The USDA announced an update to the Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to set benefit levels for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This science-driven and long-overdue reevaluation will be welcome news for families across the country, many of whom will be better able to afford a healthy diet with greater SNAP benefits.

The jump in benefits, the biggest in the program’s history, comes after a revision of the initiative’s nutrition standards that supporters say will reduce hunger and better reflect how Americans eat.

More than a year into a public health crisis that snowballed into a social and economic disaster, Baker was still among the 28 percent of households struggling to cover household expenses in July. She was still among the 11.5 million renters behind on her payments. She was still among the 1 in 7 parents struggling to feed their families. All this despite a raft of government interventions, the latest of which is an expanded child tax credit approved by Congress in March.

It should be an energizing break from school. Kids should hang out, go to the pool, see movies. They should get to just be kids. But where I’m from in Phoenix, that’s just not always the case, because they’re hungry. And I see it almost every day.

Senator Sherrod Brown, a Lutheran, Democrat, and US senator from Ohio, and Peter Edelman, faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, share an opinion about the child tax credit.

“This is one of the largest expansions of an anti-poverty program we’ve probably ever seen,” said Elyssa Schmier, vice president of government relations and national budget at the advocacy organization MomsRising. “It will likely cut poverty in half over the next year, childhood poverty in particular.”