In the first seven months after Congress passed the biggest cuts in the history of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program last summer, the number of people in the U.S. receiving food assistance through the program fell by more than 3.5 million.
That decline, which I and my colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated from new Agriculture Department data, is the fastest drop in almost 30 years. And this growing crisis could easily worsen, as next year the same bill will shift a portion of SNAP’s costs to the states and encourage further cuts. At minimum, Congress should delay this new burden on state budgets, which is already hurting families struggling with hunger and lack of food and driving deep SNAP cuts.
The law dramatically expanded SNAP’s already harsh work requirements.
Usually, a widespread decline in SNAP participation signifies improvements in people’s economic well-being, less need for help affording food, or both. But neither explanation accounts for the recent dramatic drop. The national unemployment rate has been flat since last July, and the share of people experiencing “food insecurity,” meaning that they experienced difficulty affording enough food, remained high in 2025, according to estimates from the Urban Institute.
The most likely reason, instead, is the early impact of the massive Big Beautiful Bill enacted through the reconciliation process last July with only Republican votes, which severely restricts SNAP eligibility and pushes large new costs onto states. The new law’s SNAP cuts, plus its even bigger cuts in health coverage, were meant to partially finance trillions of dollars in tax cuts, which are tilted to the wealthiest households, and additional funding for the Trump administration’s immigration deportation and detention campaign.
The cuts in the new law will affect everyone who receives basic food assistance through SNAP, currently more than 37 million people. The law dramatically expanded SNAP’s already harsh work requirements to apply to adults as old as 64, parents of teenage children, veterans, people experiencing homelessness and former foster youth. All of these people now risk losing their food assistance if they can’t show that they are working at least 20 hours per week or qualify for an exemption. These paperwork requirements can lead to people losing SNAP benefits even when they should be found eligible.
And starting in October 2027, the new law will require most states, for the first time in program history, to begin paying up to 15% of SNAP benefit costs. In many states this change will mean hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs every year.
The amount a state must pay will be based on its “payment error rate.” The rate measures the extent to which states give families too much or too little in SNAP benefits based on program rules and the household’s specific circumstances. Those errors mostly result from unintentional mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers or computer programmers, but no matter: The “cost shift” gives states an enormous incentive to slash their payment error rates and cut program costs even if this means delaying or improperly denying benefits to eligible people, which is not counted as a “payment error.”
Congress gave most states virtually no time to avoid the enormous new costs.
In anticipation of the cost shift, many states already made changes that could make SNAP less accessible to eligible people. For example, Illinois and Georgia now require most households to recertify their SNAP eligibility twice as often, increasing the chance they lose benefits because they can’t navigate the added red tape. In Arizona, the state imposed more paperwork requirements and slashed staff. The result was bigger backlogs that left people waiting without benefits for months and eligible families losing SNAP when they couldn’t get through on overloaded phone lines.
Congress gave most states virtually no time to avoid the enormous new costs. In the first year, the percentage of benefits that each state must pay will be based on its payment error rate for either fiscal year 2025, which ended on Sept. 30, or fiscal year 2026, meaning states have only a few more months to reduce their payment error rates.
This change may be a large part of the reason why SNAP participation has already fallen in every state since July 2025, often by alarming amounts. In more than a dozen states, participation has fallen by more than 10%. In Arizona, participation has dropped by more than half, and almost 200,000 fewer Arizona children are getting the food assistance they need.
Big declines have occurred in red states and blue states, large ones and small ones, and in every region of the country: 450,000 people in Florida, 234,000 in Illinois, nearly 60,000 in Nevada and 112,000 in Virginia, to name just a few.
Why are these declines so troubling? SNAP is our nation’s most effective tool to combat hunger and food insecurity. By providing assistance that averages just $6.17 per person per day, SNAP reduces food insecurity by as much as 30% and is even more effective among children.
SNAP serves families in particular need of assistance. About 9 in 10 participants are in households that include a child under age 18, a person 60 years or older or a person with a disability. About 73% of SNAP households have incomes at or below the poverty line, and 35% have incomes at or below half the poverty line. Millions of workers in low-paying jobs use SNAP to help afford the high cost of groceries. SNAP also has long-term payoffs: Child beneficiaries do better in school, and those with access to SNAP early in life have better long-term health and economic outcomes.
Congress needs to act now to address this unfolding crisis. The new law gave a few states with the highest payment error rates up to two more years before facing the SNAP cost shift. Ideally, Congress should repeal the cost shift altogether, but at a minimum, it should extend this two-year delay to all states, giving them time to improve payment accuracy while preserving the help that low-income households need to afford groceries. In the long run, policymakers must stop attacking an essential program that helps millions of people in the U.S. get enough to eat each day.
Joseph Llobrera is the senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,