Millions of low-income families with kids will get more help paying for food this summer − depending on what state they live in.

More than half of U.S. states are set to take part in a new program where poor families with kids can get hundreds of dollars in food stamps during the time of year students lose access to free or reduced price cafeteria meals, causing food insecurity to spike among struggling families. The expanded benefits come as childhood hunger has been increasing across the U.S., with more than 17% of households with children reporting they didn't have enough to eat at some point in 2022, the most recent year with available data.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the nation's food benefits, said Wednesday that 15 governors opted out of the expanded summer food program for various reasons.

Most of those governors run states that already have higher levels of food insecurity, said Luke Shaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan and co-author of the 2023 book "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America."

“Americans would like to think that all kids get a fair shot," Shaefer said. "What we’re seeing is this increasing gap between kids in different states in the union."

All 15 of the states that rejected the new federally funded program are led by Republican governors.

“COVID-19 is over, and Nebraska taxpayers expect that pandemic-era government relief programs will end too,” Gov. Jim Pillen said last month defending his decision to opt out. He has drawn a firestorm of criticism for later defending that stance at a news conference by saying, “I don’t believe in welfare.”

Neighboring Iowa is also opting out of the program, with Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds saying in December, “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”

There's an undeniable lack of "political will" among some Republican governors to implement the program, said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute whose work focuses on food insecurity. It's also true that the program would be challenging for everyday government employees in those states to implement in 2024, she explained.

Researchers say expanding summer food stamp benefits for kids is more logistically complicated than many people realize, because it involves linking data from education departments with data from separate state agencies. States have a "limited runway to get everything set up in time" to administer the new program, which is fairly complex, said Poonam Gupta, another Urban Institute researcher studying how states implement food assistance programs.

Even so, it's not fair that some of the country's most vulnerable kids won't get the same benefits as kids in neighboring states, Waxman said.

"It's really unfortunate, because we've learned that you can make a big dent in childhood food insecurity, and now we've lost that progress, we're going backwards," Waxman said.

Americans' access to government benefits is getting more unequal, experts say

The news from the USDA this week is one example of how Americans experience unequal access to the same government assistance programs depending on what state they live in, Shaefer said.

“It’s not just food assistance, it’s so many different things," he said, pointing to how Medicaid benefits, higher minimum wages and more robust unemployment benefits all vary by state. “It’s really across policy after policy that you’re seeing this gap widen.”

Access to traditional SNAP benefits has varied by state for years, with some states allowing families with higher incomes to qualify. In some states, a family can be far above the poverty line and still qualify, because the way we measure poverty is outdated and underestimates how many Americans are struggling financially, Waxman said.

"That's yet another way how where you're born or where you live influences what's available to you," she said.

Many of the states that require residents to earn the lowest incomes in order to be eligible for SNAP are also among those that rejected expanding summer SNAP to more kids, Waxman said.

Sheafer pointed out that when the U.S. expanded its child tax credit during the COVID-19 pandemic, it treated all lower and middle income kids equally, leading to the lowest child poverty rate on record. The U.S. government also treats all senior citizens equally when it pays out social security benefits, another program administered by the federal government and not by states, he said.

“When we devolve all this authority to the states we lose that equality,” Shaefer said.

These states have higher than average child hunger rates

Among the 15 states whose governors rejected participating in the new USDA summer food assistance program, 10 have rates of hunger that were higher than the national average in 2022, according to USDA data.

States with larger populations, like Texas, Florida and Georgia also have more hungry kids to begin with, Waxman said.

"Not only is it the rate you worry about, but it's the sheer number of kids involved − and we don't have a solution for them," Waxman said

Here are the 10 states that had higher rates of food insecurity than the 2022 national average of 11.2%:

• Texas − 15.5%
• Mississippi − 15.3%
• Louisiana − 15.2%
• South Carolina − 14.5%
• Oklahoma − 14.3%
• Alabama − 12.4%
• Nebraska − 12.1%
• Florida − 11.4%
• Wyoming − 11.4%
• Georgia − 11.3%

The five other states that chose not to opt into federally funded extra summer SNAP benefits for kids include Idaho, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and and Iowa.

Whether or not a state chose to opt in to the USDA's new summer SNAP program may also have a lot to do with administrative burdens faced by state employees, Waxman and Gupta said. Policymakers across the country think several states that didn't opt in for the 2024 summer may opt in for 2025 after they've had more time to prepare, Gupta said.

Contributing: Associated Press