The best thing that Joe Biden did

Joe Biden has had a rough go of things. He leaves the presidency with the worst end-of-first-term approval rating of any president since Jimmy Carter; 55.8 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and only 37.1 percent approve, as of Friday.

Biden’s legacy will take years to sort out, and I certainly think he made serious mistakes. But one of the greatest triumphs of his presidency has gotten far too little attention, including from journalists like myself. That triumph is the reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP).

The phrase “reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan” feels like it was concocted by an AI instructed to design the most boring string of words in the English language, but bear with me. This action, taken by Biden’s Department of Agriculture in 2021, resulted in a 21 percent increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps” colloquially) benefits. The safety net program that is most precisely targeted at America’s poorest and most vulnerable people got a substantial, ongoing increase.

That last part is notable, because so much of Biden’s presidency was spent on temporary measures, with a spree of short-lived programs unleashed in 2021 to tackle the Covid pandemic and help the economy recover from its aftereffects. The TFP hike stands out because it’s still going — indeed, it’s meant to be permanent — and it’s something that the Biden administration did on its own, in accordance with a law that Congress passed in 2018.

As a fan of the food stamps program, I think this was an outstanding measure by Biden, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and USDA nutrition leaders Stacy Dean and Cindy Long. Critics of food stamps, in particular among House Republicans, have long sought to roll back the measure, and it is a possible target for cuts in the Trump years. But whatever you think of the food stamp expansion, it’s an important part of Biden’s legacy, one that will reverberate longer than a burst of inflation or a temporary stimulus bill.

Food stamps benefits, explained

A shocking amount of US government policy is based on the eating habits of people in the 1950s.

The best known case of this is the construction of the official poverty measure, the most frequently invoked statistic for measuring the extent of poverty in the US. It was devised in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, and based on the US Department of Agriculture’s 1962 “Economy Food Plan.” That plan was itself based on 1955 data, and meant to determine how much money a family of four would need for food, if they were really pinching pennies.

The USDA had been putting together plans like this for decades; the 1962 report gives a short history, which goes back to “pioneer nutrition investigator” Wilbur Olin Atwater, who worked at the department in the 1890s. The point of the plans was instructional, similar to the food pyramid of more recent decades: to demonstrate for average families how they could purchase food that met their caloric and nutritional needs at a reasonable cost. 

The Economy Food Plan was the result of an attempt to find the cheapest possible diet that could still provide basic nutrition. The report clarifies that this means it assumes households will buy less fruit, vegetables, or meat, and focus on cheap and lasting items like dry beans and potatoes. “It is essentially for emergency use,” the report concludes. 

Orshansky tripled the cost of this emergency diet to arrive at a level of income below which a family would be in poverty, since families of three more typically spent a third of their income on food at the time. (For all the complaints about grocery inflation, Americans now spend only about 10 percent of their income on food.)

That was the poverty line, and it has not changed since, with the exception of annual adjustments for inflation, according to the consumer price index. It serves to determine eligibility for programs like Medicaid, health insurance credits, and food stamps, and it’s all based on 1950s eating habits.

For food stamps, though, “food plans” take on additional significance. Eligibility is based on the poverty line (which is in turn based on the 1962 Economy Food Plan), but the benefit amount received under SNAP is determined by something called the Thrifty Food Plan, which succeeded the Economy Food Plan starting in 1975. 

The maximum SNAP benefit for a given family is set as equal to the cost of a diet for a family of that size under the Thrifty Food Plan; benefits are then steadily reduced as the family’s income increases. For instance, a four-person household this year has a maximum monthly benefit of $975, because that is the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four. Food stamps assumes that a family can afford to pay 30 percent of their income on food, so a four-person household with $1,000 in monthly earnings would receive $975 minus (30 percent times $1,000) = $675 a month.

When the Thrifty Food Plan was first established in 1975, it was set at the same level as the 1962 plan, only adjusted for inflation. It was the same approach used when setting the poverty line. The plan was then updated repeatedly, in 1983, 1999, and 2006, but each time the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan only grew according to inflation. 

This was required: The updates were, as a matter of policy, meant to be cost-neutral. The plans’ allocation of the budget between different types of foods changed quite a bit over this period, but the overall cost could not.

This was inadequate on a number of grounds. For one thing, food price inflation and overall inflation are not the same, and there have been key moments, like the mid-1970s and the aftermath of the pandemic, when food inflation was notably higher than overall inflation. But more importantly, the requirement to not increase prices meant that the Thrifty Food Plan came to involve a diet that assumed families had far more time to cook and meal prep than they actually did, and that they would subsist on bizarre diets that no one actually eats anymore.

My favorite example is that the 2006 Thrifty Food Plan, to produce a cheap diet that provides adequate protein, suggested that a family of four should eat 40 pounds of low-fat milk and yogurt a week. That’s 18.1 kilograms, and since a Chobani cup of yogurt is 150 grams, that implies that the household is eating the equivalent of 120 yogurt cups a week. No one actually eats like this. 

The TFP also assumed that households had 2 hours and 18 minutes free, every day, to prepare food; the actual amount for households on SNAP was more like 50 minutes. As such, the plan prescribed bulk purchases of goods that took time to chop, process, soak, etc., that many households just did not have. It also did not budget for people to buy convenient items that might be slightly more expensive, like canned beans instead of dry ones.

How the Biden administration revamped food stamps

Stacy Dean, who served as deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services from 2021 to 2024, explained to me that her team’s efforts to reform the Thrifty Food Plan were authorized by the 2018 Farm Bill, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Donald Trump. Section 4002 of the law stated that the Department of Agriculture should “by 2022 and at 5-year intervals thereafter … reevaluate and publish the market baskets of the thrifty food plan based on current food prices, food composition data, consumption patterns, and dietary guidance.”

The team was thus instructed that the Thrifty Food Plan had to reflect how people actually ate (“consumption patterns”) and the foods they actually chose (“food composition data”), rather than assuming that poor Americans subsist largely on giant tubs of yogurt, or oatmeal and beans. 

The administration concluded that complying with that instruction meant the total cost of the Thrifty Food Plan could not stay the same. It was not possible to accurately reflect the actual cost of food and not increase the cost of the plan.

You can see this in the long report the USDA put out in 2021 outlining the changes. (They beat the 2022 deadline by a year.) “For the first time in more than 45 years, maintaining cost neutrality did not drive the process,” the report states. “Instead, the Thrifty Food Plan reevaluation process started first with assessing the foods and beverages that make up a healthy, practical diet, then determining a cost at which they could be purchased by resource-constrained households.”

Dean said that by far the most important factor driving the 21 percent increase in the cost of the plan was that the department had better data on food prices with which to work. “In the past, they were using people’s recollection of what they paid for food. Do you remember what you spent on food last week?” she asked me. “You might remember in aggregate, but not for individual items.” Instead of that survey data, Dean and her team used data directly from retailers that the USDA was already collecting for other purposes. This provided a much more accurate and up-to-date sense of what people were paying for food — which led to a conclusion that food costs were greater than the old Thrifty Food Plan reflected.

Dean emphasized to me that the goal was to get an accurate sense of what a thrifty household was actually paying for food, rather than an attempt to change SNAP per se. To that point, USDA has actually been revising downward the Thrifty Food Plan for Hawaii (which, along with Alaska, gets its own estimate separate from the mainland) because it believed the earlier estimate of the plan’s cost was too high.

But the overall effect of the TFP reevaluation was to substantially increase food stamp benefits for the more than 41 million people who use it. While the resulting SNAP program is still quite modest (it went from offering $4.80 per person per day to $6.20 per person per day), that had significant budgetary implications. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the TFP change would cost $250 billion to $300 billion over 10 years. 

Where SNAP goes under Trump

While the Biden team saw the Thrifty Food Plan update as merely following the law Congress wrote, Republicans unsurprisingly saw the matter differently. Conservative think tanks like the Foundation for Government Accountability made attacking the change a major priority, and Republican members of Congress railed against it in hearings. 

“Some will cynically point to provisions to update the Thrifty Food Plan in the 2018 Farm Bill as the basis for USDA’s action, but Congress never agreed to permit a quarter of a trillion-dollar spending increase,” Sen. John Boozman (R-AZ), the incoming chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, argued in 2023.

The 2018 Farm Bill itself expired on September 30, 2023, and has been continually extended as-is since then by Congress. But that means we’re overdue for a new farm bill, and Republicans like House agriculture chair GT Thompson (R-PA) have signaled they want to use the bill to roll back the TFP boost. Donald Trump proposed sweeping cuts to food stamps in each of his budgets as president, and lists of “spending options” being circulated by congressional Republicans give reversing the Thrifty Food Plan changes a prominent place, alongside cuts to Medicaid.

All that suggests that Republicans will probably try to cut food stamps this year. But there’s reason to be optimistic they’ll fail. Food stamps have always survived based on an unusual coalition between farm-state members of Congress and urban members, where the latter support farm subsidies that don’t help their constituents in exchange for food stamps that do, and vice versa. 

Farm bills pass through regular order, meaning they need 60 Senate votes, and no Senate Democrat is going to vote for a bill that substantially cuts food stamps. Even if Republicans try to use budget reconciliation to avoid needing 60 Senate votes, their thin House majority means only a few defections would be needed to kill food stamp cuts. There’s a reason Trump merely proposed cuts last time, while signing a farm bill that didn’t cut the program at all.

If the Thrifty Food Plan changes endure, they stand as an unambiguously positive part of the legacy of Dean, Vilsack, and Biden himself. It’s tempting to view the 2021–2025 period as an interregnum in an era mostly defined by Donald Trump and the ways in which he’s reshaped American politics. But interregna can leave lasting marks too. And this could be an immensely positive one.