By Mariana Alfaro, Daniel Wu — The federal government has fully paid for benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since it was created in 1939 as a way to fight food insecurity amid the Great Depression.
But now, Republicans in Congress are looking into forcing states to pay for 5 to 25 percent of SNAP funding in a move experts warn could force state governments to remove individuals from the food assistance program, leave local budgets with massive shortfalls, and hurt the food producers and retailers that serve them.
On Monday night, the House Agriculture Committee released its budget bill, which includes a provision outlining that, starting in 2028, all states will have to pay at least 5 percent of their SNAP benefit allotments. Additionally, states would be required to immediately begin paying 75 percent of administrative costs if the legislation is passed. States pay half of the program’s overhead now and do not contribute to benefits.
If these changes become law, they would force 28 states and territories to pay for 25 percent of their SNAP costs, according to fiscal 2023 data from the Agriculture Department. Data for 2024 has not yet been released.
Republicans on the Agriculture Committee said Monday that having states pay for part of SNAP would help reach their goal of $230 billion in federal savings. House Republicans need these cuts to offset the cost of extending President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in a massive bill Congress aims to pass by July 4. The committee is scheduled to mark up the bill Tuesday night before sending it to the House for a full floor vote.
Critics of the proposal say it will force states to cut their budgets and limit who is eligible for SNAP to pay for benefits that for decades have been funded by the federal government. According to data from the Agriculture Department, the federal government spent $112.8 billion on SNAP during fiscal 2023, when an average of 42.1 million people participated in the program per month, receiving a monthly average of $212 in benefits.
Farmers and grocers have raised the alarm over the potential changes, noting that a reduction in program funding could threaten the hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wages and tax revenue that purchases using SNAP benefits support, according to an analysis conducted by the National Grocers Association.
“In all my years of business, I don’t remember laying anybody off,” said Jimmy Wright, owner of an independent grocery store in Opelika, Alabama, who makes a third of his business from SNAP. “These reductions may make it where I have to visit that for the first time.”
A reduction in SNAP “would be a significant loss to our business,” said Kaitlyn Kimball, who runs a vegetable farm in Naugatuck, Connecticut. SNAP, she said, makes up between 5 and 10 percent of her sales every year between her farm stand and sales to farmers markets, school districts and grocery stores.
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Cuts and restrictions are likely
Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the public policy think tank Urban Institute, said making states pay for a portion of SNAP “fundamentally reshapes the program” at a time of economic uncertainty.
“States will do different things depending on their positioning, but I don’t see any scenario where they’re able to avoid significantly cutting SNAP,” she said. “And that might be benefits, it might be severely restricting eligibility. … So there will clearly be far fewer people, I think, receiving SNAP.”
Waxman said one of the benefits of having the federal government shoulder the cost of SNAP benefits is that, during a recession, the program “immediately” steps in to fill the need when people lose their jobs or face a reduction in earnings. States, she warned, may not be able to provide the same coverage in case of an economic downturn. And, she noted, USDA estimates show that SNAP spending acts as a stimulus during hard economic times.
“For every additional dollar of SNAP spent in the downturn, you get about $1.54 in economic activity,” Waxman said. “That actually generates jobs, and not just in food but also in transportation and packaging companies, and all of the people who intersect with providing groceries on our shelves.”
Republicans insist the proposed changes to SNAP are not cuts and are instead attempts to root out program waste to save federal funds.
“For far too long, the SNAP program has drifted from a bridge to support American households in need to a permanent destination riddled with bureaucratic inefficiencies, misplaced incentives, and limited accountability,” Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) said in a statement. “This portion of the One Big, Beautiful Bill restores the program’s original intent.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement that SNAP “was never intended to be a windfall for food companies, retailers, and nonprofits” but rather a “temporary safety net for families and communities in need.” Rollins noted that the Agriculture Department spends nearly $405 million each day across 16 nutrition programs, and insisted that Americans “will not go without access to programs like SNAP, or school meals, or the charitable sector.”
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‘People will go hungry’
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) told reporters Tuesday that states “do not have the kind of money that it would take to maintain the program at the current level.”
“If these cuts [go] through … people will go hungry,” she said.
And Carol Gundlach, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Alabama Arise, told The Washington Post she fears her state will lose the SNAP program if the bill goes through.
“States, especially poor states like Alabama, can’t pick up the commitment that Congress made to providing nutrition assistance,” she said.
Under this bill, states with higher rates of SNAP payment errors will face the largest increases in benefit costs.
Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director for SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center, said many states are operating under pandemic-era guidelines or have not yet updated their systems, which means they may have large error rates.
States with high error rates include swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania; deep-red states including Mississippi, Oklahoma, Florida and Indiana; and states with limited administrative infrastructure like Alaska and Hawaii.
Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said SNAP will have to effectively be administered “differently across the country” because each state will have to choose how to enact the program and drive down their error rate.
“Since SNAP started, the goal of the program was [that] no matter where you lived, our country had a national commitment to providing low-income families with a food assistance benefit that’s sufficient,” she said. “And we are now saying that that’s not what we plan to do anymore.”