The Republican Budget Plan: Snatch Food From the Mouths of Hungry Children
SNAP cuts are ‘going to have a massive shock wave across the country, and everybody will feel it.’
This article was originally published in The American Prospect. Read it here.
When you walk into the supermarket, do you calculate the cost of each meal as you go along, tallying up the per-meal cost of your eggs, cans of beans, and bananas? If you were to calculate it, how much would a day of eating cost you? For the nearly 24 million households that receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the help they receive for a day of eating is just $6 per person—that’s the average daily allowance for Americans on SNAP.
Advocates say that number has never been high enough, but during an era of inflation and tariffs, it’s even more inadequate.
Cindy Camp, a Baltimore grandmother and caregiver who spoke at a March 25 House Democratic hearing on the threat to SNAP, said the rising cost of food means her family’s SNAP benefits don’t last them the full month.
“I go to the market and I just cry sometimes, because I’m trying to figure out what I can afford,” she said. “I’m already struggling to provide the fresh, healthy foods I know [my grandkids] need to grow and thrive. I haven’t bought eggs in a very long time. We rely on cheap, processed foods and food banks to help fill in the gaps.”
And now, Republicans are poised to cut SNAP benefits even more, a move that would devastate tens of millions of Americans and chip away at nearly 90 years of anti-poverty policy since the first food stamps program—SNAP’s predecessor—was started in the U.S.
SNAP hasn’t always been highly politicized. As Saima Akhtar, senior attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, said, the program often takes a back seat while welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or health care programs like Medicaid are targeted. (One reason is that both farmers and retailers like Walmart, which accounts for a quarter of SNAP spending, benefit from the program.) Even now, as both SNAP and Medicaid are under attack by Republicans, much of the public outcry has focused on the risk to Medicaid, leaving SNAP recipients vulnerable to larger spending cuts.
This Thursday, the House passed its budget resolution, setting off the starting gun for Republicans to find billions of dollars in spending cuts to pay for large tax cuts for the rich. Now that House and Senate Republicans have passed identical budget resolutions, they can move forward with the budget reconciliation process, which allows them to bypass the Senate filibuster and avoid Democratic pushback.
The House’s budget plan asks the House Agriculture Committee to find $230 billion in spending cuts, a plan that President Trump has endorsed. Since SNAP is nested under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), that means that some of those dollars will almost certainly come from spending cuts to SNAP.
House Agriculture Committee chair G.T. Thompson (R-PA) told Politico in mid-February that there would be no direct cuts to SNAP benefits during budget reconciliation, but hinted at a number of other changes that would have the same devastating effect on SNAP recipients.
“We can achieve what we need to do by program integrity to make the program stronger and better and better serve people, and also making sure the states take some accountability with the program,” said Thompson.
Even though Thompson suggested that benefits wouldn’t be cut, other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are skeptical that such massive spending decreases could be met without targeting SNAP, which cost the federal government $107 billion in 2023.
On February 19, eight House Republicans who represent districts with large Hispanic populations sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) urging him not to cut SNAP, which provides assistance to 22 percent of Hispanic households. In Johnson’s own Louisiana district, nearly 1 in 5 residents receive SNAP assistance. Some Republicans are clearly worried about the electoral consequences of voting against their own constituents, but it’s still unclear if that pressure will be enough to derail the budget plan.
State Match and the Rural South
As Thompson suggested, there are many ways to hurt SNAP without directly cutting the amount of money that goes toward benefits. When lawmakers like Thompson talk about “making sure the states take some accountability with the program,” they are proposing the idea of a “state match”—forcing each state to match the benefits they receive from the federal government.
Currently, SNAP has two different funding schemes: one for the cost of administrative work and the other for the cost of the food benefits themselves. For administrative costs, which make up just 6 percent of the program’s budget, the states and federal government each contribute half of the funding. SNAP benefits, on the other hand, are entirely funded by the federal government.
“The beauty of this is that states don’t have to utilize their small budgets to try to supplement or put out SNAP benefits … and everybody’s able to receive a consistent number across the country,” said Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC).
If the federal government requires states to start contributing to benefits, as Thompson suggested, the result will be devastating, particularly for the poorer, more rural states in the South. If a state match is implemented, said Bhatti, “we’re going to see some states that have smaller budgets, like in the South and in rural parts of America, not be able to support that change.” If these states did try to start funding SNAP benefits directly, they would be forced to cut other spending programs. “It would cause the states to suffer in some way, shape, or form,” he added.
Alabama is one of the states that advocates say could be hit hardest by cuts to SNAP. One in seven state residents receive SNAP, and the majority of Alabama SNAP participants live in a household with children.
When discussing the havoc that a state match policy would wreak on Alabama, Carol Gundlach, senior policy analyst at the anti-poverty organization Alabama Arise, was almost at a loss for words. “I don’t, I don’t even know how we could possibly—I mean, Alabama’s budget is incredibly tight as it is,” she said. “We don’t have a good tax base. I just—I see no way, quite frankly, that even if we wanted to, we could fill in that hole.”
In short, in states like Alabama, the entire program could be lost.
The Thrifty Food Plan and a Vicious Cycle
Another way that SNAP could be hollowed out is by reversing hard-fought wins with the Thrifty Food Plan, the USDA’s calculation of how much it costs a family of four to eat healthily in a month. The USDA uses this number to calculate the SNAP benefits that households will receive.
In 2021, the USDA updated its Thrifty Food Plan for the first time since 1975, adjusting it to account for food price increases and modernized dietary guidelines. All told, the re-evaluation raised the average daily SNAP benefit from $4.40 per person to $6.20 per person. This change allows SNAP recipients to buy healthier foods and stretch their benefits further into the month.
But now Republicans are considering reversing the new Thrifty Food Plan guidelines, sending recipients back to the 20th century and likely forcing many of them to rely on cheaper processed foods to make it through the month. You shouldn’t need peer-reviewed studies to explain why that’s a bad thing, but here they are regardless: Unhealthy diets lead to more deaths nationwide than tobacco use. Black, Latino, and Native American populations, as well as lower-income Americans, have much higher rates of diet-related illnesses than white or high-income Americans. A return to lower monthly benefits would almost certainly cause chronic illnesses like diabetes and cardiovascular disease to rise among the poorest, most vulnerable Americans.
Lowering the monthly SNAP benefit will also have economic consequences that hurt everybody, not just SNAP recipients themselves. In Alabama, every dollar of SNAP benefits has a $1.80 impact on the economy during economic downturns. That’s because SNAP money is redeemed in grocery stores and farmers markets, including just shy of 5,000 retailers in Alabama. In 2023, those retailers redeemed $2 billion in SNAP money, injecting it back into the community through local tax revenue, employee spending, and so on.
“SNAP isn’t just helping feed people, but it’s actually an economic investment,” said Bhatti of FRAC. If Congress cuts SNAP by 20 percent, as some lawmakers have suggested, that loss would be transferred to the grocery stores that rely on SNAP recipients. “These small convenience stores, mom-and-pop shops, they’re not operating on margins that can survive a 20 percent cut,” he said. “Not only would we see more food insecurity amongst those who have received SNAP, we would see food insecurity increase when these rural stores close up shop, because it affects everybody that would access those stores.”
If stores wanted to avoid closing, the only other option would be to increase their prices. “At a time when wages are stagnant, that’s not a good option. And as tariffs are coming in as well,” Bhatti said. “So it’s a holistic approach. It’s going to have a massive shock wave across the country, and everybody will feel it.”
Food banks, like the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama, also rely on the generosity of grocery stores to help fill what anti-hunger advocates call the “meal gap,” the difference between how many meals a community needs and how many it actually has access to. For this particular food bank, which serves a quarter-million Alabamians, the annual meal gap is 44 million meals. The food bank is able to serve 21 million meals a year, but that still leaves the community 23 million short.
The food bank’s CEO, Nicole Williams, said that 53 percent of the food they give out comes from reclaimed grocery store items. If SNAP benefits are cut, two things will happen. First, it will be harder for recipients to make ends meet, increasing the state’s meal gap. Downstream of this, grocery stores will lose a sizable chunk of their revenue, likely forcing some to go out of business or cut back on their charitable donations to food banks. That increases the meal gap while simultaneously decreasing food banks’ ability to fill the gap. In short, cutting SNAP benefits will quickly kick off a vicious cycle of poverty.
Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility and Government (In)efficiency
Another way to gut SNAP: end something called broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE). BBCE allows states to be less strict when evaluating participants’ assets and also slightly raises the income limit for SNAP. BBCE is essentially a way to increase access to SNAP, particularly among the elderly, a population that may be food insecure despite having assets like homes or retirement savings. Alabama, along with 39 other states, uses BBCE to make SNAP less restrictive for its citizens. But BBCE has been a target of Trump and Republicans before, and may be again.
In Alabama, BBCE primarily helps two groups access SNAP: first, families who are food insecure but have some savings or assets like a family car; and second, senior citizens who have savings accounts or inherited properties.
“It’s quite common here for older people to have savings accounts where they are saving money for their own funerals,” said Gundlach of Alabama Arise. Without BBCE, “it would require they liquidate those accounts before they can get food.”
According to Williams of the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama, the state ranks in the top ten for food insecurity among seniors. The food bank specifically caters to older community members with low-sodium foods and outreach programs in senior centers.
Gundlach also notes that ending BBCE would be expensive and inefficient for the state, forcing them to track down residents’ assets before giving them SNAP benefits. “I can remember the days, because I’m old, when they were sending 25-year-old caseworkers with a blue book way out in the middle of the country to figure out what a tractor was worth,” she said. “We’d be spending dollars chasing pennies.” How’s that for government efficiency?
Speaking of government (in)efficiency, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was welcomed into the USDA by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in mid-February. The Trump administration has already frozen some USDA programs that food banks rely on—Williams said that these cancellations will cost her food bank three million pounds of food this year, which amounts to 12 percent of its total yearly food supply.
With DOGE empowered in the USDA, these freezes and cancellations could increase, despite the fact that the USDA has worked on making SNAP more efficient and less fraudulent for years. Most of the fraud that happens with SNAP benefits comes through card skimming and card cloning, both of which happen at grocery stores and deprive recipients of their benefits. The federal government worked to replace those stolen benefits between 2022 and 2024, and gives advice to grocers and recipients on avoiding scams.
Whether the federal government cuts SNAP benefits directly or chips away at the program by other means, the current risk is higher than it has ever been.
Gundlach worries that SNAP may follow the same path as other welfare programs like TANF that Republicans slowly chipped away at: “I think there’s a really big fear that SNAP will go where TANF went. It was a robust program that helped lots and lots and lots of people, and it’s now a ghost of itself. There’s a lot of fear that that’s where we may go.”
