State officials say they’re trying to secure a waiver that would allow Vermont to participate in a new federal program that provides nutrition assistance benefits to low-income families over the summer.
Vermont is one of 17 states that decided not to apply for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Summer EBT” program, which would have delivered $3.6 million in food benefits to low-income families this year.
Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families, said earlier this month that the cost of administering the program would have put undue pressure on the state budget.
“It’s not just bringing this [federal food assistance] income here,” Gray said at the time. “There is an expense to Vermont to being able to administer this program now.”
In an interview on Wednesday, however, Gray said DCF is now trying to secure a waiver from USDA that would allow the state to draw down benefits without engaging in the labor-intensive data collection the formal rules require.
“We want to find a way to be able to do this,” Gray said. “We know summer 2025 is something that we will be able to do, and it’s just continuing to explore any possible way to do this in 2024.”
Gray said administrative costs won’t be a barrier in 2025, because the state will have a new IT system in place that streamlines the data collection process.
She said the state already has data close at hand on the Vermont children who are income eligible for other federal assistance programs, such as Medicaid. And she said DCF is working with the USDA to see if the federal government will allow Vermont to use that data to satisfy reporting requirements for the Summer EBT program.
“So seeing if that is something that they would be willing to give us a waiver — or some time — to be able to use that information, and then look at how we could reach other children that are eligible that aren’t on one of these programs,” Gray said Wednesday.
The summer of 2024 marks the “official launch” of a program the USDA calls “a tested and effective strategy for ending summer hunger.” Summer EBT will provide income-eligible families with $40 per month in grocery-buying benefits per child via a debit card sent to households.
The federal government would pay for 100% of the estimated $3.6 million that would flow to Vermont families this summer under the program. But Gray said USDA would cover only 50% of the cost of administering the program.
“So we would also need to be able to say that we have that funding, and … we’re just getting into the budget season with the Legislature now so that timing made this rather challenging,” Gray said earlier this month.
States had to submit a letter of intent to participate in the program to the USDA by Jan. 1.
Gray said administrative costs could be significant, due to the fact that Vermont lacks the IT system needed to streamline the collection of eligibility information from participating households.
Over the past three years, Vermont has participated in a structurally similar “Pandemic EBT” program. Gray said the feds picked up 100% of the administrative costs for that program, which totaled $900,000 last year. She said the process involved manually inputting household eligibility information into spreadsheets.
Though Vermonters would receive significantly more in federal assistance than the state would incur in administrative costs under the Summer EBT program, Gray said moving forward with the initiative this year would cause undue “budgetary pressure.”
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