The GOP is proposing big cuts to SNAP food assistance. Here's what would change and who would be impacted

Yahoo

15-05-2025

House Republicans have unveiled a proposal to slash funding for the nation's largest anti-hunger program by an estimated $290 billion as part of their sweeping plan to turn President Trump's agenda into a legislative reality.
The draft bill released by the GOP-led House Agriculture Committee would substantially reduce how much the federal government spends on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a public benefit that helps 42 million Americans pay for food.
Republicans on the committee argue that the reforms are needed to 'ensure SNAP works the way Congress intended it to' by rooting out waste, increasing accountability and controlling costs.
Democrats have roundly condemned the proposal. 'It's bad for families, bad for farmers, and bad for the country. Increasing hunger to make billionaires richer is just plain wrong,' Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio wrote in a statement last week.
The GOP's plan to cut SNAP funding is one piece of a much larger effort to pass a budget bill that would slash spending on a long list of programs — including Medicaid and green energy tax incentives — to offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts.
SNAP is better known among the public under its old name, food stamps. That name was abandoned in 2008 in an effort to fight the stigma that had plagued the program for decades.
Through SNAP, the government provides money directly to people who would otherwise struggle to feed themselves or their families. Participation in SNAP has increased dramatically in recent decades and so has the cost. In 2000, the government spent about $17 billion to support 17 million SNAP recipients. Last year, nearly 42 million people collected benefits that totaled more than $100 billion.
Eligibility varies from state to state, but in general SNAP is available to people who either make below a certain income threshold or have no income at all. The amount of money someone receives is affected depending on their household size, income and other factors. The majority of SNAP funding goes toward supporting children, either through money sent to their parents or to them directly. The benefit also goes to millions of elderly people and people with disabilities. Only 13% of SNAP recipients are able-bodied adults with no children.
Most of the savings in the proposal come from asking states to foot part of the bill for the first time.
Ever since the program was founded in the wake of the Great Depression, the federal government has paid for 100% of SNAP benefits. The GOP's plan would force all states to provide at least 5% of the money starting in 2028, with a provision that could require them to cover substantially more. States could see their funding burden rise as high as 25% if they make too many mistakes in how to administer the program. In 2023, a total of 28 states had error rates that would have put them above that new maximum threshold, according to federal data.
SNAP already requires able-bodied adults without children to work in order to maintain their benefits. The GOP plan would make those rules more stringent in a number of ways, including significantly rolling back exemptions that currently mean many parents and older Americans do not have to meet work requirements.
The proposal would also limit how much per-person benefits can increase in the future by prohibiting changes to the formula the government uses to decide how much money each person needs to support a nutritious diet.
On the surface, total spending on SNAP wouldn't actually change under the GOP's plan. States would simply be asked to increase their contribution to make funding whole. Many experts predict, however, it would inevitably cause states to cut benefits or tighten eligibility rules, meaning fewer people would receive support.
'We don't have those dollars here at the states to do that, and that means we'll have to decide who will get benefits, and I don't think we can make that choice,' Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said this week.
One recent analysis by the Urban Institute estimated that an overall 10% reduction in federal SNAP funding to states would push nearly 900,000 Americans into poverty.
Hunger is a problem everywhere in the U.S., but it's especially concentrated in certain parts of the country. More than 47 million Americans, representing 13% of all U.S. households, deal with food insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those rates are much higher in some states, particularly in red states in the South. Big states like California and Texas collect a lot more SNAP money from the government than smaller states, but they also have huge budgets that would presumably give them more opportunity to cover the extra cost of keeping the program fully funded if the federal contribution were to shrink.
Republicans are attempting to combine a laundry list of legislative priorities into a single, massive spending bill that they hope to pass before Memorial Day. With narrow majorities in both houses of Congress and zero reason to expect they will get any Democratic votes, they have very little room for error. Any part of the 'big, beautiful bill' could be changed or scrapped altogether if the party can't unify behind it. So far, though, disagreement within the GOP has mostly centered around other proposals — particularly a plan to slash Medicaid funding.