enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program. But as the Department of Human Resources spokesman stated, 477,172 students were provided with P-EBT benefits for that year, and a total of 503,040 when you count the summer.
That’s a pretty big difference, somewhere between 129,509 and 155,337 students. And if each of those received the $375 that my children did (which all depends on how long each student’s school was closed), that’d be anywhere between $48 million and $58 million.
Officials said that some of the difference can be explained by counting the private schools that are enrolled in the free and reduced priced lunch program, residential childcare institutions, and those who were added to the program during the effort to provide meals to families during the pandemic, though all were still required to meet eligibility requirements. It’s just not clear what those numbers are, precisely.
It was a “pretty messy situation” the Alabama Department of Education’s spokesman said, while the department’s Child Nutrition Program director said some of the numbers required “finagling.”
To be charitable, that was a sign of the times in 2020. People did their best with the challenges they faced and the resources, and information, they had. In the end, everyone was fed, which is no small feat.
Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, studied the national program and explained in a Washington Post story that states were faced with a massive knowledge management problem:
“Centralized databases for this kind of information were very uncommon, and departments of education were not set up to collect and monitor these types of data,” she said.
The story explained how school administrators were also required to not only track who was eligible in the first place, but how many days their specific school was closed. With hundreds of individual school systems in one state alone, each with their own rules, with some even having separate quarantine rules for grade levels, classrooms, and even individual students, the process grew beyond what the word “chaos” can adequately describe.
You can imagine — lists may have been created, merged, edited, added to, subtracted from, crossed with old ones, mixed with new ones. And then the new computer program messed it all up even more. Who knows?
But hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were distributed based on that data.
I cut through my P-EBT cards with a pair of scissors and mailed them back to the distributor with a note explaining that my children weren’t eligible. The spokesman for the Alabama Department of Education said he hoped others in my shoes would do the same. While I share his hope, I’m not very confident about that. The total at the grocery check-out has increased 7.5% due to inflation in the last year alone and continues to rise. Every dollar counts more than ever.
The Problem Now — Inflation
What did all of this create? Aside from an accounting mess, inflation. My mechanic just told me that a tank of freon that cost $99 last year costs $300 today. The same can be said for most anything, from milk to bread to shoes to gas.
Most people mistakenly think that the current inflation crisis is being caused by a stretched and weakened supply chain.
That’s not correct.
Inflation wasn't coined to describe inflated prices. It was used to describe an economy that is inflated with cash. And in this case, all of these trillions of dollars in cash that our government has pushed into the economy trying to battle COVID-19, including these P-EBT cards, which have pumped billions into the economy nationwide.
Inflation is when there are too many people with cash trying to buy things, and when that happens, those things become too few in number, and thus, more expensive. It happens like clockwork and is a basic rule of economics.
But don’t take my word for it. Read this except from a New York Times op-ed by Steven Rattner, a former advisor in the Obama Administration:
For starters, the supply chains have not been “cut off,” just stretched. And supply issues are by no means the root cause of our inflation. Blaming inflation on supply lines is like complaining about your sweater keeping you too warm after you’ve added several logs to the fireplace.
The bulk of our supply problems are the product of an overstimulated economy, not the cause of it. Sure, there have been some Covid-related challenges, such as health-related worker shortages in factories and among transportation workers. But most of our supply problems have been homegrown: Americans have resumed spending freely, and along the way, they have been creating shortages akin to those in a shopping mall on Black Friday.
All that consumption has resulted from vast amounts of government rescue aid (including three rounds of stimulus checks) and substantial underspending by consumers during the lockdown phase of the Covid crisis. There has also been an unforeseen shift in what consumers are buying: With travel still sluggish and many people still wary of returning to entertainment venues, a hunk of purchasing has moved to goods — particularly “durables” like cars, electronics and building materials for housing — for which production and distribution capacity is limited.
Bottom-line: All this cash from the federal government isn’t helping anything, at least not anymore. It’s hurting everyone, especially those with low incomes and little to no margins in their budget to absorb the increased prices at the pump, the grocery store, and everywhere else.
Going Forward — Stop
One of the arguments conservatives make against big government programs is that they’re simply too big for anyone to manage properly — regardless of their experience, resources, or intent. You can add the P-EBT program to the long line of evidence for that argument.
Still, the federal government has expanded the program to cover meals missed during the current academic year, 2021-2022, and officials at the Alabama Department of Education and the Alabama Department of Human Resources told me that they’re currently exploring the option to continue providing these benefits, though no decision has been made.
First, the program should be paused, if not stopped altogether. The list of eligible students from 2020-2021 that Conduent State & Local Services has cannot be trusted as the basis to distribute so much money, even if the program wasn’t cancelling itself out by causing inflation (which it is).
Secondly, the solution to feeding students who are enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program is to KEEP SCHOOLS OPEN.
We can forgive the mistakes of the past, especially since it was a crisis. As the spokesman told me, it was a “pretty messy situation.”
But we now know that closing schools isn’t the answer. It hurts our society across the board, from the education of our students to the nutrition of low-income families to the inflation that threatens our entire economy.
Education is supposed to be about learning.
And we can start by learning from our mistakes.
(J. Pepper Bryars is Alabama’s only reader supported conservative journalist. You can support his writing by subscribing here.)