Texas won’t offer a program to help feed kids over the summer. Advocates push for change next year.

About three dozen states plan to participate in a federal program that helps families pay for groceries over the summer. For the second year in a row, Texas – which has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the U.S. – won’t be among them.

The Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program, also known as Summer EBT or SUN Bucks, provides families with $120 per eligible child to help pay for food while school’s out. The idea is to help fill the gap for kids who rely on free and reduced-price meals during the school year.

Anti-hunger advocates had held out hope Texas could get the program off the ground this summer even after missing the Jan. 1 deadline to tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it planned to participate.

Celia Cole is one of those advocates. She’s the CEO of Feeding Texas, a network of 20 food banks that pushes for policies to prevent hunger. She said the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which would be responsible for implementing Summer EBT in the state, needed to know by Monday whether the Texas Legislature was going to allocate funding the agency needed to get the program up and running. The state must provide money up front to launch the program.

“That did not happen, unfortunately,” she said. “The Legislature did not appropriate or tell them they would have the money in time for them to do it this summer.”

Cole said HHSC had estimated it needed about $55 million to cover startup costs and some ongoing expenses associated with implementing the program. That price tag, she said, is much higher than what it has cost to implement the program in other states.

“We have always maintained that those estimates were way too high,” she said. “I think HHSC was reasonably nervous about underestimating and then being stuck without having enough resources or funds to run the program. But … I think one of the sticking points was the funding.”

Cole added that the amount of funding Texas families could receive through Summer EBT far outweighs the cost of setting the program up.

“We estimated it would result in about $450 million in federal food assistance this summer reaching 3.75 million low-income kids in Texas,” she said.

Cole said Feeding Texas sees childhood hunger spike during the summer months. So does Lauren Gambill, a pediatrician in the Austin area. She said pediatricians are on the lookout for symptoms that might appear to be something else but are actually hunger.

“Abdominal pain or stomach pain is a common presentation that kids can come in for, and I’ve taken care of multiple kids that have come in for abdominal pain,” she said.

In addition to immediate health issues, Gambill said, hunger can have a long-term effect on children.

“Kids that have food insecurity or hunger are more susceptible to chronic diseases like anemia, to asthma, to diabetes, to heart disease,” she said. “And so we see all of those things when kids are chronically hungry or chronically food insecure.”

Gambill said while Summer EBT would not entirely solve the problem of food insecurity, it would go a long way in helping kids stay healthy while school’s out. That, she said, is something that has an important ripple effect.

“We know there’s the broader educational impact that these kids come back more prepared to learn during the school year,” she said, “and so our teachers and our schools can better utilize resources to help kids reach their full potential educationally.”

Cole said the goal is now to ensure state lawmakers give HHSC the resources it needs to launch the Summer EBT program in 2026.

“Members across the political spectrum in the Texas Legislature support this program, but we just didn’t get enough support to get it over the finish line for this summer,” she said. “We’ll continue to push to make sure there is that political will at the leadership levels to appropriate the funds for summer of 2026 and summer of 2027.”

HHSC told KUT in an emailed statement that ensuring kids have access to healthy food over the summer is a priority for the agency. The spokesperson added that HHSC will continue working with the Texas Legislature, as well as other state agencies, on this issue.

This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.

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