House Republicans are spending this week finalizing their partisan budget plan, looking for places to cut spending to pay for its massive tax cut bill. Alongside Medicaid, Republicans have made the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) a prime target of their fiscal chain saw. Over 42 million Americans benefit from SNAP, using federally provided funds to buy groceries each year. And after two days of debate, the House Agriculture Committee approved more than $300 billion in cuts to the program over the next 10 years.
That the GOP is even willing to take such a large chunk out of a vital lifeline for millions of Americans is abominable. But the way that they’ve decided to enact these cuts to finance a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires is downright cowardly. By shifting some of the costs of the program to the states, House Republicans are punting the problem, leaving it to cash-strapped governors and state legislators to do the dirty work of kicking people off the program.
The GOP’s solution is as inelegant as it is shameful.
Though Republicans have long eyed major cuts to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, substantial shifts to the program would be a political minefield, particularly as inflation has kept food prices high. It was clear that for the committee to hit its target of $230 billion in reductions to offset the Ways and Means Committee’s tax cuts, it would have to take a hatchet to SNAP.
But the White House has worried about the political “one-two punch” of cuts to SNAP alongside planned cuts to Medicaid. Even Agriculture Committee Chair Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., knew it would be a hard sell to directly cut off millions of people from SNAP, especially given the pushback from some more moderate members of his caucus.
The GOP’s solution is as inelegant as it is shameful. Rather than simply reducing the amount of money allocated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to run SNAP, Republicans instead are enacting a new formula to shunt some of its cost to the states for the first time. At minimum, alongside the administrative costs that states already covered, states would be required to pay at least 5% of the total cost of the SNAP benefits their citizens receive each year. From there, the percentage a state will be on the hook for will rise based on its payment error rates, or the amount it accidentally overpaid or underpaid its beneficiaries. Those with payment errors of 10% or higher will be forced to cover a full 25% of the program’s costs.
Even at the base rate, that will add major costs that states can’t absorb easily — and it isn’t just Democratic-controlled states that would be paying the top rate out of their coffers. The most recent figures from the USDA, which cover fiscal year 2023, show that red states like Alaska, Florida, Missouri and South Carolina would be among those forced to pay a quarter of the total cost for their constituents’ SNAP benefits. Based on an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that would add roughly $3 billion to state budgets in Missouri and South Carolina over the next 10 years and a whopping $15 billion to Florida’s balance sheet.
As the Center for American Progress noted in a recent report, there’s already a system in place to deal with error rates that was working just fine even without the cost sharing factor. The introduction of the new scheme is likely to undo the progress that states have made in improving their SNAP distribution programs. And there’s no provision included in the bill as written to provide a federal stopgap should a state not be able to meet its portion of the program’s costs.
There are other major cuts and policy shifts in play as well. The committee’s bill ups the maximum age for SNAP’s work requirements to apply from 54 to 64 while also significantly raising the threshold for getting a waiver for those requirements.
The clear hope is to reap the benefits of being cost cutters now without having to face the political consequences in a year and a half.
It’s previously been shown that work requirements are not a substantial boost to employment rates. At the same time, the bill also removes a Biden-era provision that allows beneficiaries to factor internet service into their utility costs. It’s hard to find a job without internet access these days, especially as libraries are themselves facing major budget cuts, making the decision seem counterproductive at best.
The Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the GOP plan shows that the bill as written would cut SNAP spending by $300 billion over the next decade — well above and beyond the GOP’s goal. But beneficiaries wouldn’t feel the effects of the bill immediately should it become law. Instead, in a particularly shady move, the new formula wouldn’t come online until fiscal year 2028 — in other words, after the next midterm elections in 2026.
The clear hope is to reap the benefits of being cost cutters now without having to face the political consequences in a year and a half.
Even though the bill has cleared the Agriculture Committee, there’s still a chance that the GOP changes up the details before final passage. Politico reported last week that former governors among the Senate GOP caucus are skeptical of the new cost-sharing schemes for SNAP and Medicaid. The whole package could be derailed at any point by just a handful of Republican legislators, reopening the entire thing for negotiations again.
But even supposedly moderate House Agriculture Committee members have gotten on board with the draconian plan. As of now, this bait-and-switch that will leave states on the hook will be included in Trump’s big, beautiful bill. And the hundreds of thousands of people whose SNAP benefits may be reduced or taken away all together will take little solace that their empty bellies helped feed the wealthiest Americans’ bank accounts.
