When Latoya Jefferson, a single mother in Baton Rouge, tried to sign her two-year-old daughter up for food assistance last year, she spent three hours navigating government websites, making phone calls, and filling out duplicate forms. She eventually gave up — not because she wasn't eligible, but because the process felt impossible.
Jefferson's experience illustrates a puzzle that policymakers and researchers have long struggled to solve: why do so many families who qualify for government assistance never receive it? New research from Brookings senior fellow Jon Valant and Lindsay Weixler, co-director of the New Orleans Collaborative for Early Childhood Research at Tulane University, offers a surprisingly straightforward answer — and an even simpler solution.
Their study, conducted in Louisiana with low-income families applying for SNAP benefits, used a randomized controlled trial to test whether simply helping people navigate the system could boost enrollment in related programs like WIC and free early childhood education. The results were striking: among families who received clear information about their likely eligibility and direct links to applications, WIC application rates jumped from 29% to 38%. Families who received additional support — including the ability to transmit their information to other agencies with a single click — saw nearly identical gains, with 37% applying.
The researchers note that these gains held especially strong for families who may have been unaware of their eligibility. Parents of children older than one year, for instance, showed particularly large increases; the researchers suspect many simply didn't know that WIC benefits extend beyond infancy. Hispanic applicants also showed outsized gains, suggesting that language and navigation barriers play a significant role in under-enrollment.
Enrollment rates — not just applications — improved as well, though more modestly. The control group's enrollment sat at just over 23%, while both the information and support groups reached roughly 28%. The researchers caution that even with simplified processes, families still face meaningful barriers to completing enrollment.
"Administrative burden isn't just an inconvenience," Valant and Weixler write. "For many eligible families, it becomes an invisible wall." Their findings suggest that the problem isn't that people don't want help — it's that the system makes finding and accepting that help unnecessarily difficult.
The implications extend well beyond Louisiana. With WIC currently serving roughly 6 million people nationwide butmillions more eligible but unenrolled, the researchers argue that basic changes to how information is communicated could unlock millions in federal support for families who need it most.