Senator Mike O'Pake

Pennsylvania State Senator Mike O'Pake died this week from complications due to a recent bypass surgery. He was 70. Sen. O'Pake is remembered as having been the longest serving member in the 328-year history of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.


But among his many accomplishments Sen. O'Pake may best be remembered for his championing of the use electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, technology to replace food stamp coupons back in the 1980s. Fraud and abuse in the Food Stamp Program had been rampant, with food stamps being bought and sold in many neighborhoods like a new coin of the realm. In 1984 the Agriculture Department, which oversees the program, launched an experimental two-year pilot to test whether it could replace food stamps with a debit card, similar to a bank card. The pilot site happened to be Sen. O’Pake’s 11th Senatorial District of Berks County.

Federal Food Stamp Coupons

By 2004 all states had switched to EBT

When the two-year pilot was completed in 1985, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prepared to return the district to the issuance of food stamps. But the electronic EBT cards proved so popular, that program participants beseeched Sen. O’Pake to find a way to continue the electronic program. They appreciated the fact that they no longer had to shop with a currency that immediately identified them as poor. They also liked the convenience that EBT provided.

Retailers liked the fact that EBT was like any other form of electronic payment, and they no longer had to bear the cost for the care and keeping of food stamps.

Government liked the fact that they no longer had to pay $40 million a year to print food stamps, which were used one time and destroyed. Everyone except the bad guys who bought and sold food stamps as if they were stocks and bonds liked the idea that money that had been appropriated by Congress for a food supplement program was ending up on the tables of families and children.

Mike O’Pake was nothing if not resourceful. Although the pilot had been funded by the federal government, he found funds so that the Commonwealth could continue paying the administrative cost of the EBT program. In fact, with state funding, the Reading EBT pilot ran for more than ten more years, until Pennsylvania replaced it with a statewide EBT system in 1997.

Mike O'Pake, godfather of EBT

To call Mike O’Pake the “godfather” of EBT would not be too much of a stretch. The presence of the Reading EBT pilot provided a model for other states to adopt the technology for their food stamp programs. By 1996 Congress had mandated that all states must adopt EBT technology. By 2004 all 50 states, the territories and the District of Columbia had adopted EBT technology in place of food stamps. The Agriculture Department even re-branded the Food Stamp Program as the SNAP Program.

More importantly, states began to experiment with ways to bring the cost-efficiency, convenience and security of EBT to other government entitlement programs. Today states use EBT technologies to issue food benefits, to provide prescriptive supplemental nutrition to pregnant and nursing mothers, to authorize medical care, to issue child support payments, and to provide child care subsidies. None of this would have happened at the speed it did or in the way it did without the decade-long Reading EBT pilot to provide assurances that it could work.

And Reading would not have happened if it weren’t for Mike O’Pake.

Just thought you might like to know.