A few weeks ago, a DoorDash driver showed up at our door. I started to tell him he had the wrong house — until my 14-year-old daughter came outside, accepted the delivery, and thanked him. She loves DoorDash. I don’t.
“It’s too expensive,” I answer whenever she asks. Apparently, however, the service is not too expensive for millions of food stamp recipients.
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I recently discovered a new trend: people using EBT cards, better known as food stamps, to pay for deliveries. When I first saw complaints about this on X, I assumed it was fake news. A 60-second Google search confirmed I was wrong.
On its website, DoorDash boasts about how many SNAP recipients use its service and offers instructions on how to sign up and buy EBT-approved items. (Some indulgences, such as fast food, are still off limits.)
“Since launching support for SNAP/EBT payments,” said Fuad Hannon, vice president of new verticals at DoorDash, “over 1.1 million consumers have added their SNAP/EBT cards to DoorDash.”
That was in April 2024. Since then, usage has only grown. Earlier this year, the company reported that the number of SNAP/EBT users had more than doubled to 2.4 million.
This is clearly good news for DoorDash, whose stock has quadrupled since it began accepting EBT cards. It also raises important questions about the SNAP program, which has become a focal point in the government shutdown.
The Department of Agriculture recently announced that SNAP benefits will not be issued in November. Voters are anxious, and lawmakers in both major parties blame each other for the potential cut in benefits. However, it’s high time to ask if the federal government’s food stamp program is actually helping Americans.
An abundance of economic research shows that obesity is a greater problem for SNAP recipients than for non-recipients. There are many intertwined reasons for this, but certainly one is that SNAP households purchase more junk food. Soft drinks are the top commodity purchased in SNAP households, USDA research shows, and bagged snacks are not far behind.
America’s steadily rising obesity rate cannot be attributed solely to food stamps, of course. But research indicates they’re contributing. That is not the only unintended consequence, however. Research also shows that SNAP benefits disincentivize work.
“SNAP participants have low employment levels. Less than half of able-bodied SNAP adults (i.e., adults without a disability) work while receiving SNAP,” a 2025 report from the American Enterprise Institute found.
Work is the single greatest way to combat poverty known to man. And while some people no doubt benefit from the assistance, for others it erodes productive habits and leads them down a pathway to dependence, not dignity.
Not very long ago, Republicans seemed to recognize the darker trade-offs of government welfare.
“We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added,” President Ronald Reagan observed.
Today’s GOP is singing a very different tune. President Donald Trump has been assuring voters that SNAP benefits will be issued in November despite the shutdown, while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) invoked Scripture to defend SNAP in the New York Times.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether a government shutdown is the proper time to reform SNAP, but welfare reform is barely being discussed by policymakers.
America’s founding fathers understood incentives better.
“The best way of doing good to the poor,” Ben Franklin once wrote, “is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
Unfortunately, federal policy is making millions of Americans easy in their poverty. Data show that SNAP spending has been exploding, hitting $140 billion in 2023, up from $23 billion in 2000 (both figures are in 2021 dollars).
That wasn’t the program’s original intent. Created during the Great Depression as a small pilot to distribute surplus farm goods to the poor, the Food Stamp Program evolved — through the 1964 Food Stamp Act and its 2008 renaming as SNAP — into a vast entitlement program.
Perhaps Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be involved in any of this. The father of America’s Constitution thought not.
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“The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects,” James Madison said during a 1794 debate in the House of Representatives. “It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
It’s not too late to restore Madison’s vision, but it won’t happen until Americans recognize that ensuring that people are fed is actually not the role of the federal government. If government has any role in charity, it belongs closer to home — entrusted to the states, not centralized in Washington.
Jon Miltimore is senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.