The Role of State Social Safety Net Generosity on Food Insecurity Among Households with Children

Over the past several decades, food insecurity has become a widely used social indicator of family well-being in the United States. The most recent data show that 12.8 percent of all U.S. households and 17.3 percent of households with children experienced food insecurity in 2022, with substantial variation across states – from 7.1 percent in Minnesota to 16.6 percent in Arkansas (Rabbitt et al., 2023). Whereas early research focused largely on household-level risk factors, researchers have paid increasing attention to the role of public policies, sometimes focusing on how participation in assistance programs is associated with food security, and other times considering assistance programs as part of the broader context that may influence food insecurity. The current study is in the latter vein: we are interested in how the generosity of the social safety net is associated with food insecurity among households with children in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, capitalizing on variation across states and over time.

The “safety net” in the United States is a patchwork of cash and in-kind transfers to low-income individuals and families. With a long history of federalism, social safety net programs are mostly funded at the federal level, though state funding also plays a role; eligibility and generosity rules vary at the state level, often within federally defined parameters (Schmidt et al., 2021). This study posits that food insecurity is associated with household-level risk factors such as low income, but is also influenced by the generosity of state social safety net programs. We build on earlier work (Bartfeld & Dunifon, 2006; Bartfeld & Men, 2017) that examined the role of state contextual factors on household food insecurity during 1998-2001 and 2002-2014, respectively. Here, we focus on a more recent period – the years immediately preceding COVID-19, and incorporating a different set of variables that measure state safety net generosity.

The primary data for this paper utilizes years 2010-2019 of the Current Population Survey-Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS). Household food security status, the dependent variable, and other household-level predictors of food insecurity such as income-to-poverty ratio and racial composition are attained from the CPS-FSS. State-level data comes from the National Welfare Data by the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and other sources. We currently focus on three major safety net programs - Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) - because these are the major means-tested cash and near-cash transfer programs for households with children and have some level of state discretion over benefit level and eligibility. Hierarchical linear modeling is used for the analysis.

Preliminary results highlight the importance of state EITC generosity, which is linked to lower food insecurity with the largest impacts for poor households. In ongoing work, we are incorporating a richer set of measures to capture the generosity of state programs. Results provide new insight into the importance of state policy decisions in reducing food insecurity risk leading into the pandemic.