MAP: See How Cuts to SNAP Food Assistance Would Affect Your State
Proposed cuts to the nation’s largest anti-hunger program would translate into hundreds of dollars less in the pockets of the neediest families, with more than 2.7 million American households losing some or all of their benefits.
2025-05-23 13:54:42 - VI News Staff
A series of think-tank analyses concluded that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could suffer in these ways and more under a $300 billion reduction included in President Donald Trump’s massive budget bill, which passed the House early Thursday. The bill also includes more than $5 trillion in tax cuts, changes to the tax code and aid for farmers.
SNAP is a federally funded program that gives money for groceries to more than 40 million people in eligible low-income households — mostly older adults, disabled people and families with children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. The proposed changes would shift a chunk of the program’s cost off the federal government’s plate and onto the states starting in 2028. They’d also expand the program’s pre-existing work requirements to include parents of school-age children and some older adults.
In a brief released earlier this month, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson framed the cuts as a way to control costs and incentivize states to make SNAP more efficient. But Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, calls it “by far the single largest cut to food assistance in history.”
“It’s not just trading a federal dollar for a state dollar,” she says. “This is an extreme, unprecedented proposal that would likely lead to extreme cuts to food assistance in the state that you live in.”