Experts Say SNAP’s Food Budget Doesn’t Match How People Actually Eat

By Meghan McCarron. Originally published in The New York Times on November 13, 2025.

Emily Broad Leib is quoted in this article.

The government-shutdown crisis may be coming to an end, but for SNAP recipients the inadequacies of the program still persist, and may get worse.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has long used an esoteric formula to determine how much people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program get to spend on groceries each month. Experts say the calculations, which are based on a subsistence-level diet, rely on unrealistic and out-of-date ideas of how Americans eat. And recipients typically end up using 80 percent of their benefits in the first half of each month.

Kris Adler, a single mother of two in Los Angeles who was laid off a year ago, said she feels that as she struggles to feed her family. “It’s just barely enough, we have to be really careful,” she said. “Toward the end of month, it starts to get scary.”

Ms. Adler sometimes skips meals when food gets short. “I need to make sure the kids have their food,” she said, “and I would rather just not eat and make sure they have what they need.”

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