Estimates of Nonparticipation Rates of Medicaid and SNAP Beneficiaries in WIC

​​This report responds to House Report 117-82, which directs the USDA to publish state-level estimates of the percentage of pregnant women, infants, and children under age five participating in FNS’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or in Medicaid but not participating in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

Key Findings

• USDA attempted to fulfill the Congressional directive by conducting two different analyses, using two different methodologies with different data sources. One approach used USDA and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) administrative data to generate counts of nonparticipants, and a second approach used Census survey data to generate estimates.
• The national-level results suggest relatively large WIC-Medicaid and WIC-SNAP gaps, but the state-level results are not reliable enough for USDA to be able to quantify the size of the WIC-Medicaid and WIC-SNAP gaps in individual states.
• Results from the state-level analyses are presented in the appendices, but both methods have substantial limitations that limit USDA’s confidence in the state-level results and/or make the results difficult to interpret.