The Expensive Cost of SNAP Cuts
Major changes to SNAP causes major uncertainty for the 41 million Americans who rely on food stamps to feed their families. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.
The Trump administration’s severe cuts to federal programs through the One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) Act have placed significant economic and infrastructural burdens on state governments and community-based organizations (CBOs), such as food banks, pantries, and churches. As a federal program that provides food benefits to low-income families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) currently serves about 41 million Americans. As a result of BBB, they will soon serve far fewer. States and local organizations are scrambling to keep up with the Act’s changes to SNAP, with many Americans poised to lose their benefits because states and CBOs cannot shoulder the burden of SNAP cuts. In addition to the millions of Americans who may go hungry, an underlooked concern is the ease and speed with which the federal government was able to make broad changes impacting so many, revealing that America may be too reliant on SNAP as its primary food welfare program.
The recent BBB changes to SNAP means fewer Americans will qualify for benefits: the upper age limit of the work requirement for “able-bodied adults without dependents” has increased from 49 to 64 years old, caretakers of children 14 to 18 years old now have to meet work requirements, asylum seekers and refugees are no longer eligible for SNAP, and veterans and former foster youth are no longer exempt from ABAWD requirements. This means that many more Americans will have to consistently work 80 hours a month to continue qualifying for SNAP benefits. Ultimately, the Congressional Budget Office finds that about 2.4 million people will no longer qualify under SNAP due to these changes.
Even before the recent changes, it had become much harder to stretch SNAP benefits, which provides a maximum of approximately “$6.16/day for the average person,” to cover nutritious food as prices continue to rise. CBOs and other volunteer organizations have historically stepped in, feeding Americans in addition to or in place of SNAP benefits. However, organizations like Feeding America, one of the biggest non-profit organizations in the U.S. with a network of over 200 food banks, rely on federal funds like the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), both of which are losing funding through recent cuts.
Although CBOs play an important role in providing food, they cannot serve as a replacement for such a vast federal program. Craig Rice, CEO of Manna Food Center in Maryland, reports that SNAP benefits provide nine meals for every one meal a food bank distributes. Thus, Rice states, “If those SNAP dollars get cut in half, that would mean that a local food bank quadruples their output just to meet that need.”. If people suddenly stop qualifying for SNAP benefits—as many will because of the new work requirements—food banks can never come close to filling the gap. Congress proved this theory during the government shutdown, as CBOs struggled to absorb much of the impacts of the lacking federal presence.
It is also not difficult to see that BBB’s changes to SNAP are short-sighted because of how quickly it expects states and local organizations to respond to slashes in SNAP benefits. Some of SNAP eligibility modifications have already gone into effect on November 1st, 2025, while others will take place over the next few years. In addition to eligibility changes, BBB also expects states to fund SNAP for the first time if their payment error rates are above six percent, with higher error rate states requiring more state funding. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, these states will be asked to fund anywhere from five to fifteen percent of their SNAP programs. How much this new policy will cost states, as well as whether four years is a feasible time frame, remains unclear.
As with many other aspects of the recent SNAP cuts, it is ambiguous as to what will happen if states end up being unable to cover their costs—some suggest that benefits might weaken while others postulate that states may be forced to stop their SNAP program altogether. This ultimately means that states, especially those with high error rates, will undoubtedly struggle to find appropriate funding to cover the burden of new SNAP costs if they wish to continue offering SNAP benefits to their residents. Ultimately, food banks and other community-based organizations will not be able to fill in the gaps that cuts to SNAP benefits will create, especially given the impossible turnaround and federal funding cuts to these organizations. If-and-or-when high-error states fail to correct their rates, even more Americans can expect to lose their SNAP benefits.
The fact that one administration can change so many crucial benefits for so many Americans so quickly should be highly concerning to anybody who cares about the wellbeing of our society. This “ripple effect” highlights that America lacks the infrastructure to support its people in the case that a single central program gets cut—like SNAP. Though CBOs on the ground are there to support small changes, such large changes like the kind that BBB delivers are simply unsustainable.
What legislators and community organizers should learn from the SNAP fallout is that America needs to pursue and strengthen supplemental programs that could do some heavy lifting should the program get cut. Even if the role of local programs and organizations could be further emphasized, they often receive federal funding that can be taken away and, thus, poses many questions about how alternative programs might be funded. But this is exactly why America needs to diversify its welfare services—relying on only one program that is almost completely subject to the impulses of one political administration puts benefits like SNAP in a position of extreme vulnerability.
BBB’s changes to SNAP funding and eligibility are both incredibly short-signed and force us to consider whether a single federal program is sufficient to serve as America’s food welfare system. Countless Americans will no longer be able to qualify for SNAP and will have to turn to community-based organizations. However, such a rapid increase in numbers will only put strain on the food relief system, there is no doubt that countless Americans will go hungry.
Alison Chiu (CC ‘28) is a staff writer at CPR studying economics, political science, and statistics.