Joe Biden has had a rough go of things. He leaves the presidency with the worst end-of-first-term approval rating of any president since Jimmy Carter; 55.8 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and only 37.1 percent approve, as of Friday.

Biden’s legacy will take years to sort out, and I certainly think he made serious mistakes. But one of the greatest triumphs of his presidency has gotten far too little attention, including from journalists like myself. That triumph is the reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP).

The phrase “reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan” feels like it was concocted by an AI instructed to design the most boring string of words in the English language, but bear with me. This action, taken by Biden’s Department of Agriculture in 2021, resulted in a 21 percent increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps” colloquially) benefits. The safety net program that is most precisely targeted at America’s poorest and most vulnerable people got a substantial, ongoing increase.

That last part is notable, because so much of Biden’s presidency was spent on temporary measures, with a spree of short-lived programs unleashed in 2021 to tackle the Covid pandemic and help the economy recover from its aftereffects. The TFP hike stands out because it’s still going — indeed, it’s meant to be permanent — and it’s something that the Biden administration did on its own, in accordance with a law that Congress passed in 2018.

As a fan of the food stamps program, I think this was an outstanding measure by Biden, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and USDA nutrition leaders Stacy Dean and Cindy Long. Critics of food stamps, in particular among House Republicans, have long sought to roll back the measure, and it is a possible target for cuts in the Trump years. But whatever you think of the food stamp expansion, it’s an important part of Biden’s legacy, one that will reverberate longer than a burst of inflation or a temporary stimulus bill.

Food stamps benefits, explained

A shocking amount of US government policy is based on the eating habits of people in the 1950s.

The best known case of this is the construction of the official poverty measure, the most frequently invoked statistic for measuring the extent of poverty in the US. It was devised in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, and based on the US Department of Agriculture’s 1962 “Economy Food Plan.” That plan was itself based on 1955 data, and meant to determine how much money a family of four would need for food, if they were really pinching pennies.

The USDA had been putting together plans like this for decades; the 1962 report gives a short history, which goes back to “pioneer nutrition investigator”

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