Most Americans have never heard of the Thrifty Food Plan, but President Joe Biden’s US Department of Agriculture (USDA) used a routine re-evaluation of it to bypass Congress and increase government spending on a key safety net program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost at $200 billion over the next 10 years, adding to an already overstretched federal budget. Now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog—has confirmed in two reports that the USDA acted improperly. Congress should insist that the USDA re-conduct the re-evaluation, this time demanding integrity and adherence to the law.      

Let’s start with how a routine administrative exercise expanded the federal budget in the first place.

Simply put, the USDA creates four food plans to represent a suitable diet at different cost points: thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost and liberal. For decades, food and nutrition experts within the USDA have developed the plans to “inform research, education, and policy.”

The Thrifty Food Plan has added relevance because it serves as the basis for setting benefit levels for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP (formerly called food stamps). In 1975, the USDA set food stamp benefit levels at the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan and adjusted those benefit levels each year for inflation. Three times since 1975, USDA researchers reevaluated the underlying assumptions of the Thrifty Food Plan, but always stayed within the bounds of the law—never raising the TFP above the inflation-adjusted amount of the 1975 plan.

This changed in 2021 when the Biden administration’s USDA ignored the historical precedent of reevaluating the Thrifty Food Plan by expanding it beyond the original plan’s cost constraints. The USDA defended their decision by arguing that the 2018 Farm Bill, which included a requirement to reevaluate the Thrifty Food Plan every five years, did not legally require the cost constraint principle, even though Republican lawmakers believed it did. The USDA conducted the reevaluation without the cost constraints, resulting in an unprecedented 21 percent increase in SNAP benefits.

Republican lawmakers requested a review by the GAO with several questions about the USDA’s reevaluation process. The GAO has now released two reports, each concluding that the USDA acted improperly throughout the process.

In the first case, the GAO found that the USDA violated the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which requires government bureaucracies to submit significant policy updates to Congress. According to the GAO, the USDA failed to ask for congressional approval, writing, “the 2021 TFP is subject to the CRA requirement that it be submitted to Congress before it can take effect.” Regrettably, even though the USDA violated the CRA, the benefit increase still went into effect; only an act of Congress or a future USDA can reverse the increase. 

The GAO published a second report last week summarizing their review of the USDA’s reevaluation. The bottom line: The reevaluation was rife with problems from start to finish.

First, the USDA cut several corners to accelerate the timeline so that they could increase benefits in line with the expiration of pandemic-related expansions to SNAP at the end of 2021. The accelerated timeline pushed forward the process by as much as 18 months and sacrificed quality according to the GAO. It also revealed the USDA’s real intention to use the reevaluation to bypass Congress and increase SNAP benefits.

Second, the GAO cited multiple instances that the USDA failed to follow the basic steps necessary to ensure integrity of the process. They failed to use evidence to justify decisions, they neglected to document their decision-making process, and they ignored their own internal guidance on how to review and check the results of their decisions.

In fact, the GAO identified 11 crucial decision points and established that the USDA lacked documentation and justification for all decisions. The GAO found that the USDA did not even complete their information gathering (which they had already accelerated the timeline for) in advance of making key decisions, leaving officials to report that they used evidence “mainly for context and not as a direct input to the TFP reevaluation process.”

To make matters worse, the GAO found that the USDA lacked a proper peer review of those decisions. The people involved in “peer reviewing” the decisions were the same people involved in making the decisions, an egregious violation of the USDA’s own internal guidance.

There are many more examples of the USDA’s careless work found by the GAO. But officials at the USDA seem unfazed. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack responded to the GAO stating: “We stand firm on both the quality of our work and the difference it made in millions of people’s lives. We owed it to the American people to get the reevaluation done well and get it done quickly—and that’s exactly what we did.” The report from Congress’s watchdog strongly disagrees.

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