One of the most far-reaching cuts to federal programs in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a provision that will largely shift the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to the states. Until now, the federal government has covered the full cost of SNAP benefits and half of the administrative costs. The reconciliation bill is expected to cut $186 billion in federal spending for SNAP over the next 10 years, leaving states scrambling to determine how to feed the estimated 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates over 3 million Americans will likely be dropped from the program and lose their benefits.
Over the next few years, states will have to decide how much of the SNAP costs to absorb, which totaled over $100 billion in 2024. The CBOe predicts that some states will scale back or drop SNAP benefits altogether. Food banks throughout the country are already raising the alarm that they won’t be able to meet the food demands created by cuts to the program.
In addition to shifting the cost to states, the legislation will change the enrollment requirements for SNAP, such as raising the working age to 64, and requiring able-bodied parents with children over 14 to work in order to receive benefits.
Some critics of the bill argue the provision prevents SNAP from serving its purpose of feeding low-income Americans.
On the Today, Explained podcast, co-host Sean Rameswaram dove into the history of SNAP, the program’s controversies since its inception, and how the legislative bill will prevent the program from being able to deliver on its original goals with Tracy Roof, an associate professor of political science the University of Richmond who focuses on domestic policy who is writing a book about the history of food assistance in the United States.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What’s the history of food assistance in the United States of SNAP? Whose idea was this and why did we want to do it?
In the 1950s, you got more attention to certain pockets of poverty in the United States. One of the areas that got the most attention was Appalachia with coal miners who were losing their jobs. You were starting to see more mechanization of coal mines, as well as competition from things like oil. And all of these coal miners were losing their jobs in the middle of areas that didn’t have other economic opportunities. And because you had able-bodied workers in the household, a lot of these families didn’t qualify for cash assistance.
John F. Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1960, toured some of these areas and saw how widespread the problem of starvation was.
At the same time, members of Congress made the argument that we were spending all of this money to store surplus grain, and we could not find enough places to sell that grain. So we started sending some of it abroad to starving people in other countries, but we had starving people in the United States who were not getting access to that food. And so the idea came about of trying to get some of these surplus commodities to people.
When Kennedy came into office, his very first executive order was to create a pilot program.
People were given coupons that looked like Monopoly money that they could take into grocery stores and use to buy any food within the grocery store. You couldn’t get alcohol, you couldn’t get cigarettes, but pretty much any consumable food you were able to purchase with it.
Then during the mid- to late 1960s, you started to see more and more attention to the plight of tenant farmers in the South. A documentary from CBS called Hunger in America came out, and it showed starving children.
When Nixon came in, there was a very famous speech where he pledged to end hunger.
That ultimately led to the creation of a permanent program in 1964 that was expanded over the course of the late 1960s, and ultimately every jurisdiction was required to have it by 1974. It was set up such that the federal government would cover all the cost of the benefits, and the states would still be responsible for administering it, but a lot of the cost would be borne by the federal government. So that’s the origins of the program.
Yeah. This isn’t the first time that people have wanted to cut or curtail or prevent certain people from accessing this program. That’s been a long-established history as well.
Pretty much from the beginning, there’ve been critics of the program. I mean, there were people in Congress that just didn’t think it was necessary, or they thought that it should be treated as a welfare program and not as a nutrition or agricultural program because it was always put into the Farm Bill. But as inflation grew in the 1970s, enrollment really started to take off. And you saw people like Ronald Reagan in his run for the presidency become very critical of people becoming overly dependent on it.
The argument was very similar to what we’ve just heard, that we needed to protect the program for the truly needy and get people that can fend for themselves off of it.
Is this most recent cut to SNAP the most drastic cut we’ve ever seen?
Yes, it’s likely to be the biggest cut we’ve seen.
But it isn’t an elimination. It’s saying, “States, you gotta figure this out, your move.”
Is it going to affect Democrats, Republicans, white people, Black people, Asian people, poor people, tall people?
A lot of that is gonna be up to the states. So rather than Congress coming in and saying, “We’re going to eliminate eligibility for these categories of people,” it’s telling the states, “You’re going to have to bear a larger share of the benefits. And if you can’t cover that, you’re going to have to figure out how you reduce enrollment in the program or come up with ways to cover the additional cost.”
You know, some of the bluer states are probably going to try to make up those differences and maintain assistance to people. Some of the poorer states are probably going to cut back. People will be hungry.
Why let people go hungry? We’re the richest country on Earth. Why do people want to cut food aid for the poor?
You always have a number of people that could be getting something like SNAP, but they don’t apply, either because of the stigma associated with it, or because they don’t want to go through all the paperwork, or for whatever reason they don’t know they’re eligible. Back in the 1990s in the midst of welfare reform, the participation rate fell such that only 57 percent of eligible participants participated in SNAP. And then over the course of the George W. Bush administration, that number came up into the 70s.
As they tried to make the program more accessible — and that took off during the Great Recession — what you saw was a steep increase in the percentage of people that were on SNAP. It went up to 15 percent of the population at the peak in 2013. But it remained pretty high, even as the economy started to recover.
That was largely because it took a long time for the economic recovery to hit low-income workers, and partly because of the decline in stigma. And so that criticism became really loud in Congress once Republicans took control of Congress during the Obama years, and it carried over into the Trump administration. This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has tried to cut benefits. They tried to do it in the wake of the 2016 election as well, they just weren’t successful.
How much of a shakeup do you think this is of food aid in the United States ultimately?
Most states have to have balanced budgets either because of their constitutions or because of state laws. They can’t just sell more Treasury bonds the way the federal government does. That means that when we slip into a recession, states face really tough choices because they need to fund education, they need to fund Medicaid, and they need to fund all the other services that states provide. They’re going to face some really tough choices about where they allocate their resources.
That’s when a lot more people will be looking to apply for SNAP to be able to meet their basic needs — and it’s going to be very, very difficult for the states to meet those needs.
