The state wants to change the rules to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, so that more than 13,000 more households could be eligible for its benefits.
The directive comes after a University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization report showed that the state was losing out on millions of dollars of SNAP benefits due to income limit rules.
Economist Dylan Moore, one of the authors of the report, said that the state could remove limits on what it calls “net income."
“What that means is a limit on the amount of income a household can have after you take out deductions like paying for child care, paying for rent, things like this — how much money they have left over after they pay for those expenses,” he said.
“It turns out that keeping that limit in place, it matters a lot in Hawaiʻi — much more so than in other states. And in fact, right now, is restricting a number of households from receiving benefits, who otherwise would.”
Moore explained that the problem is a particular issue in Hawaiʻi because of the high cost of living.
SNAP is largely funded by the federal government, so the net income limit elimination would result in an additional $45 million of federal funds coming to Hawai’i.
State Department of Human Services Director Ryan Yamane said he intends to implement this change, but it is not yet clear if its eligibility system from the 1980s would be capable of doing so.
“The timeframe for implementation is dependent on the ability to make necessary modifications to the legacy HAWI system, and the timeline for completion of the new system currently in development,” he wrote in a statement.
“The elimination of the net income limit for SNAP households under Broad Based Categorical Eligibility aligns with the department’s overall mission to encourage self-sufficiency and support the well-being of individuals, families and communities in Hawaiʻi.”
The department is in the early stages of upgrading the system, but it will not be completed until early next year.
Gov. Josh Green agreed with the UHERO report and encouraged the department to make the changes.
“This is going to provide a huge relief for our working-class families who are struggling with Hawai‘i’s highest-in-the-nation cost of living,” Green wrote in a statement.
“In identifying a critical opportunity for our SNAP program, UHERO’s research team is enabling us to make much-needed changes to our social welfare system so that families living from paycheck to paycheck can afford to put more food on their tables.”
