Food stamps under President Trump have been reshaped by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next decade. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has called it the largest cut in SNAP’s history. More than 3.5 million people lost access to food assistance in the eight months after the law took effect, and the administration has pursued a separate effort to collect recipient data from every state, triggering federal lawsuits and court orders.
If you or someone in your household receives SNAP, the changes fall into a few areas that affect eligibility directly: who has to work to keep benefits, which immigrants qualify, how states are handling verification, and whether benefits arrive on time. Each of those is now different from what it was a year ago.
What the New Law Changed
H.R. 1 passed through budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority in both chambers. Its SNAP provisions restructured the program in four ways: expanded work requirements, tighter immigrant eligibility, a shift of program costs to the states, and changes to how utility expenses factor into benefit calculations.
Supporters said the goal was to reduce waste and increase accountability. Anti-hunger organizations and dozens of state attorneys general say the combined effect is to push millions of eligible people off the rolls through rules and paperwork that states are struggling to administer.
Who Now Has to Work to Keep Benefits
Before the law, SNAP’s time-limited work rules applied mainly to “able-bodied adults without dependents” between 18 and 54 who did not live with a child under 18. Those adults had to work, volunteer, or train at least 80 hours a month or lose benefits after three months in any three-year period.
The new law widens the net. The upper age is now 64 instead of 54, and the dependent-child threshold dropped from under 18 to under 14. A parent whose youngest child is 14 or older is now on the same three-month clock as a childless adult.
The law also stripped exemptions that had shielded several groups:
- Veterans, regardless of discharge status, no longer receive an automatic exemption in most states.
- Former foster youth aged 24 or younger who were in foster care on their 18th birthday lost their exemption.
- People experiencing homelessness are now subject to the standard work requirement.
A new exemption was added for people who qualify as American Indian, Urban Indian, or California Indian under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. General exemptions for pregnancy, physical or mental health conditions that prevent work, and participation in substance abuse treatment remain in place.
States are phasing the rules in on different dates. Minnesota’s expanded requirements took effect November 1, 2025, and its waivers for areas without enough jobs were removed December 1, 2025. Illinois ended its long-standing statewide waiver on February 1, 2026. New York City’s new rules began March 1, 2026. California’s expanded time limits took effect June 1, 2026, with the state expecting 55,000 to 60,000 additional people per month to lose benefits starting around October 2026. If you live in an area that previously had a waiver, the local waiver may no longer apply.
Which Immigrants Are Now Ineligible
The law narrowed which noncitizens can receive SNAP, and several groups of legal U.S. residents who previously qualified are now cut off. In California, changes effective April 1, 2026, exclude most lawfully present immigrants, including asylees, refugees, parolees other than Cuban and Haitian entrants, trafficking victims, battered noncitizens, and certain Afghan and Ukrainian nationals granted parole between 2021 and 2024. In Maryland, benefits are limited to lawful permanent residents, Cuban or Haitian entrants, and individuals from the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands; refugees and asylum seekers must complete a five-year waiting period after obtaining permanent residency.
A coalition of 21 states and the District of Columbia sued the USDA in November 2025 in federal court in Oregon over the agency’s implementation guidance. Led by the attorneys general of New York and Washington, the states argue that a USDA memo issued October 31, 2025, went beyond the statute by declaring that people who entered through humanitarian pathways remain permanently ineligible for SNAP even after becoming lawful permanent residents. The states also challenge the USDA’s claim that a 120-day grace period for states to update their systems had already expired, noting the memo was issued one day before the supposed deadline during a federal government shutdown. In New York alone, an estimated 35,000 lawful permanent residents are at risk of losing benefits under the disputed guidance.
Why States Are Tightening Verification
The most structural change is the requirement that states begin paying for a share of SNAP benefits, an obligation that used to be entirely federal. The trigger is a state’s payment error rate, which measures how often it overpays or underpays. States with error rates at or above 6 percent must pay between 5 and 15 percent of total benefit costs. Those penalties are scheduled to begin in fiscal year 2028.
Nearly every state would face a cost share based on 2024 error rates, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Twenty-seven states face projected costs above $100 million per year. Projected annual hits include California at $1.8 billion, New York at $1.1 billion, Florida at $984 million, and Illinois at $666 million, all at the top 15 percent tier. A paradoxical exemption applies to states with the highest error rates: those at or above 13.33 percent in fiscal year 2025 are exempt until 2029, and those hitting that threshold in 2026 are exempt until 2030.
Separately, the federal share of SNAP administrative costs drops from 50 percent to 25 percent starting October 2026. Maryland estimates the shift will add roughly $57.5 million per year to state costs. In the ten states where counties administer SNAP, including California, New York, Ohio, and North Carolina, local governments will absorb part of the difference.
Those numbers matter for recipients because they push states to prevent overpayments at almost any cost. To reduce future liability, states are demanding more frequent documentation of income, expenses, and work hours. When applications or recertifications don’t get processed on time, recipients are dropped and have to start over.
An asymmetry in the federal error rate accelerates this. Wrongly denying or delaying benefits to an eligible household is not counted as an “error.” Overpaying is. States face financial punishment for being too generous and no comparable penalty for being too restrictive. The CBPP reports that caseload declines of 10 percent or more have occurred in some states partly because eligible households are being swept off the rolls by paperwork they cannot navigate.
How Many People Have Lost Benefits
SNAP participation nationwide dropped by more than 3.5 million people, roughly 9 percent of the program, between July 2025 and February 2026, according to CBPP figures. Once the law is fully implemented, the CBPP projects that 4 million people in a typical month will either lose benefits entirely or see them substantially reduced. The CBO’s more conservative estimate is 2.4 million people in a typical month.
Arizona has seen the sharpest decline, with SNAP participation falling as much as 51 percent in state-level data. Louisiana dropped roughly 20 percent, Tennessee about 16 percent, and Virginia around 15 percent. Illinois’s Department of Human Services estimated that up to 340,000 residents were at risk of losing benefits under the new work rules. In Oregon, nearly 7,000 people lost benefits under the expanded work rules, an average of $287 per month in food assistance per affected case. About 29,000 Oregon households that lost the heating and cooling utility allowance saw their benefits reduced by an average of $58 per month.
Harvard public health policy professor Sara Naomi Bleich told PBS NewsHour that administration claims tying the enrollment declines to a stronger economy and reduced fraud don’t hold up: the economy has not measurably improved since the bill’s passage, and fraud in SNAP is already low, at about 1.6 percent. She characterized the decline as eligible people being forced out by administrative difficulty.
The November 2025 Shutdown Fight Over Benefits
A federal government shutdown that began in October 2025 threatened November benefits for about 42 million people. On October 10, the USDA told state agencies that insufficient funds existed to pay full November SNAP benefits and ordered states to hold back benefit files from their electronic benefit transfer vendors.
A coalition of 25 states, the District of Columbia, and advocacy groups sued. Two federal judges ruled against the pause. Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts found the administration’s plan illegal, ruling that Congress intended SNAP to continue during a funding lapse, and pointed to a roughly $6 billion contingency reserve. Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island granted a temporary restraining order requiring the USDA to make full SNAP payments by November 3, 2025, identifying both the SNAP contingency fund and a separate $23 billion fund under the Agricultural Adjustment Act amendments of 1935 as available sources.
The administration initially issued partial benefits at about half the usual amount, saying the contingency fund’s remaining $4.6 billion could not cover full monthly program costs of $8 billion to $9 billion. It appealed to the Supreme Court to halt the court-ordered full payments. President Trump signed legislation ending the shutdown on the night of November 12, 2025, and the following day the Agriculture Department directed states to move quickly to issue full November allotments. Several states reported delays of days to weeks in restoring full benefits.
The Recipient Data Dispute
Beginning in February 2025, the USDA asked all 50 states for personal information on SNAP recipients, including names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses, and immigration statuses. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the goal was to root out fraud.
Twenty-nine states, mostly Republican-led, turned over the data. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia refused and sued in federal court in California, arguing the demand violated federal privacy protections. In December 2025, the administration threatened to begin withholding administrative funding from noncompliant states. Kansas, which was not part of the lawsuit, also declined and was separately warned its SNAP funding would be cut.
In California v. U.S. Department of Agriculture (N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-06310), Judge Maxine Chesney issued a preliminary injunction on October 15, 2025, blocking the USDA from withholding funds from states that refused to share recipient data. The court found that federal statute requires data disclosures to follow security protocols agreed to by both the state and the Secretary, a step the USDA had not taken. The judge denied the administration’s request to pause the injunction pending appeal. As of June 2026, the injunction remains in effect, and plaintiffs filed a second amended complaint in April 2026.
Using data from the 29 compliant states, the administration said it had identified 186,000 deceased individuals and 500,000 people receiving duplicate benefits, estimating $3 billion in fraud. Secretary Rollins has not shared the methodology or underlying data, according to Agri-Pulse and Civil Eats. Officials in Connecticut and Illinois said they could not verify the numbers because the USDA had not provided the specific data or criteria used. CBPP noted that the analysis does not appear to account for existing verification systems, since states already cross-check records with the Social Security Administration, raising the possibility of substantial false positives. State officials also said some “deceased recipient” figures may reflect the routine administrative lag between a death and state verification, or benefits legitimately issued while a person was still alive. The Congressional Research Service has noted that there is “no single data point that reflects all the forms of fraud in SNAP” and that error rates should not be equated with intentional fraud.
The March 2026 Anti-Fraud Executive Order
On March 16, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, charged with coordinating anti-fraud efforts across federal benefit programs including SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, and cash assistance. Agencies must propose new fraud control measures within 30 days, the task force must coordinate minimum requirements within 60 days, and agencies must submit measurable implementation plans within 90 days.
The order directs the task force to recommend “any ways that federal funds may be withheld from jurisdictions that do not have adequate anti-fraud requirements.” The accompanying White House fact sheet said “nearly 9% of food stamp spending is in error” and pointed to state policies that “avoid individual eligibility validation” and “permit self-certification.” The order followed two earlier March 2025 executive actions aimed at eliminating federal data silos and expanding the Treasury Department’s ability to screen for improper payments.
What the Cuts Are Doing to Food Security
A Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey published in May 2026 found what researchers called a “remarkable increase in food insecurity,” particularly among lower-income and less-educated households and families with young children. Ten percent of families reported missing meals due to lack of food, and nearly 16 percent relied on food donations, worse than the summer of 2020, when 4 percent of households reported missing meals. Among families earning under $50,000 per year, nearly 20 percent reported skipping meals, compared with less than 7 percent in 2020.
SNAP use has also gone up among those who still qualify: 18 percent of surveyed families reported receiving benefits in February 2026, up from 10.6 percent in 2020. Among lower-income families, 38 percent received SNAP, compared with 22 percent six years earlier. The USDA’s own 2024 food insecurity rate was 13.7 percent, the highest since 2001. The department terminated its food insecurity research in September 2025.
Food banks are seeing demand that exceeds pandemic-era levels. California’s food bank network reports serving 6 million people per month. SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal a food bank can deliver.
A peer-reviewed study published in the National Library of Medicine found that benefit reductions were associated with roughly 1,310 additional hospitalizations per 100,000 Medicaid enrollees by the fifth quarter after benefits were cut. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University estimated that the law’s work-requirement provisions could lead to 93,000 premature deaths among recipients under age 65 between 2025 and 2039, based on a CBO projection that 3.2 million people in that age group would lose benefits. The Center for American Progress adjusted the estimate to about 69,600 avoidable deaths by 2040 to account for differences between the House-passed and final versions of the law.
What Could Change With the 2026 Farm Bill
The next legislative moment that could reverse any of this is the 2026 Farm Bill. The House Agriculture Committee advanced the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 on March 5, 2026, though the Food Research and Action Center reports that the bill as written does not reverse the SNAP cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman released the Senate’s version on June 23, 2026, with a committee markup expected after the July 4 break. The Senate bill keeps the cost shift to states. Senate Democrats have said they will oppose the legislation unless it includes at least a two-year delay in that cost shift, and the bill requires 60 votes to pass, so Republican leaders need Democratic support to move it. As of late June 2026, the path forward for the Farm Bill remains uncertain, and SNAP participation continues to fall.