The Covid pandemic provided a real-time experiment of a strengthened social safety net, in which several anti-poverty programs were bolstered and benefits increased. One such program, called Pandemic EBT, provided a voucher for families to purchase groceries while children were unable to attend school in person, helping them to obtain the nutrition they would otherwise get through free school meals and lifting millions of children out of hunger.

In late 2022, Congress approved a similar, permanent program on a bipartisan basis. Called SUN Bucks, or Summer EBT, the program begins this month and provides families with $40 per child per month in grocery benefits over the summer, or $120 in total, when they don’t have access to free lunches at school.

Thirty-seven states, five territories, and the District of Columbia will participate in the program. But 13 states, all led by Republican governors, have opted out of the program, depriving millions of low-income kids. Several of these states have also declined to expand Medicaid, increasing the burden on households too poor to afford health care or basic groceries.

SUN Bucks isn’t as generous as its pandemic-era iteration, but the Department of Agriculture nonetheless estimates that the program will reach more than 20 million children. “We always see summer as one of the hungriest times of year,” said Kelsey Boone, the senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research and Action Center. “We see summer EBT as kind of filling that gap in the summer nutrition programs that only reach a fraction of the children that participate in reduced-price school meals during the school year.”

The baker’s dozen of red states that opted out are Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina, South........

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