Strengthen the social safety net and enable people to better manage risk
The purpose of a social safety net is simple: give people the stability to weather hardship, plan for the future, and recover from setbacks without falling into poverty. Yet in recent years, federal policy has moved in the opposite direction. The 2025 reconciliation bill shifted resources upward by redesigning benefit formulas, tightening eligibility, and weakening cost-of-living protections across key programs.
At the same time, rising prices in housing, food, and energy have pushed the basic cost of survival beyond what existing supports can cover. These changes did not make the system more efficient; they made it more regressive, exposing low-income households, older Americans, and disabled individuals to far greater financial precarity.
SNAP funding shortfalls illustrate this clearly. Emergency allotments expired without replacement, benefit levels failed to keep pace with inflation, and administrative backlogs left eligible families waiting months for assistance. These actions increase food insecurity, even as the cost of resolving these failures is far lower than the social and economic costs of hunger.
A modern safety net must reduce volatility, not deepen it. By restoring benefit adequacy, correcting outdated formulas, and ensuring rapid access to assistance, federal policy can once again help families manage risk, maintain stability, and avoid being pushed into crisis by forces outside of their control. Project 2029 proposes the following immediate actions aimed at strengthening the social safety net, including:
Restoring and strengthening SNAP benefits adequacy. This shall include directing the Department of Agriculture to update the Thrifty Food Plan using the most current nutritional and market data, accelerating the scheduled reevaluation timeline, and issuing emergency administrative adjustments in states experiencing elevated food prices or demonstrated benefit shortfalls.
Ensuring low-income workers are not penalized for marginal increases in earnings or savings by encouraging states to adopt or restore broad-based categorical eligibility, which will eliminate benefit cliffs and reduce administrative churn.
Creating SNAP processing time standards with federal enforcement by directing USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service to enforce a national standard timeline for application processing, requiring states to report real-time backlogs, and authorizing federal intervention, including temporary staffing assistance, when states fail to meet statutory timelines.
Strengthening Social Security’s purchasing power by directing the Social Security Administration and the Department of Labor to reevaluate the CPI-W cost-of-living formula and incorporate consumption patterns that most accurately reflect housing, medical care, and energy expenses for retirees and disabled beneficiaries.
Ensuring disabled individuals are not penalized for accepting basic help from family members or community organizations by fixing Supplemental Security Income’s (SSI) outdated asset and income rules. This shall be accomplished by ordering SSA and OMB to update SSI asset limits, exclude more forms of essential support (like informal caregiving or shared housing), and simplify income counting rules.
Expanding automatic enrollment in benefit programs by directing HHS, SSA, and Treasury to automatically re-enroll eligible individuals in SNAP, Medicaid, reduced-cost ACA plans, Low Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP), and SSI where permitted by statute, reducing administrative burden and ensuring consistent access to benefits.
Creating an annual “Household Stability Review” by directing OMB, USDA, SSA, and HHS to publish an annual federal assessment of benefit adequacy that tracks whether SNAP, SSI, Social Security, and housing supports meet basic living costs. This shall include recommending administrative and legislative adjustments to maintain purchasing power.
