Virginia SNAP substitute to roll out weekly through November

Virginia’s budget surplus will fund a state-level replacement for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program should the federal government shutdown continue into November, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Tuesday. 

Dubbed Virginia Emergency Nutrition Assistance, or VENA, the newly-created program is expected to send money to SNAP beneficiaries’ Electronic Benefit Transfer cards starting on Nov. 3. 

SNAP typically helps low-income earners and people who can’t work  afford groceries. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, has told states to pause payments until further notice, starting Nov. 1. The federal government has been shut down since the beginning of October as members of Congress failed to agree on annual appropriations bills and several attempts at a short-term spending bill that could end the shutdown. 

 VENA’s payments will roll out in weekly waves every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and follow SNAP’s model of disbursing funds to a third of beneficiaries  each time. With SNAP, a third of people are paid on the first of each month, another third gets paid on the fourth and the last group gets their benefits on the 7th. 

Unlike SNAP, however, people can expect VENA money weekly rather than their month’s allotment all at once.

Youngkin estimates that about $37.5 million will be allocated per week to Virginia’s roughly 850,000 SNAP recipients. 

“Because we are designing this in real time, we need to pay the first benefits on a Monday,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said as he announced details of the new program at the state Capitol on Tuesday afternoon. 

Youngkin acknowledged the “hardship” recipients may face if they had expected their normal SNAP payments on the first of the month, which is a Saturday. To remedy that problem, he directed  $1 million to the state’s network of food banks to help bolster their support. Last week, Virginia’s food banks had cautioned that they could not fully absorb the spike of Virginia’s SNAP beneficiaries that would flock to them for help. 

Youngkin said that he anticipates Virginia can operate the program through the end of next month, but he hopes that Congress can end the shutdown before then. 

Partisan tensions simmer amid shutdown, social programs held ‘hostage’

The governor cast the blame for the shutdown and impending SNAP freeze on Democrats in Congress, where Republicans hold the majority. 

“To be honest, I think our nation will be in a state of complete disarray if the Democrats in the Senate continue to drag out this complete shutdown and hostage-taking that they have engineered,” Younkgin said. 

He suggested that Democrats in Congress are essentially putting programs like SNAP at risk, which “continues to just absolutely defy any sense of morality.”

His remarks echo that of politicians nationwide, who have played a blame game about who’s at fault for the federal shutdown and its effect on states.

President Donald Trump is on an out-of-country trip to Asia while the U.S. House of Representatives has not gaveled into session in more than a month. The U.S. Senate has continued to meet but has also failed to agree on continuing resolutions. 

A key sticking point for Democrats, has been an attempt to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that the Republican-controlled Congress left out of their reconciliation bill this summer. 

Those subsidies help low-income people who don’t qualify for Medicaid be able to purchase health insurance on their own. The matter has taken on fresh salience as the reconciliation bill entails forthcoming changes to health care that would cause millions of Americans to lose Medicaid insurance and funding losses to hospitals. The bill took aim at Medicaid in order to boost funding for the U.S. military, U.S. Customs and Immigration and to extend tax cuts that primarily benefit high-income earners. 

“Republicans still control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. They have, quite literally, the power to stop this,” Virginia’s U.S. senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner said in a statement provided to The Mercury. “They also had the power to defend nutrition benefits earlier this year, but chose to sell out working families as part of the Big Ugly Law in order to offset the cost of tax breaks for billionaires.”

U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach, has agreed with her Democratic colleagues that the ACA subsidies should be extended and  urged her fellow Republicans to address the matter — but she suggested in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson that Congress take up the matter after ending the shutdown. 

Kaine, Warner and others have also urged the USDA to tap into its $6 billion contingency funding in the interim to support SNAP nationwide. 

SNAP recipients will have relief for now

The political back-and-forth over the past month has caused stress for local SNAP recipients, including  Richmond resident Asia Broadie, a single mother balancing work, parenting and schooling to become a nursing assistant. 

On a recent trip to the grocery store with The Mercury, she explained which bulk purchases get her through each month and how she’s able to tap into a state program to buy discounted produce. 

“They’re growing and they’re eating — it goes quick,” she said of her children. 

While Virginia’s budget surplus has allowed Youngkin to get creative with short-term solutions, he emphasized Tuesday that each state is different and not all can absorb issues that stem from the federal fallout.

“The National Governors Association has called us to ask us how we are doing this,” Youngkin explained. “We’re leading different states in different circumstances, and I think we have decided that we’re just going to get this done.”

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com.