Who’s Hungry? When Accounting Rules Decide Who Eats

With the government shutdown still in place, a fight over the future of food assistance is unfolding in Washington, D.C.

As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, Congress approved sweeping changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, affecting about 42 million Americans per month.

The law restricts future benefit increases, tightens work requirements, and shifts more administrative costs to states. Unless Congress gets back to work, benefits could be delayed or suspended altogether.

Beneath the partisan noise lies something quieter and more consequential: the administrative machinery that determines who receives help and who is excluded. SNAP does not operate through campaign slogans or floor speeches but through thousands of pages of eligibility rules and cost calculations.

These may appear technical, but they reveal how the modern administrative state governs through measurement as much as through lawmaking. The formulas that structure SNAP are performative. They do not simply measure poverty; they help define it.

Research back to 2003 has shown how financial models once used to price futures contracts ended up shaping the very markets they were designed to describe. Measurement, they argued, can make realities rather than merely observe them.

As a professor of accountancy and business history, I study how systems built to measure profit and efficiency have seeped into the public realm, quietly shaping how need and entitlement are defined.

The same principle applies to social policy. The tables, thresholds, and quality-control ratios used by SNAP do not just record economic life; they construct it by determining who counts as “in need.”

The latest revisions make this visible. The bill passed in July limits how the Thrifty Food Plan, the benchmark used to set benefit levels, can be adjusted for inflation. It prohibits future revaluations that would raise costs, ensuring that benefits will not keep pace with real food prices.

At the same time, the law changes the treatment of household utilities and internet costs and reduces federal reimbursement for state administrative expenses. Each of these adjustments may seem minor, but together they alter the eligibility boundaries.

Even the program’s internal accounting incentives matter. States are evaluated on payment error rates, the share of benefits deemed incorrectly issued. High error rates can trigger financial penalties.

The very way those rates are measured varies. What counts as an error, how samples are drawn, and how responsibility is assigned, encourage states to err on the side of exclusion. When in doubt, it is safer to deny than to approve. The result is a bureaucracy that prizes precision over access.

This is not new.

Since the New Deal of the 1930s, every major federal social program has relied on measurement systems to translate public commitments into administrable form. Eligibility tables and benefit formulas have always served as the invisible infrastructure of American governance.

Yet when those formulas change, the effects are anything but invisible. They determine which households keep food on the table and which do not.

That is why debates over SNAP’s size or cost often miss the deeper issue. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), for example, has argued that “SNAP was designed to provide temporary relief to vulnerable people facing difficult times, not a permanent subsidy for able-bodied adults,” emphasizing cost and dependency.

What is absent from such debates is any scrutiny of how the program itself defines vulnerability or measures need. Lawmakers argue over how much to spend, but rarely ask how the underlying measurements shape the answer.

If the formulas that define need and benefit levels are adjusted, the fiscal picture shifts with them. What looks like restraint through one metric can become austerity through another.

To be clear, none of this implies that SNAP should be exempt from scrutiny or reform. Questions about its efficiency, reach, and long-term design are legitimate. But those debates must occur with open recognition of how measurement governs policy.

If the administrative rules define who counts as poor, then revising those rules is not a technical matter. It is a political act that decides who gets to eat.

A more transparent process would help. Congress could require that any substantial revisions to the Thrifty Food Plan, quality-control formulas, or deduction rules undergo public notice and independent evaluation through established oversight bodies such as the Office of Management and Budget, the Government Accountability Office, or the Congressional Budget Office.

Each of these agencies already reviews regulations and fiscal impacts, but they could also be tasked with assessing how technical adjustments affect eligibility and benefit adequacy. Their findings must be made public and submitted to Congress before implementation. Any future adjustments need to ultimately be debated in the same forum that determines the program’s funding: the legislature, not the bureaucracy.

SNAP, like other great programs of the 20th century, is a moral commitment administered through numbers. Its success depends not only on appropriations but on the integrity of its measures. When policymakers ignore that layer and treat measurement as neutral, they allow technical procedures to govern democratic choices.

Budgets determine what a society values. Measurements declare who it includes.

Martin E. Persson is an assistant professor of accountancy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.