After weeks of delay, federal food benefits should resume to about 1.4 million Ohioans by midweek, according to the state agency that administers the program.
Even though a federal judge ordered him to disburse the funds, President Donald Trump held up the payments to 42 million Americans starting on Nov. 1. That drove record numbers of families to Ohio food pantries.
Trump claimed he couldn’t pay the food benefits because of the partial shutdown of the federal government. But they were paid in every prior shutdown, and the courts ruled that not only could Trump pay them, he had a duty to.
The food program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is administered by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Bill Teets, a spokesman, on Monday said that his department expects to get the food benefits to low-income Ohioans by midweek.
On Friday, the agency issued a written statement saying that it expected to get the money into hungry Ohioans’ pockets by early this week.
“Ohio has begun the process of calculating the full benefit households should have received in November,” it said.
“It will then deduct the partial amount already paid. Over the weekend, ODJFS will begin testing to ensure the accuracy of payments. Once testing is successful, authorization for those amounts will be transmitted early next week to Ohio’s Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) vendor to issue to recipients through their Ohio Direction (EBT) card.”
Recipients of SNAP tend to have low incomes and benefits are modest. Average benefits for a family of three are $588 a month, or a little more than $6 per person, per day. If you’re a single mother of two with just $7,200 a year in net income, your monthly food benefit is $564, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Of the 1.42 million Ohioans who received SNAP in 2022, just over 1 million, or 71%, were children, elderly or disabled, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nearly three-fourths of able-bodied adult SNAP recipients worked at some point in the year in 2015, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in April.
The restoration of benefits may only be temporary for many Ohioans. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act Trump signed last summer contains the biggest cuts ever made to the program. That could cost more than 700,000 Ohioans their benefits, Policy Matters Ohio reported last week.
This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.