"Millions of Americans, including Ohioans, don’t get SNAP even though they’re eligible"

As a reminder, Data 4 The People's research illustrated - using four interactive data visualizations - the systemic failure of our nation's largest food assistance program ("SNAP"). It found that 63% of all U.S. counties had less people receiving SNAP than were living in poverty, a blatant failure of a program that - on paper - is designed to be available to all Americans with gross incomes up to 130% of the Federal Poverty Level.

In short, Data 4 The People's work uncovered systemic failures in SNAP before it gets further slashed by provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB).

OCJ's coverage today connected these two stories for the first time. It told the story of a failed program. And then it explained the imminent risk of how SNAP can get even worse.

Read the full story here.

Note there is no paywall. That's how OCJ rolls!

On a related note, in late January census.gov updated its SAIPE dataset, rolling forward its county-level poverty estimates (and SNAP enrollment) to 2023 and its state-level poverty estimates to 2024.

Last week, we updated our four interactive SNAP data visualizations to capture this additional year of data. The biggest takeaway is that political polarization in SNAP coverage continued to increase in 2024. You can see this clearly in the state-level box whisker visualization, embedded below.