What could massive cuts to SNAP benefits mean for the U.S. economy – and for all of us?

Today, almost 43 million U.S. residents are enrolled in SNAP — 90 percent of whom are seniors, people with disabilities and families with children. And the program is, once again, on the chopping block for a Republican-controlled Congress and White House, who claim without much evidence that it’s rife with “waste, fraud, and abuse” — for example, that there are too many able-bodied adults taking benefits without working, or working enough. Trying to get a handle on the potential fate of SNAP is currently a roller coaster ride, with new pronouncements about it being made almost daily. Here’s how things stood as of this writing:

On February 12, the House Budget Committee directed the House Agriculture Committee to make $230 billion worth of cuts over the next ten years to its various programs, which include SNAP — broadly speculated to be the program that will take the brunt of the hit. (For the record, $230 billion represents about 20 percent of SNAP.) “Nobody’s ever cut the program by anything near that,” says Jonathan Coppess, who teaches agricultural policy at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while not discounting that it could happen now.

Yet two days later, Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA), Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, vowed that there would be no cuts to food benefits themselves, either in a reconciliation process or the Farm Bill, which is the piece of legislation where SNAP lives. Rather, he told “Politico,” opaquely, that cuts would come about by strengthening the program and improving its accountability and integrity.

What changes may lie ahead — and why they matter

The reconciliation process

As the National Women’s Law Center explains, most bills require “a supermajority of votes (60 out of 100 senators) to overcome a filibuster and pass. A ‘budget reconciliation’ process allows senators to expedite certain legislation’s approval with a simple majority vote.” The Republican Congress might want to use reconciliation to set the federal budget, since it only has a four-seat advantage in the Senate (53-47), and Senate Democrats are unlikely to sign off on any budget that drastically cuts SNAP and other vital programs like Medicaid. The budget will have to pass both the House and Senate (although the president does not sign it into law). That proposed $230 billion chop to agricultural spending would be part of this reconciliation process, with its many potential cuts to many programs, which Republicans want to use to fund tax cuts that greatly favor wealthy U.S. residents. Normally, though, agricultural spending is determined in the Farm Bill.

The Farm Bill

The Farm Bill is a piece of legislation that exists independent of the federal budget being tossed around for reconciliation; although the bill and budget are two distinct entities, it’s possible Republican lawmakers could try to reduce SNAP benefits in both places. The first Farm Bill was passed in 1933 to reduce crop surplus and raise crop prices while also keeping food affordable for consumers. Food Stamps were added in 1973. The Farm Bill is now a $428 billion package — about 80 percent of which goes to SNAP — that also helps farmers access crop insurance and credit, and supports rural development, farming research and conservation efforts. The bill is meant to be renewed every five years but there hasn’t been a new one since 2018. It’s been extended yearly since it expired in 2023, with the current extension set to expire on September 30, 2025.

Coppess says SNAP’s inclusion in the Farm Bill has always been essential to propelling the legislation forward. “For the last 50-plus years, you didn’t move a Farm Bill without that coalition between the farm assistance [side] and the food assistance side,” he says. “They need to be bipartisan” to get the entire package passed. But for Congress to make cuts to SNAP in reconciliation, he predicts they’ll split the program from the Farm Bill, leaving farmer benefits intact for now. He thinks it’s also possible legislators could try to turn SNAP into block grants — that is, rather than administering the program federally, they would allocate money to each state and then make those states “figure out who doesn’t get their food assistance.” Block grants, he says, “are a favorite gimmick because [they allow] Congress to take credit for cutting spending but not actually having to choose.” This strategy also risks cutting off essential food aid to many people who need it.

“Waste, fraud, abuse”

So, where might cuts to SNAP come from if not the benefits themselves? Coppess expects Republicans will try to greatly reduce the number of people who participate in the program. “Benefit reductions do not get much in terms of savings, so it almost always has to come out of participation numbers,” he says, which likely means the introduction of a lot more arduous paperwork and changes to who is eligible. This all fits under the rubric of reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” incidence of which even the U.S. Department of Agriculture admits is low.

One way GOP legislators have vowed to eradicate “abuse” from the system is by tightening SNAP work requirements. However, says Luis Nuñez, a research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, of the approximately 30 percent of SNAP participants who are not children or elderly or disabled, “74 percent of them worked in the past year or a month after” enrolling in the program. Currently, work requirements are waived for SNAP recipients 54 years and older, veterans, people who are unhoused or recently aged out of foster care, and parents of school-age children, for example. A previously attempted adjustment would have raised the age limit to 64 and, Nuñez says, many of these other work exemptions could disappear.