Taxes

The federal food stamp program marks 62 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law on August 31, 1964 — an anniversary landing this year amid the steepest enrollment decline in the program’s modern history, as expanded work requirements and eligibility restrictions passed last year work their way through the system. More than 4 million people lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits between July 2025 and April 2026, according to federal data, with nationwide participation falling from roughly 42 million to 37 million recipients — an 11% decline in less than a year. More recent estimates put the total number of people who have lost benefits since the changes began at over 5 million, with enrollment continuing to decline in every state, according to Lauren Bauer, an economist at the Brookings Institution who tracks the program. The changes stem from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping tax and spending package Congress passed in July 2025. The law significantly expanded SNAP’s work requirements, mandating that more adults prove they are working or volunteering at least 80 hours a month to keep receiving benefits. Groups newly subject to those requirements include veterans, homeless individuals, young adults aging out of the foster care system, parents with children between 14 and 17, and adults between the ages of 55 and 64 — populations that had previously been exempted from SNAP’s work-requirement rules in whole or in part. The law also eliminated federal food aid eligibility entirely for certain categories of noncitizens, including refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of domestic abuse or human trafficking who had previously qualified for assistance regardless of immigration status. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the expanded work requirements alone will reduce SNAP participation by an average of 2.4 million people per month over the 2025-2034 period, a scale of reduction that budget analysts describe as one of the largest deliberate contractions of the program’s reach since its modern form took shape in the 1970s. Children have not been spared: at least 1 million children lost benefits across the 19 states surveyed in one recent analysis, even though most of the new work requirements are aimed at adult recipients rather than families with young children directly. The impact has landed unevenly across the country. Arizona has seen the steepest decline of any state, with enrollment falling to roughly half of the previous year’s level — a drop of more than 400,000 participants. Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma have also recorded significant enrollment drops as the new eligibility rules and paperwork requirements take hold, according to state-level data reviewed by researchers tracking the rollout. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has offered a different read on the numbers, attributing the enrollment decline primarily to “a better economy” and arguing that many people leaving the rolls were “taking the program that shouldn’t have been” receiving benefits in the first place — framing the drop as evidence the new work requirements are successfully targeting the program toward those who genuinely need it. Policy analysts studying the data have pushed back on that explanation, noting that unemployment has remained essentially flat over the same period while food prices have continued to rise, a combination they argue points toward the policy changes themselves, rather than a strengthening labor market, as the primary driver of the decline. Beyond the immediate eligibility changes, the law sets up a more structural shift in how SNAP is funded starting in 2027, when states will be required to help cover the program’s costs for the first time in the program’s history. SNAP has historically been funded almost entirely by the federal government, with states responsible mainly for administrative costs rather than the benefits themselves. Tim Shaw, a policy expert at the Aspen Institute, said the new state cost-sharing requirement creates a serious long-term risk for the program’s reach, since most states are legally required to balance their budgets every year and have far less fiscal flexibility than the federal government to absorb a new, potentially large and unpredictable expense. “More than 60 years of food assistance could soon come to an end” in some states, Shaw warned, raising the possibility that a handful of states could eventually scale back their participation in the program altogether once the funding burden shifts. Some states have also begun restricting which specific food items SNAP recipients are permitted to purchase with their benefits, a separate trend that predates the 2025 law but has gained momentum alongside the broader push to tighten the program’s rules. Supporters of those restrictions argue they encourage healthier purchasing patterns among recipients; critics counter that they add administrative complexity for retailers and stigmatize recipients without meaningfully improving nutrition outcomes. Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute pointed to what she described as one of SNAP’s core historical strengths now under strain: its universality. Before the recent changes, she noted, the program’s defining feature was that “it was available everywhere,” providing a consistent nutritional safety net regardless of which state a family happened to live in. With enrollment now falling unevenly by state and a state-funding requirement looming in 2027, that consistency is increasingly in question, with anti-hunger advocates warning that the practical experience of the program could soon vary dramatically depending on a family’s zip code in a way it has not for most of the program’s 62-year history. Food banks and local charitable networks in several of the hardest-hit states say they have already seen a noticeable uptick in demand as SNAP recipients lose eligibility, though most describe their capacity as strained rather than broken so far. Anti-hunger organizations argue that private charity was never designed to absorb the scale of need that a federal entitlement program covering tens of millions of people is built to address, and they warn that a further wave of state-level funding shortfalls in 2027 could push local food assistance networks well past their sustainable limits. Supporters of the new work requirements counter that a modest transition period of strained…