CLSEI Resources - Alchemist CDC

Sam Greenlee, Executive Director

He/Him

sam@alchemistcdc.org

916-598-3032

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Key Links and Resources

Alchemist CDC

Market Match / California Nutrition Incentive Program (CNIP) / GusNIP Policy

To summarize a key takeaway: the biggest threat to CNIP at present is the funding model in which the program must be re-funded every 2-3 years. As a standard approach, this requires non-profits and farmers’ markets across the state to dedicate significant time and resources that they don’t have toward advocacy simply to keep a proven safety net program up and running. In a year like 2024, in which the hard-won funding was threatened with extinction-level cuts, even more work was required of these groups and the proposed cut prevented California from applying for federal GusNIP funding. A proposal intended to cut costs ended up costing California around $13m in federal funding. We would like to see CNIP established as baseline funding, allowing the organizations who advocate for it to focus on their community-level services and ensuring that California is always able to pursue the maximum match from the federal government.
Save Market Match website – this website was the policy/organizing tool used by our statewide coalition in 2024 to oppose proposed cuts to CNIP. It has not been updated since the policy victory in preserving the program, but it has resources and information that are helpful with regard to CNIP and the Market Match program.
Official Market Match website
Regarding the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP): this program provides a dollar for dollar match to CNIP. It is a component of the Farm Bill which is now a year over-due and unlikely to pass before the new administration comes in to office. Statewide, we have been advocating for Congress to allocate more money to GusNIP because it has been so successful that programs throughout the country are requiring more funding. With the election, we are concerned it may actually face cuts. It has a history of bipartisan support, but that is also in danger. It could go a long way if California legislator could reach out to California’s congressional members to highlight the importance of this program to food-insecure households and to California’s farmers.

CalFresh / SNAP / EBT Policy

CalFresh and Farmers’ Markets

As Sam mentioned, Alchemist ran a bill in 2022 which was signed into law but never funded with the goal of creating a grant program to ensure CalFresh access is available at every certified farmers’ market in the state. This information has not been updated since the 2023 effort to fund the program, but is a helpful reference. Please note: the original request of $1500/month/market would likely not be sufficient by the time any such funding is passed for this program as that was pegged in 2022 on the basis of 2021 and costs have risen since then.

Federal Policy for SNAP
Congress opted not to renew the pandemic-era increases to SNAP, and our hope has been to see increases restored as current household EBT benefits are not nearly sufficient to feed a household in California. While this does not seem likely in the current Farm Bill, efforts like Sen. Menjivar’s SB 600 to enhance the CalFresh minimum benefit are a good model for how the state can supplement these benefits.

With the new federal administration, we have significant concerns about possible changes to SNAP policy. While we do not yet know to what extent efforts like Project 2025 will impact actual federal policy, the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) has summarized the proposed policies in Project 2025 for SNAP. Our comments are in italics:

Increase work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents by only allowing waivers if the state’s unemployment rate is above 6 percent for more than 24 months and disallowing long-standing state flexibility to calculate the local unemployment rate. Harms California’s ability to administer the program appropriately.

Eliminate categorical eligibility, which would remove the state options of increasing gross income eligibility from 130 percent to 200 percent of the federal poverty level and increasing/removing the asset limit. Likely more harmful to California than any other state, as the federal poverty level is completely irrelevant to California’s high cost of living. This would be devastating and dramatically increase food insecurity here.

Roll back the updates to the Thrifty Food Plan that modernized the SNAP benefits formula after decades of being connected to metrics and nutritional guidance from the 1960s. This would not uniquely harm California, but would drive up food insecurity nationwide including California.

Eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and create a national standardized utility allowance for households with low incomes. Another policy that would be particularly harmful in California.

One additional threat to SNAP looms large, although it is not included in Project 2025. Maryland Representative Andy Harris has been pushing for a “SNAP Choice” policy that is echoed in policy proposed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The proposal is to change SNAP to function more like WIC, meaning that instead of allowing EBT beneficiaries to use their benefits to buy any food product (excepting alcoholic beverages), it would strictly regulate which specific items could be purchase with EBT. Effectively, this would require the creation of federal infrastructure to independently evaluate every single grocery item’s exact nutritional content to rate its “nutritional density” and prohibit the usage of EBT to purchase products that don’t meet the standard.

This policy would create many problems. First, it would be very costly to the US government to create and maintain such a system. The average grocery store carries around 30,000 unique “stock keeping units” (SKUs), meaning individual grocery products. Some larger grocery stores carry upwards of 80,000. There are hundreds of thousands of unique grocery products on the market and thousands-tens of thousands of new grocery products introduced each year. This system would stymie innovation and competition in the food industry, increase the moves toward consolidation and monopolization), harm small local food businesses, and create new hurdles for products to be approved for EBT even if they meet the nutritional density standards. This leads to the second major problem: there would be far less in any given grocery store that was eligible for EBT. This would restrict the choice of SNAP beneficiaries, impact culturally significant foods, and increase stigma for the program participants. Research has consistently indicated that anti-hunger benefit programs are most successful when they reduce the stigma of participation and increase benefits.