Trump Administration Moves to Cut Food Stamps for 6.3 Million Americans in Biggest SNAP Crackdown in Years

The Trump administration has moved to cut food stamps for about 6.3 million Americans, the largest single tightening of the nation’s main anti-hunger programme in years, according to Reuters. The proposal, issued by the United States Department of Agriculture on Tuesday, would end a long-standing policy that lets states extend food assistance to households whose incomes sit above the federal limit, and it would strip nearly one in five people currently enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, of their benefits.

The change would not take effect at once. It is a proposed rule, which means the public has 30 days to comment on it before the department can finalise it, and the department’s own analysis says the full effect would land in fiscal year 2029. But the scale of what is being proposed is already clear from the agency’s own figures: about 3.2 million households would lose their benefits, federal spending on the programme would fall by roughly 45 billion dollars over five years, and about 1.8 million children would lose their automatic eligibility for free school meals.

The proposal arrives at a moment when the programme has already shrunk sharply. More than 5.5 million people have lost SNAP benefits since President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, according to the department’s own data, bringing enrolment to about 36 million people. The new rule would cut deeper still, and it has drawn an immediate and furious response from Democrats and anti-hunger groups, who describe it as a direct attack on working families at a time when the cost of living dominates American politics.

Angie Craig, the Democratic ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, called the proposal “heartless and cruel” in a statement, adding that it “would make it harder to meet basic needs and roll back efforts to streamline federal programs.” The department, for its part, says the change is long overdue and would “preserve benefits for the truly needy.” The gap between those two descriptions — a cruel cut on one side, a long-overdue correction on the other — is the heart of a fight that has now been running, on and off, for seven years.

What the Proposed Rule Would Do

At the centre of the proposal is a policy with a technical name: broad-based categorical eligibility, usually shortened to BBCE. It is a rule that has been in place for more than two decades, and it is used by more than 40 states and the District of Columbia. Understanding it is the key to understanding everything else about this story, because the proposal does not change the basic income limits for food stamps. It changes who gets to skip proving that they meet them.

Under the normal federal rules, a household qualifies for SNAP if its gross income is at or below 130 per cent of the federal poverty level, and if its assets fall below set limits. But for years, states have been allowed to treat a household as automatically eligible for food stamps if that household already receives benefits under another programme, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known as TANF. The idea was simple: if a family has already been through one means test, there is no need to put it through a second one.

The crucial detail is what counts as receiving TANF. In many states, a household does not need to receive cash assistance to qualify. Non-cash TANF-funded services are enough — things like childcare assistance, job training, or even an informational pamphlet or a referral to another service. That is the part the administration objects to. According to the department, states have used this flexibility to widen eligibility far beyond the limits Congress set, allowing households with incomes and savings above the federal thresholds to draw food stamps.

The proposed rule would narrow that gateway sharply. Only households receiving TANF “assistance” — largely temporary cash aid — would be automatically eligible for SNAP. Households that qualify only because they receive non-cash TANF services would have to apply for food stamps on their own merits, under the standard federal income and asset tests. According to the department’s analysis, about 6.3 million of them would fail those tests.

The rule was signed by Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, and it is set to be published in the Federal Register. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been publicly critical of the broad-based eligibility policy for months. In April, she told Fox News that no identity verification was required to sign up for the programme, a claim that framed the issue as one of lax controls rather than of need.

Who Would Lose Benefits — and How Many

The department’s own estimate is the most striking number in the proposal. In fiscal year 2029, the first year in which the rule would be fully in effect, about 6.3 million individuals in about 3.2 million households would lose their SNAP benefits. That is nearly 18 per cent of everyone currently enrolled in the programme, or roughly one person in five.

Those numbers are not in dispute between the two sides. What is disputed is who those people are. The administration’s position is that they are households with incomes or assets above the federal limits — people who, in its view, should never have qualified in the first place. The department said in a statement that broad-based categorical eligibility “has bloated the welfare rolls for decades,” adding: “It has allowed States to take short cuts, error rates to balloon, and those with income and assets far above federal limits access to a benefit meant for the neediest among us. Correcting this loophole is long overdue.”

Anti-hunger advocates see the same 6.3 million people very differently. Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP policy and advocacy director at the Food Research & Action Center, told CNN: “Instead of helping families, the administration is making life harder for them. These are working families.” Her point is that the households affected are not, for the most part, wealthy. They are families whose earnings sit just above the federal poverty line — often between 130 and 200 per cent of it, the range in which many states set TANF eligibility — and who depend on food stamps to bridge the gap between a pay cheque and a grocery bill.

That gap matters because the federal poverty level is a blunt instrument. A family of four earning, say, 150 per cent of the poverty level is not, by any ordinary measure, comfortable. Rent, childcare, transport and medical costs can swallow an income that looks adequate on paper. Broad-based categorical eligibility was designed precisely for that grey zone: it let states recognise that a family already judged needy enough for one form of help was needy enough for another. Removing it does not only remove a benefit. It removes the recognition that need exists above a single federal line.

The advocates also warn that the true number of people who lose benefits will be larger than 6.3 million. The proposal would increase the paperwork burden on enrollees and on state agencies, they say, and that burden alone could push some eligible people out of the programme. Some families, particularly those with immigrant members, are afraid to fill out government paperwork and draw attention to themselves, according to CNN’s reporting. Others will simply be caught by a missed form, a lost letter or a deadline they never saw. In a programme that serves 36 million people, even a small rise in administrative failure translates into a large number of empty cupboards.

The Knock-On Effects for Children

The most consequential ripple effect of the proposal falls on children. Because SNAP enrolment automatically qualifies a child for free school meals, removing 6.3 million people from food stamps also removes about 1.8 million children from automatic eligibility for free school lunches, according to the department’s own estimates. The department says nearly all of those children would still qualify for free or reduced-price meals if their families applied separately — about 97 per cent, by its calculation — but that qualification would no longer be automatic. It would require a separate application, a separate form, and a separate decision.

The same pattern repeats in the programme for women, infants and children, known as WIC. About 16,500 pregnant women, mothers, infants and children would have to apply separately for WIC, according to CNN, while another 5,500 participants would no longer be eligible for it at all.

These knock-on effects are easy to miss in the headline figure, but they are where the proposal’s practical impact is sharpest. A school lunch is not only a meal. For millions of children it is the most reliable meal of the day, and the automatic link between SNAP and school meals exists precisely so that no child has to go hungry because a parent missed a form. Breaking that link does not save money on school meals in any meaningful sense — the children will mostly still qualify — but it adds a layer of bureaucracy between a hungry child and lunch. That, the critics argue, is the point: the rule does not only cut benefits, it makes the remaining benefits harder to reach.

Ali Hard, the policy director at the National WIC Association, added a further concern. The department stopped measuring food insecurity last year, she told CNN, which makes it harder to keep track of Americans’ ability to feed themselves and their families. If the government no longer counts how many people cannot afford enough food, it becomes harder to know — and harder to prove — what a cut like this one actually does.

The Administration’s Case

The administration’s case rests on three claims: that the programme has grown beyond its intended limits, that states have exploited the flexibility they were given, and that the savings are substantial.

On the first claim, the department points to the scale of the programme and to the way broad-based categorical eligibility has been used. In its statement, it argued that the policy “has bloated the welfare rolls for decades” and that correcting it is “long overdue.” The rule itself says the changes would make SNAP eligibility more standardised and “preserve benefits for the truly needy.” The language is deliberate: it draws a line between the truly needy, who will keep their benefits, and everyone else, who will not.

On the second claim, the administration argues that states have taken shortcuts. Because a household can qualify for SNAP on the strength of a TANF-funded pamphlet or referral, the department contends, the system has allowed people with incomes and assets “far above federal limits” to draw a benefit meant for the poorest. Error rates, it says, have ballooned as a result. The White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster put the same point more simply, saying the administration wants to ensure that SNAP serves only “eligible Americans who need it most.”

On the third claim, the numbers are large. The department says the proposal would reduce federal spending on SNAP by nearly 45 billion dollars over five years — 44.6 billion dollars, by the precise figure in the rule — and state spending by 5.2 billion dollars over the same period. In a government that has made deficit reduction a central promise, that is a saving worth claiming. It is also, the administration would argue, a saving that comes from removing people who should not have been receiving the benefit at all.

There is a fourth element to the administration’s case, which is less about this rule and more about the direction of policy as a whole. The July 2025 tax law — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — already expanded work requirements for SNAP and cut federal spending on the programme. From 1 October, states have also been required to shoulder a larger share of the cost of administering SNAP, and states whose payment error rates run above 6 per cent must now share the cost of the benefits themselves. The proposed rule fits inside that larger project: a programme that is smaller, stricter, cheaper, and harder to enter.

The Critics’ Case

The critics’ case is that the administration has the story backwards: that the people being removed are not the well-off gaming the system, but working families, children and older Americans living just above an unforgiving line.

Ty Jones Cox, the vice president for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank, said in a statement: “Instead of listening to the public sentiment on affordability following the election, the administration is continuing its attacks on vital food assistance and the families who need help to put food on the table.” The reference to the election is pointed. The proposal was published days after midterm elections in which the cost of living was the dominant issue, and in which Republicans lost control of Congress — a defeat that President Trump himself has partly blamed on the war with Iran, while conceding that Vice President JD Vance was “largely” correct to blame the conflict for the party’s losses. The critics’ argument is that voters sent a message about affordability, and the administration answered with a cut to food assistance.

Jenique Jones, the executive director of WhyHunger, a global nonprofit working to end hunger, was blunter still. “Today the Trump administration proposed a rule that would take food off the tables of at least 6.3 million more Americans,” she said in a statement. “This is not reform. This is a benefit cut dressed up as paperwork.” Her organisation notes that broad-based categorical eligibility has operated for more than 20 years, that it streamlines applications, lowers administrative costs for states, and keeps people from falling through the cracks. “It does not reduce hunger. It does not improve program integrity. It does not make a single family more food secure,” the statement said. “It simply moves the cost of hunger off the federal ledger and onto food banks, pantries, school cafeterias, and families.”

Plata-Nino, of the Food Research & Action Center, made the same point about the burden the rule would place on states. “Basically, what the administration is doing is continuing on this path of making sure that SNAP is dismantled,” she said. “The states have so much on their plate that they cannot continue running the program.” That warning matters because the states are already under strain. They are absorbing significant new costs from the July 2025 law, they must verify household resources for many more applicants under the new rule, and the department itself estimates that state administrative costs would rise by about 929 million dollars over five years as a result of the change.

There is also the question of timing. The proposal comes as food banks across the country are already stretched. If 6.3 million people lose their food stamps, many of them will turn to pantries and food banks instead — the very organisations that WhyHunger says are already operating beyond capacity. A cut to a federal programme does not eliminate the need it served. It moves that need somewhere else, usually to a charity with fewer resources and no legal obligation to meet it.

A Fight the Administration Has Had Before

None of this is new. The Trump administration proposed a strikingly similar rule in 2019, during the president’s first term, also aimed at ending broad-based categorical eligibility. That proposal drew more than 183,000 public comments in opposition, according to WhyHunger, and it was withdrawn by the Biden administration in 2021 before it could take effect. Congress, the group notes, has also rejected these same cuts.

The return of the proposal now, seven years later, is itself a statement. It says that the administration regards the 2019 attempt not as a defeat but as unfinished business, and that it is prepared to try again with a Congress and a political landscape that have changed since then. It also says something about the durability of the underlying disagreement. Broad-based categorical eligibility has been a target of Republicans for as long as it has existed, because it embodies a particular philosophy: that eligibility should be judged by a family’s real circumstances, as already assessed by another programme, rather than by a single federal formula. Its defenders believe that philosophy is humane and efficient. Its opponents believe it is a loophole. Neither side has persuaded the other in two decades, and the rule-making process is now the arena in which the argument will be fought again.

That history also shapes what happens next. The 2019 proposal generated an enormous public response, and advocacy groups are already urging people to submit comments again. WhyHunger’s statement pointed out that the administration has given the public just 30 days to respond, and argued that “that is not enough time for families, advocates, and state agencies to weigh in on a change this sweeping.” The short comment window is itself likely to become a point of contention, as is the question of whether the department has adequately explained why a policy that survived two decades of scrutiny should now be abandoned.

Legal challenges are also likely. Rules of this kind, which affect millions of people and billions of dollars, are routinely challenged in court by states and advocacy groups, and the 2019 proposal was litigated before it was withdrawn. Any final rule will face the same scrutiny, and the courts will ask the same questions the public comment process asks: whether the department has followed the proper procedures, whether its reasoning is supported by evidence, and whether it has considered the effects on the people who will lose their benefits.

The Wider Squeeze on Food Aid

The proposed rule cannot be understood in isolation. It is one element of a wider squeeze on food assistance that has been tightening for more than a year, and its effects compound with the changes that came before it.

The starting point is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025. That law cut federal spending on SNAP, tightened eligibility, and expanded work requirements. Since then, enrolment has fallen by more than 5 million people, including an estimated 2 million children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Advocates attribute the drop to states implementing stricter eligibility reviews to avoid payment error penalties, as well as to the law’s other provisions. The department itself puts the figure at more than 5.5 million people lost from the programme, with enrolment now at about 36 million.

On top of that, the law shifted costs to the states. From 1 October, states have been required to shoulder a larger share of the cost of administering SNAP, and states with error rates above 6 per cent must now share the cost of the benefits themselves. The Senate is currently debating a farm bill, and one of the key disagreements is how much time states should be given to bring their error rates down: Republicans have offered a one-year delay, while Democrats are pushing for two. The proposed rule would add to that pressure, requiring states to verify household resources for many more applicants and to modify their eligibility systems, at an estimated additional administrative cost of about 929 million dollars over five years.

The result is a programme being squeezed from three directions at once: fewer people eligible, more costs pushed onto the states that run it, and more paperwork for the families who depend on it. Each change is defensible on its own terms — a tighter rule here, a cost shift there — but together they amount to a transformation of the programme’s character. SNAP was designed as a national safety net with national standards. The direction of travel now is towards a smaller, more conditional programme in which the burden of proving need falls ever more heavily on the people who need help most.

That transformation has a human cost that is hard to capture in budget figures. A family that loses 200 dollars a month in food stamps does not simply eat 200 dollars less. It skips meals, buys cheaper and less nutritious food, falls behind on rent or medicine, and turns to a food bank that may itself be short of supplies. The department’s estimate that 1.8 million children would lose automatic eligibility for free school meals is a reminder that the effects reach beyond the household budget and into the classroom, where hunger shows up as an inability to concentrate, to learn, and to keep up.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The headline figure — 6.3 million people — is large enough to dominate the coverage, but the real significance of this proposal lies in what it reveals about the direction of American social policy, and about the politics of a government that has just lost an election fought on the cost of living. Five points stand out.

1. Affordability was the election issue. This is the answer.

The timing of the proposal is impossible to ignore. It was published days after midterm elections in which the cost of living was the issue voters talked about most, and in which the governing party lost control of Congress. The critics have been quick to draw the connection, and Ty Jones Cox’s statement — that the administration is acting “instead of listening to the public sentiment on affordability following the election” — captures the charge precisely. Whether or not the timing was deliberate, the political effect is the same: a government that has been told voters are struggling to afford the basics has responded by proposing to take food assistance away from 6.3 million of them. That is a difficult position to defend, and it hands the opposition a simple and powerful line: that the administration’s answer to the affordability crisis is to make food less affordable for the poorest. The administration will argue that the rule is about integrity, not affordability, and that the two issues are separate. But voters do not experience them as separate. A family that cannot afford groceries does not care whether the policy that cut its food stamps was labelled reform or retrenchment. It cares that the money is gone.

2. A technical fix that is really a values argument

Broad-based categorical eligibility sounds like an administrative detail, and the administration has every incentive to present it as one. A loophole, a shortcut, an error rate: these are the words of management, not of morality. But the argument underneath is a values argument, and it has been running for more than twenty years. The question is simple: when a family has already been judged needy enough to receive one form of public help, should that judgement count for another? The defenders of the policy say yes, because need is need, and because making a family prove the same thing twice is wasteful and cruel. The opponents say no, because each programme has its own limits, set by Congress, and because letting states blur those limits invites abuse. Both positions are coherent. Neither is merely technical. What the proposed rule does is settle that argument, for now, in favour of the stricter view — and it does so through a regulatory change rather than through legislation, which means it can be done without a vote in Congress. That is why the history matters: the same change was proposed in 2019, drew 183,000 opposing comments, and was withdrawn. The administration is betting that the second attempt will succeed where the first failed. The public comment process will test that bet.

3. The states are being asked to do more with less

One of the least discussed aspects of the proposal is what it does to the states. The department’s own figures say state administrative costs would rise by about 929 million dollars over five years, because states would have to verify household resources for many more applicants and rebuild their eligibility systems. At the same time, states are already absorbing new costs from the July 2025 law, including a larger share of administrative expenses and, for states with error rates above 6 per cent, a share of the benefit costs themselves. The Senate is still arguing over how long states should be given to bring their error rates down. Against that background, the proposed rule looks less like a saving and more like a transfer: the federal government saves 45 billion dollars, and the states pick up nearly a billion dollars of new administrative work, plus the political cost of telling families they no longer qualify. Some states will manage. Others, particularly those with older systems and thinner budgets, will struggle, and the struggle will show up as delays, errors and eligible families losing benefits for administrative reasons rather than because they are no longer needy. That is the quiet risk in the proposal: not the headline cut, but the slow erosion of a system that is being asked to do more, more strictly, with less help.

4. Children pay twice, and the bill is hard to see

The most troubling part of the proposal is also the easiest to overlook. About 1.8 million children would lose automatic eligibility for free school meals, and thousands more would lose the automatic link to WIC. The department says nearly all of those children would still qualify if their families applied separately, and that is probably true. But “still qualify” and “still receive” are not the same thing. Every additional form is a chance for a family to fall through the cracks: a missed deadline, a lost letter, a parent who does not understand the process, a family afraid to put its name on a government form. The children who fall through those cracks do not show up in the department’s savings figures. They show up in classrooms, hungry, and in food bank queues, and in the statistics on childhood nutrition that the department itself has stopped collecting. The decision to stop measuring food insecurity last year makes the problem worse, because it removes the very evidence that would let the public judge whether the cut is doing harm. A government that does not count hunger cannot be held to account for increasing it. That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of a structural failure, and it is one that should trouble anyone who cares about the evidence on which policy is judged.

5. The fight is not over — and the next round will be public

The proposal is not yet a rule. It is the beginning of a process, and the process is public. Thirty days of comments, a farm bill debate in the Senate, state governments weighing in, advocacy groups mobilising, and, almost certainly, lawsuits. The 2019 attempt generated more than 183,000 comments and was ultimately withdrawn. The administration will have studied that history, and it will have prepared for a similar response. But the politics have changed since 2019. The programme is smaller than it was, the states are under greater strain, and the cost of living has become the central issue in American politics. Those changes cut both ways. They make the case for fiscal restraint easier to argue, and the case for cutting food assistance harder to defend. What happens in the next thirty days — who comments, what the states say, how the farm bill debate resolves — will determine whether this proposal becomes the largest cut to food stamps in a generation, or whether it joins its 2019 predecessor as an attempt that failed. Either way, the argument it has started will not end with the comment period. It will run through the courts, through the states, and through the next election, because the question it raises — who deserves help, and how much proof should be demanded of them — is one that American politics has never settled, and probably never will.

What to Watch Next

1. The 30-day comment period. The public has a month to respond to the proposed rule. The volume and content of those comments will be the first test of whether the 2019 backlash repeats itself, and the department will be required to consider them before finalising anything.
2. The farm bill debate. The Senate is currently negotiating a farm bill, with the treatment of state error rates a key point of disagreement. How that debate resolves will shape how much room states have to absorb the new rule’s demands.
3. State responses. More than 40 states use broad-based categorical eligibility. Governors and state agencies will have to say whether they can implement the change, what it will cost them, and how many of their residents will be affected.
4. Legal challenges. Rules of this scale are routinely challenged in court. Watch for lawsuits from states and advocacy groups, and for any injunction that would pause the rule while the courts consider it.
5. Food bank demand. If the rule is finalised, food banks and pantries will be the first to feel the effect. Their reported demand in the months after finalisation will be an early indicator of the real-world impact.
6. The school meals link. Whether the 1.8 million children who lose automatic eligibility for free school meals are successfully re-enrolled through separate applications — and how many fall through the gap — will be a key measure of the rule’s human cost.
7. The final rule itself. The proposal may change before it is finalised. Watch for whether the department softens any element — the treatment of non-cash TANF services, the timeline, or the school meals link — in response to the comments it receives.

Sources

• Reuters — Trump administration moves to cut food stamps for 6.3 million people
• CNN — Nearly one in five food stamp recipients could lose benefits under Trump proposal
• Washington Sun — USDA Is Proposing a Rule That Would Kick Millions Off SNAP
• US Times Mirror — New SNAP proposal would increase food insecurity for millions of Americans, critics say
• WhyHunger — Hunger Is a Policy Choice. So Is This New Rule.
• America Mornings — 6.3 Million Could Lose Food Assistance Under New USDA Policy