The Food and Nutrition Service FNS

Federal food assistance began as a way to dispose of farm surpluses during the Depression, when the government bought up crops to support prices and handed the food to the poor. The first food stamps, in 1939, let families buy surplus commodities at a discount. The idea was revived as a pilot in 1961, made permanent by the Food Stamp Act of 1964, and expanded nationwide in the 1970s. The Food and Nutrition Service was created on August 8, 1969, to run the growing set of programs from inside the Agriculture Department, where they remain because of the farm-bill bargain that pairs them with crop subsidies.

The agency administers sixteen programs. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still widely called food stamps, is the largest, providing benefits on debit-style cards to roughly forty million people in a typical month at a cost near a hundred billion dollars a year. The National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs serve meals to about thirty million children each school day. WIC provides food, formula, and nutrition counseling to about six and a half million pregnant women, mothers, and young children. Smaller programs reach food banks, tribal reservations, summer meals, and elderly and child care feeding.

FNS does not hand out benefits itself. It sets rules, pays the money, and audits the results, while states run SNAP and WIC through their own welfare offices and school districts run the meal programs. That split gives the agency a small staff, about 1,500 people, relative to the scale of what it funds. SNAP eligibility is tied to income and assets, with work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents that Congress has tightened and loosened repeatedly. Benefits rise automatically with the cost of a basic diet, a formula the agency updated in 2021 for the first time in decades.

No federal program is argued over more regularly. Supporters point to evidence that SNAP reduces hunger, poverty, and health costs and that nearly every dollar is spent quickly at local stores. Critics argue it discourages work, is prone to error and fraud, and has grown far beyond its original purpose. The 2025 budget law shifted part of SNAP's cost to the states for the first time and expanded work requirements, changes whose effects on enrollment will become visible over the following years.