{"id":1710,"date":"2026-07-30T23:44:37","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T23:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1710"},"modified":"2026-07-30T23:44:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T23:44:37","slug":"a-lose-lose-for-food-stamps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1710","title":{"rendered":"A Lose-Lose for Food Stamps"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

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Back in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote an op-ed celebrating the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to get Americans off food stamps. Officially known as SNAP, the program has shed an estimated 6 million participants since Donald Trump\u2019s return to office\u2014a shift that Rollins argued could help break a \u201cvicious cycle\u201d of government dependence.<\/p>\n

The idea that too many people have come to rely on federal handouts has long been a line of attack against SNAP. Per the Department of Agriculture\u2019s preliminary data from April, about 37 million low- and no-income people in the United States are on food stamps. That\u2019s roughly one in 10 Americans, down from one in eight last year. The reduction is in line with the administration\u2019s broader approach to social welfare. Last year\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump has touted as one of his signature policy achievements, slashed funding to Medicaid and the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program. And its cuts to SNAP\u2014tightening eligibility requirements and limiting the amount of aid that recipients might be able to collect in the future\u2014were the largest in the program\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Food stamps will lose $186 billion in federal funding through 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office\u2019s estimates. But what Rollins has framed as a way to curtail waste, fraud, and abuse is already having far-reaching impacts on the Americans who rely on the program. Last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggested that \u201cit\u2019s very likely that the number of children receiving SNAP has dropped by more than 1.5 million since July 2025,\u201d when the OBBBA became law. Inflation has been rising quickly this year, in part because of the Iran war, and the assault on food stamps is now compounding an ongoing affordability crisis. If states can\u2019t meet the federal government\u2019s new requirements for SNAP, they may have to take on a collective $9 billion in food-stamp costs themselves\u2014forcing local legislators to make hard choices about which kinds of social-welfare programs, and which kinds of people, should receive aid.<\/p>\n

This past winter, when the White House decided to briefly stop funding SNAP during the government shutdown, Trump said that the program\u2019s enrollment number was \u201cmany times what it should be.\u201d It\u2019s true that food-stamp enrollment\u2014which tends to rise during moments of economic crisis and contract in moments of recovery\u2014spiked substantially during the coronavirus pandemic as Congress temporarily increased benefit amounts, and enrollment still hasn\u2019t reverted to its pre-2020 level. But stricter work requirements (homeless people and veterans are no longer exempt, for example) and reductions in federal funding have helped drive down SNAP enrollment at a vertiginous moment. Most people, whether on food stamps or not, are cutting back on groceries. And no other institution \u201cis going to swoop in and provide these financial resources\u201d to families struggling to buy groceries, Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told me.<\/p>\n

In Arizona, the number of people with access to SNAP benefits has almost halved in less than a year\u2014the biggest drop in any state. A recent New York Times <\/i>report explains that the OBBBA\u2019s cuts and updated rules have created \u201cbureaucratic chaos\u201d in the state, which has been exacerbated by a labyrinthian paperwork process and antiquated tech infrastructure. The fact that Arizona laid off a third of its caseworkers after losing a federal grant has also made it harder to verify who is and isn\u2019t eligible for aid\u2014and monthly visits to food banks have outpaced SNAP enrollment in the state for the first time, according to the Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n

States have historically managed SNAP payments on their own; the federal government supplies the money for benefits and for some of the administrative costs. Critics of this arrangement have noted that the post-COVID swell in enrollments has coincided with an uptick in improper payments, most of which have historically been over<\/i>payments. In 2019, 7.4 percent of the payments SNAP doled out were made in error, according to the USDA; last year, the national error rate was 10.6 percent. The OBBBA puts states in a tough spot. When it went into effect, it gave most states until the end of September 2026 to get their error rates below 6 percent\u2014a little more than a year. If they fail to do so, they will begin sharing the cost of food-stamp benefits with the White House in 2027 (Alaska and other states with higher error rates will have longer deadlines).<\/p>\n

The consequences will affect red and blue states alike, unlike some other Trump-backed economic initiatives. According to data released by the USDA last month, 41 states had error rates above the threshold in the 2025 fiscal year, and many are now scrambling to get those numbers down. California could end up paying roughly $1.9 billion if legislators don\u2019t find a way to reduce the state\u2019s rate by almost half, and Florida may need to pay $900 million, according to one estimate. Taking on those costs would require states to radically reshape their budgets, raise taxes, or find some other way to pay for SNAP\u2014otherwise, their constituents may hold them accountable when the food-stamp payments stop coming. Officials in Alabama and Arizona have already considered ending the program, and, in an anonymous , four states identified \u201cwithdrawing and\/or pausing from SNAP\u201d as a potential risk.<\/p>\n

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If states are able to lower their error rates, SNAP could be transformed for the better. But if they fail to do so by the fast-approaching deadline, it\u2019s hard to see who wins: not food-stamp recipients, not the states that will have their budgets upended, and not the administration, which has been trying to convince Americans ahead of the midterms that it\u2019s responding to their affordability concerns. Rollins has described SNAP as a \u201cbroken program,\u201d but these changes aren\u2019t guaranteed to restore trust in the system. Instead, the push to repair SNAP could end up breaking it even more.<\/p>\n

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