Study: 2.5M Americans lost food aid after passage of GOP megabill
Jacob Fischler
(Stateline) At least 2.5 million low-income people quickly lost help affording groceries under a Republican-passed law that added new requirements for the nation’s largest nutrition program and shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from the federal government to states, according to a study the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published Wednesday.
Some 6% of the 41 million Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, when President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, were no longer receiving benefits by the end of the year.
In Montana, more than 80,000 people were receiving benefits at the close of 2024. A year later, that number had dropped to roughly 73,000, a decline of 8.5%
Arizona was the largest outlier in the data, with a whopping 47% of people in the program — about 424,000 Arizonans — losing benefits in 2025, according to the think tank, which cited more recent state agency data in addition to last year’s USDA numbers.
Full-year 2025 data from the USDA, which operates the federal side of SNAP, shows an even bigger drop of 3.4 million people, or roughly 8% of the program’s total, CBPP said. SNAP is federally funded and administered by states, though that cost-share will change under the law.
In a late Wednesday email, a USDA spokesperson applauded the drop in SNAP participation, noting the program’s rolls had fallen below 40 million for the first time since the pandemic. The spokesperson said the program would continue “to serve those with the greatest need while also strengthening program integrity.”
“This change reflects several factors, including the most comprehensive work requirement reform since 1996, the One Big Beautiful Bill of 2025, as well as USDA initiatives that expand access to employment services, career and technical education, and case‑management support through USDA's More Than a Job campaign,” the spokesperson wrote.
Incentives for states
The study did not intend to find a cause for the decline, co-author Joseph Llobrera, CBPP’s senior director of research for food assistance, said in an interview. But he noted the law created incentives for states to limit participation in the program.
Under a provision of the law that is not yet in force, the share of the program’s cost that states must shoulder is tied to the state’s “error rate” — the ratio of payments that were made to people who shouldn’t have qualified for benefits.
That motivates states to restrict access to the program, without providing a corresponding reward for expanding access, Llobrera said.
“So the incentive structure that’s in place, it really pushes states to make it harder to get onto the program for people who need that assistance,” he said.
The drop in participation happened without improving economic conditions, such as a decline in the unemployment rate, the researchers said.
That indicates people are moving off the rolls due to changes in the program, not because their circumstances have improved to the point they no longer need food assistance, the study said.
Many provisions of the law have not yet gone into effect. The error rate penalties, for example, start in fiscal year 2028.
Design, not a bug
In part, though, that restriction is by design, as the law’s supporters intended to cut SNAP benefits for recipients who met certain criteria and to control what they portrayed as fraud and waste at the state level.
The cuts in the federal share of SNAP funding helped pay for massive tax cuts and a boost to military spending in other parts of the megabill, which Republicans passed without any Democratic support through a process known as budget reconciliation.
The proponents of the agriculture section of the megabill championed provisions to make beneficiaries report their eligibility more often, boost work requirements, disqualify certain categories of legal immigrants, raise the age of children at which parenting would cease to qualify as work and otherwise tighten the availability of the program.
The provisions would help ensure only those who truly needed the federal assistance would get it, advocates said.
It would also create an incentive for states to control erroneous payments, which was not the case when the federal government took on the entire cost of the program before the bill’s enactment.
“It is a disservice to the truly needy to rely on SNAP,” House Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, said as the committee marked up the bill last year. “Clearly, SNAP is not working as Congress intended. We must ensure the proper incentives are in place for states to administer the program more effectively for those it serves.”
Llobrera said he understood the rhetoric in favor of increasing restrictions on the program, but that the center at the time was “raising the alarm that the bill was going to hurt people.”
A spokesperson for Thompson did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.