President Donald Trump’s allies love to talk about the food we’re eating here in the US: too sugary, too processed, too artificially dyed. What they’re not talking about, though, is how many Americans don’t have enough of it, whether it’s healthy or not. If the Republicans get their way, the number of them will only go up.
Exactly how the right-leaning majorities in the House and Senate will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP, is being negotiated. But their intentions are clear: Shrink its reach, reduce the benefits of the people still on it, and leave it to the states to take the blame.
Versions of the plan laid out in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act include all variety of cuts, such as increasing work requirements, scrapping a major nutrition education program, eliminating eligibility for legally admitted immigrants and, perhaps most alarmingly, shifting a percentage of the costs, now entirely shouldered by the federal government, to the already strapped states. House Speaker Mike Johnson maintains that the changes being considered are an effort to reduce fraud and waste, not a cut to SNAP. It’s hard to see how he can say that with a straight face. They are proposing cutting it—and cutting it deep.
SNAP, a version of which was introduced as a pilot program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt before becoming permanent in 1964, is a safety net. As many anti-hunger advocates would tell you, it’s not only hugely important but also quite small relative to the need. More than 40 million people across the US relied on SNAP in 2024, or about 12% of the population, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, receiving only about $6 per person per day, give or take, or roughly $200 per month. That might not sound like a lot of money, but for many households, it is. Even modest cuts could mean, for instance, the difference between serving a family-wide dinner at the end of the month and serving one to only the children. Parents going without isn’t unusual, and with food prices expected to continue rising, smaller benefits will be felt even more acutely. There are more than 2 million children living in households that would lose at least some of their benefits under the House plan, according to the CBPP, calling it the “deepest SNAP cut in history.”
Participating in SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, isn’t a matter of politics; recipients include huge swaths of households in red and blue states alike. It’s a matter of income. States can adjust the eligibility threshold to account for cost of living, but the baseline requirement is for those with net household monthly income at or below 100% of the poverty line. In districts that voted primarily for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, an average of 13% of households had used SNAP the prior year, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek calculation using data from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey analyzed by the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), an anti-hunger nonprofit. For Republican districts, it was 11%. So not a huge difference. (Even these numbers don’t show the full picture, FRAC says, pointing to Mississippi as a good example of a high-poverty state where the eligible-but-not-participating gap is notable. That means that people could lose benefits they haven’t yet used, and therefore aren’t reflected in these numbers.)
And yet supporting SNAP is very much a partisan issue. The fervor to bludgeon it comes squarely from one side of the aisle, no matter how much its constituents depend on it. In Florida’s 26th Congressional District, for example, where Trump handily won in 2024 with 67% of the vote, almost 24% of households use SNAP, giving it one of the highest participation rates in the country, according to the FRAC data. Still, its voice in the House of Representatives, Mario Diaz-Balart, voted for the “big, beautiful bill” and all the SNAP cuts that come with it. He didn’t respond to an inquiry from Businessweek about what the state would do to ensure his constituents can eat. But when the 65,000 SNAP households in his district realize they could be losing a major source of sustenance, it’s likely to call to mind that classic meme of the Trump era: the face-eating leopard—that is, the voter who thought their actions were inflicting pain only on someone else. (“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”)
Anti-hunger advocates are extremely concerned, and they don’t have some magical plan to solve the impending crisis. (For every meal the Feeding America network of food banks provides, it says, SNAP provides nine.) Food banks are already experiencing heightened demand, which will only increase when people have fewer SNAP dollars to spend at the grocery store.
In Trump’s adopted state of Florida, where almost 3 million people, or about 13% of the population, received SNAP benefits in 2024, veterans and senior citizens on fixed budgets are especially worrying to Robin Safley, chief executive officer of Feeding Florida, a state network of food banks. “It’s hard to scenario-plan in these types of climates,” she says. Cindy Huddleston, a senior analyst at the Florida Policy Institute, says cutting off lawfully admitted immigrants will be particularly painful in the state. Richard LeBer, president of the Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, which serves part of Florida’s deeply red 26th District, says his organization is “already stretched very thin.” His food bank is distributing about 70% more food than before the pandemic, and recent months are showing signs of even higher demand.
To make matters worse, earlier this year the US Department of Agriculture canceled the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which connected farmers with nearby food banks and schools. When government programs scale back or disappear entirely, there’s only so much a charitable organization can do. “Expecting other people to suddenly pick up that slack is going to be very difficult,” LeBer says. Many advocates are also highlighting that benefit reductions aren’t just going to hit SNAP recipients. The grocers who accept those payments, the people who work for those stores, the farmers who sell the food that goes on their shelves—they’re all going to see less revenue. And if it’s too costly for states, some could opt to withdraw from SNAP entirely, according to the Congressional Budget Office
Cynthia Kirkhart, CEO of Facing Hunger Foodbank in West Virginia—a state where an estimated 16% of residents receive SNAP benefits—says she’s particularly aghast over the loss of a program that teaches low-income families about how to eat healthfully. It’s one that seems tailor-made for the Make America Healthy Again movement. Jerold Mande, a former USDA official and now CEO of Nourish Science, calls SNAP-Ed Connection the “OG MAHA” and says plans to cut it are “stunning.”
Leaving your own constituents with less than they had isn’t a great look for someone running for re-election, which is possibly why benefit cost shifting to the states won’t happen until after the midterms, says Gina Plata-Nino, who leads FRAC’s SNAP work. “It’s a very strategic move,” she says. Still, other measures would take effect much sooner: Under the House and Senate bills, SNAP-Ed, for example, would be gone within a few months.
The office of Minnesota’s Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, is pointing to a CBO estimate that the Senate bill would shift about $40 billion in costs to the states. At a press conference on June 25, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, also a Democrat, was brutally honest about what a shift like that would mean to states, which, unlike the federal government, usually have to maintain a balanced budget: “We don’t have the money.”
The program’s biggest hope may lie with some (Republican) former governors who seem to comprehend what’s at stake. “I hope to goodness we don’t go there,” Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia told Politico last month on the cost-shifting plan. Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota echoed that sentiment, as did Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who’s running for governor. “Everybody that’s going to be in state government is going to be concerned about it,” he told Politico. “I don’t know whether we can afford it or not.” Perhaps they should push for the same kind of exemption that was added over the weekend to win over Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, which, as the New York Times reported, would keep her state from sharing SNAP benefit costs.
Back in West Virginia, Kirkhart of the food bank says she’s urging people to call their members of Congress before it’s too late. “At some point, I would really love for our representatives to look at us and hear us, give us a chance,” she says. “These are the folks that voted for you.” (When contacted by Businessweek, West Virginia’s Governor Patrick Morrisey said SNAP will be better run and save money if the states are in charge. “Regardless of what Congress decides, the governor will work to protect SNAP benefits for those who use them here in West Virginia,” says Drew Galang, his deputy press secretary.)
Kirkhart says her food bank looks forward to working with the governor. But with demand on the uptick and the future of government assistance unclear, her organization will be in a tight corner. “I’m not saying we won’t have food,” she says. “I’m just saying we won’t have enough food.”