The General Services Administration (GSA) has developed a code for assessing citizens’ eligibility for the Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to allow immediate open-source modifications and system interoperability.
Alex Soble, consulting engineer at GSA’s 18F unit, and Mike Gintz, a strategist at 18F, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday that the SNAP prototype was developed with federal policy experts to simplify food-stamp eligibility processing and standardize operations across states while incorporating regulatory changes.
The SNAP data analysis tool serves as an application programming interface that can be shared across disparate systems and utilizes Gherkin-powered automated testing, they noted.
According to Soble and Gintz, GSA has uploaded a repository for the proof-of-concept on Github where interested participants can contribute to the development process using the Python programming language.
“Back in 2018, we wrote about our early experiments implementing rules with modern programming languages,” they said. “Today, we want to share an example from our work that shows the potential for rapid, accurate policy implementation as code.”