The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out Healthy Fluid Milk Incentives projects to develop and test methods to increase the purchase and consumption of fluid milk of SNAP households by providing incentives at the point of purchase. The Act requires biennial reporting on the status of projects and completed evaluations. The findings for the FY 2020 award were presented in the first report to Congress. This second report presents findings from the FY 2021, FY 2022 and FY 2023 pilot projects.
This study provides an overview of the risk assessment tools currently used by the state agencies that administer the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to categorize those program applications more likely to incur payment errors and allocate resources to improve the accuracy of benefit payments to families participating in SNAP.
The Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 requires federal agencies, like FNS, to give Congress information about payment errors for federal programs, like CACFP. FNS planned this study to estimate payment errors in CACFP child care centers. However, after completing the study, FNS found an error in the method used to estimate nationwide findings from the study data. Because of the error, FNS is not publishing the full study, and will instead present key findings that relate to broad trends instead of specific estimates.
We explored the feasibility of using existing data from state monitoring reviews – a process designed to assess operations and provide real-time technical assistance to family day care homes operating CACFP – to estimate the rate of improper payments in those operations. This study found that flexibility in these reviews and the information they report across states, while beneficial for their main purpose, made the resulting data unusable for estimating a national improper payment rate.
The third annual survey of School Food Authorities found that 95 percent of SFAs faced supply-chain related challenges in school year (SY) 2023-24, but that the number of reported challenges and impacts they have on school food service have largely declined compared to SY 2022-23. This report is the third in the series and, like the others, reports findings from a 20-minute online questionnaire sent to all SFAs operating child nutrition programs in schools to gather information on the impacts of continued supply chain challenges
This report explores different approaches to reevaluating the Thrifty Food Plan, which represents a low-cost, nutritious diet comprised of foods and beverages consumed at home and is used to calculate SNAP benefit amounts.