National Commission recommends ways to improve SNAP

The National Commission on Hunger issued it final report to Congress at the end of 2015. Ten of its numerous recommendations, with accompanying action items, focused on SNAP:

1. Encourage a greater focus on job placement, job training, and career development among SNAP recipients, and ensure necessary supports and infrastructure to facilitate finding work.
2. Ensure SNAP eligibility encourages work by improving responsiveness to earned-income fluctuations.
3. Encourage the use of financial incentives to SNAP recipients to facilitate the purchase of fruits, vegetables, high-quality proteins, whole grains, and other healthy foods.
4. Exclude a carefully defined class of sugar-sweetened beverages from the list of allowable purchases with SNAP benefits.
5. Use evidence-based product placement strategies that encourage purchase of healthy products with SNAP benefits, and tie it to SNAP eligibility for stores.
6. Reform SNAP Nutrition Education (SNAP-Ed) to ensure that efforts are likely to lead to measurable improvements in the health of SNAP recipients.
7. Continue to promote and facilitate greater coordination of means-tested programs across federal and state agencies and provide state incentives for establishing a “no wrong door” approach between SNAP and non-nutrition family support programs.
8. The USDA should use its current flexibility to the greatest extent possible to support state innovations that would help clients to become more food secure and more self-sufficient, and should approve or disapprove these requests within 90 days of submission.
9. Create mechanisms for improved training for front-line SNAP caseworkers to maintain a customer service perspective that facilitates best practices of case management.
10. Support the wellbeing of families that have members who serve or have served in the U.S. Military.

Source: National Commission on Hunger, 12/15, Final Report; American Enterprise Institute, 1/7/16, A Conservative's Viewpoint