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Senate GOP looks to cut SNAP by more than $200 billion over the next decade
Congress is one step closer to enacting the biggest ever cut to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) spending. It’s a big program that currently serves a lot of people. SNAP benefits help nearly 42 million people buy groceries each month. The average monthly benefit is $187 per person, or just over $6 per day.
What’s new: The Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday released its piece of the massive legislative package that Republicans are muscling through Congress as a way to enact sweeping tax cuts (you may have heard President Donald Trump call it his “big beautiful bill”).
The Senate GOP bill seeks roughly $211 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade, per initial estimates. The total cut is more modest than the bill Republicans passed in the House, which would shave $290 billion from SNAP, but it would still be the largest cut ever to the program.
“This bill takes a commonsense approach to reforming SNAP—cutting waste, increasing state accountability, and helping recipients transition to self-sufficiency through work and training,” said Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.). “It’s about being good stewards of taxpayer dollars while giving folks the tools to succeed.”
SNAP numbers: The cost of SNAP has grown substantially over the past several years, which has had Republicans fuming. In 2019, the program cost about $60 billion annually. By 2022, it had jumped up to $119 billion per year. The increase was due to a combination of factors: Economic upheaval during Covid meant more people qualified for the program, Congress bumped up benefits for a time to respond to that crisis and then the Biden administration locked in a historic permanent 21 percent increase in benefit levels. Last year, SNAP spending had dropped down to $100 billion per year, but it’s still been a big target for Republicans eager to cut safety net programs.
How the cuts would work: The SNAP savings in the Senate bill come from a couple of significant policy changes. The first is an expansion of existing work requirements for able-bodied adults aged 55 to 64 as well as those who have school-aged children who are 10 and older. Historically, work requirements have applied only to able-bodied adults 54 and under without dependents, a subpopulation known as ABAWDs. This means that millions more adults who previously did not have to meet a work requirement of 20 hours per week would face that additional hurdle if they want to get SNAP benefits for more than three months in a three year period. The bill also makes it much harder for states to waive these work requirements.
We don’t yet know how many people would be pushed off of SNAP due to these changes, but it’s probably a pretty large number (hence the billions in savings). Anti-hunger advocates have long opposed expanding work requirements, arguing that they are not effective at incentivizing work, but they are very effective at pushing people off the program.
The second big policy change would for the first time shift SNAP benefit costs onto the states, particularly in states with a high rate of mistakes in processing eligibility and benefits. Throughout the program’s history, the federal government has fully covered benefit costs and has split administrative costs 50/50 (this bill also shifts administrative costs more toward the states, 75/25.)
After a lot of pushback from states, the Senate bill is not as aggressive as the House bill in shifting benefit costs onto local governments, but it would still saddle states with billions in additional obligations. One key difference between the House and Senate plans: Under the Senate plan, states that get their SNAP error rates down below 6 percent wouldn’t have to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits.
This would certainly create a big incentive for states to crack down on the administrative errors they are currently making (the error rates have gotten quite high). Right now, most states are over 6 percent, meaning they’d be required to pay anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of SNAP benefits starting in 2028 under the Senate bill.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — a progressive think tank known around town as the Center — crunched the numbers on this to illustrate the impact: “For example, North Carolina could be forced to pay up to $438 million in 2028 if it faces the 15 percent state cost share, while West Virginia could owe up to $84 million.” It’s easy to see why state leaders hate this idea.
“While some changes were made to the food assistance cuts, this bill continues to include an unprecedented cost shift, forcing tens of billions of SNAP costs onto state governments for the first time,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “Because nearly every state has balanced budget rules, states will almost certainly have to cut SNAP eligibility, benefits, or both, or choose between food assistance and other critical needs, like education, health, and public safety.”
Klobuchar said the proposed cuts to SNAP “continue to be devastating to families in need, push a major financial burden onto states, and cause farmers and independent grocers who already operate on thin margins to lose billions in revenue.”
Both the House and Senate packages would also block USDA from substantially raising SNAP benefits like Biden did. Both bills would bar refugees, those granted asylum and others with legal status from accessing SNAP benefits. And both bills eliminate SNAP-Ed, which funds nutrition education, cooking classes and other similar programs designed to promote healthier eating.
Reconciliation 101: The GOP is using a budgetary process known as reconciliation that only requires 51 votes to pass in the Senate as a way to get around the usual 60 votes you need to end a filibuster. This is one of those legislative packages that has become essentially too big to fail — Trump is staking a lot on it and Republicans in Congress are too. Congressional leaders have been hoping to get this mega package finished by the Fourth of July — that seems somewhat less likely now, but everyone in Washington still seems to think it’ll ultimately get done this summer. When it comes to SNAP, the Senate version is seen as more likely to become law than the House version, but we’ll have to see.
Zooming out: In addition to the real world impact of these proposed changes — many people will lose access to nutrition benefits amid high food prices — this whole reconciliation fight is also, at its core, a Republican attempt to re-balance the farm bill pie. Over the past decade, SNAP has grown to be a larger and larger share of total spending in the farm bill — an omnibus bill that covers not just nutrition benefits but also farm policy. GOP lawmakers have been grumbling about this for years — they’d say basically that they wanted to “put the farm back in the farm bill.” Reconciliation, in a sense, is giving them a chance to do that. SNAP may be getting cut by more than $200 billion, but key farm subsidy programs are looking to get a $67 billion plus-up in the Senate package.
The farm economy is in rough shape, there’s no question, but this presents another stress test for the farm bill coalition. I’ve been writing for a while about how this marriage between nutrition and farm programs — this grand bargain between urban and rural interests — has been stressed. We may now be headed for divorce.
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What I’m reading
Trump promises farmers “changes are coming” to immigration crackdown (Axios). “President Trump acknowledged that his ‘very aggressive’ immigration policies are ripping long-time workers from the farming and hospitality industries, in a Thursday Truth Social post,” writes Avery Lotz. “Trump’s concession comes after reports of federal immigration raids on farms stoked fears among vital agricultural workers during the summer growing season. ‘Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,’ the president wrote. ‘Our farmers are being hurt badly,’ the president said during a bill-signing ceremony Thursday. ‘They have very good workers,’ he continued. ‘They’ve worked for them for 20 years; they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be … great, and we’re going to have to do something about that.’ He said there would be a related order ‘pretty soon.’”
Trump admin approves waivers for 3 states to ban soda, other junk food from public food programs (Fox News). “Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signed waivers with three states on Tuesday, allowing them to prohibit participants of the government’s SNAP from buying junk food, like soda and candy, through the social welfare program,” reports Alec Schemmel. “Arkansas, Idaho and Utah became the latest states to obtain waivers from the federal government to begin banning junk food within the federally administered, but state-operated, public assistance program that provides food stamps to low-income individuals. Other mostly GOP-led states, like Nebraska, Indiana and Iowa, have also obtained waivers to reform their SNAP programs. Rollins indicated several other states, including Colorado, Kansas, West Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Florida and Louisiana, are also working through procedural steps in hopes of getting waivers approved. Rollins added Tuesday [that] ‘each waiver submitted by the states and signed is yet another step closer to fulfilling President [Donald] Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.’”
Top nutritionists send NIH Director letter urging more funding for nutrition science (Letter). “There is an urgent need for rigorous, independent, objective nutrition science that explains the role of American food and our diet in obesity and cardiometabolic diseases and what to do about it,” write a group of more than 70 top nutrition scientists in a letter to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. “As leading scientists in the field of nutrition and health, speaking in our personal capacities, we urge that you use your leadership to defend our ability to openly discuss and debate scientific controversies in our field, without political filtering, censorship or intimidation. Our NIH colleagues need the freedom to present their findings in scientific meetings without political oversight, and to author and co-author freely in the scientific literature, including through journal commentaries and editorials. Scientific independence and freedom of inquiry is the only way to maintain the credibility of federally funded research.”
Cyberattack leads to Whole Foods shortages (NBC News). “A cyberattack on a primary organic food distributor has led to empty shelves at Whole Foods stores across the country,” reports Kevin Collier. “The company, Rhode Island-based United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), is one of the country’s largest organic food distributors and a major partner with Whole Foods. It became aware of a cyberattack on June 5, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and took some of its systems offline, hampering its ability to distribute orders to customers. It comes in the wake of a series of cyberattacks where a notorious cybercriminal gang has been targeting major retail customers with ransomware, rendering key systems inoperable as hackers demand payment. A corporate Whole Foods spokesperson apologized for the inconvenience and said the company is working to restock shelves quickly, but declined to answer specific questions. Two Whole Foods employees, who were not authorized by the company to speak with the press about the incident, told NBC News that the shortages were significant.”
MAHA has a pizza problem (The Atlantic). “Children can be picky eaters, but few foods are more universally enticing than freshly cooked pizza—let alone from a restaurant students are almost certainly already familiar with,” writes Nicholas Florko. “Domino’s ‘Smart Slice’ initiative, sends pizzas to school districts around the country—often at little or no cost to students themselves. ‘Smart Slice’ is part of the national school-lunch program, so taxpayers foot a portion of the bill to guarantee that every kid has lunch to eat. Despite kids’ enthusiasm, you can see the problem: Students munching on free fast food might seem to embody everything wrong with the American diet. The days of school Domino’s—and school pizza in general—are numbered, [as] Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters are on a mission to overhaul school lunch. Unless cafeteria workers make school pizza from scratch, nearly every kind contains industrial ingredients that qualify the meal as an ultra-processed food. Many of the food reforms pushed by RFK Jr.’s movement are popular. But in the case of banning most school pizza, RFK Jr. could be facing a tougher sell. MAHA’s vision for food is about to run headfirst into a bunch of hungry kids in a school cafeteria.”
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