Last year, Congress passed a sweeping budget reconciliation bill that included the largest cuts to federal nutrition assistance in history. The bill cut SNAP by nearly $200 billion over the next ten years, gutting America’s most effective nutrition program and our nation’s frontline defense against hunger for the last six decades.
Here are five things worth understanding right now, and where the headlines don’t always tell the full story.
Fewer people are on SNAP, but not because they’re less hungry.
In the six months after Congress cut SNAP, more than 3.5 million fewer people were enrolled in the program. When enrollment drops like that, it can be tempting to read it as a sign that fewer families are struggling. It isn’t.
Those losses aren’t happening because fewer people are hungry. They’re happening because people are being cut from the program. New time limits are kicking in, eligibility requirements are growing even stricter and the state agencies that process applications are stretched too thin to keep up. And as more provisions from last year’s bill take effect, even more people are expected to lose their SNAP benefits.
So, in this case, fewer people on SNAP doesn’t mean fewer people need help. When participation drops due to barriers instead of economic stability, it signals a problem, not progress.
SNAP eligibility rules are stricter than people realize.
Even before Congress made it even harder for families to access SNAP, the program already had strict eligibility rules to participate. Households must meet stringent income requirements, regularly verify their eligibility and navigate extensive paperwork to receive benefits.
In most cases, households must have income at or below roughly 130% of the federal poverty line to qualify, along with limits on assets and other resources. For a family of three, that’s roughly $34,656 a year.
Even the limited tools states have to reduce red tape and make SNAP more accessible for eligible families are coming under attack. One example is a policy called Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility (BBCE), which gives states some flexibility to prevent families from losing food assistance the moment they earn a little more money or save a modest emergency fund. Without it, a small raise or a few extra work hours could push a household over an outdated asset or income threshold, even though that family is still struggling to afford food, rent and other essentials.
Importantly, BBCE does not eliminate income limits. Families must still fall within strict financial guidelines to qualify for SNAP. What the policy changes is how states account for the realities of modern life, including shifting work schedules, rising housing costs and the need for modest savings to avoid financial crisis.
That matters because SNAP benefits don’t always phase out gradually. In some cases, a modest increase in earnings can trigger a sharp reduction in assistance, leaving households with fewer overall resources despite earning more income. This dynamic, often called a “benefits cliff,” can make financial stability harder to reach. Policies like BBCE are designed to soften those cliffs so families can increase their income without immediately losing access to food assistance.
Most people on SNAP who can work already do.
84% of SNAP households had at least one working member in the past year. So why do work requirements keep coming up as if they’re needed to incentivize employment?
A stable job can absolutely be a pathway out of poverty, and work requirements sound like they’re designed to get people there. To help them find work and keep it. In reality, they don’t help people increase their employment opportunities, but function as a set of rigid documentation rules. SNAP participants have to regularly prove they’re working, looking for work or are exempt, which sounds straightforward. But for many people doing their best to comply, it’s not that simple.
Confusing processes, outdated systems and unintentional errors can all mean losing grocery benefits. Workers with variable hours or seasonal jobs can fall short of required thresholds in any given month, even when they’re doing everything they can to stay employed. Lose a shift, have hours cut, or miss a reporting deadline, and you could lose access to food assistance.
And all of this exists alongside the realities many families are already managing: unstable housing, lack of affordable childcare, limited transportation and jobs without paid sick or family leave. These challenges are even more acute in rural communities, where jobs are harder to find and transportation options are limited.
SNAP supports millions of working families. It also helps children eat, helps older adults on fixed incomes afford groceries and helps people with disabilities meet their basic needs.
When people lose benefits under these rules, it’s usually because the system doesn’t make progress possible.
Errors are about complexity, not misuse.
In SNAP, an “error rate” measures whether a benefit was calculated correctly. It includes both overpayments and underpayments, and most errors come down to timing, paperwork, administrative complexity or human errors.
Even small changes in income, hours or household circumstances can affect benefit levels. When those changes aren’t processed at exactly the right time or in exactly the right way, payments can end up slightly too high or too low.
That’s because SNAP is designed to adjust to people’s real lives, from changing work schedules and fluctuating income to shifting household needs. But administering a program that adjusts in real-time requires staffing, technology and administrative capacity that states just don’t have.
And recent SNAP policy changes are adding even more complexity. Expanded work reporting requirements, fewer exemptions and stricter eligibility rules all increase the number of steps needed to determine and maintain benefits.
As states continue to operate with limited resources, many are unable to invest in the staffing and technology upgrades needed to improve accuracy and efficiency. That increases the likelihood of errors. Those errors matter because error rates aren’t just a technical metric. Under the current policy changes, they have financial consequences for states, shaping how much they’re required to contribute to the cost of running the program.
So the same changes that make the system harder to administer also increase the likelihood of errors, which increases the cost for states to run the program, reinforcing a perpetual cycle of underinvestment and strain.
Cuts to SNAP leave families even more vulnerable to organized criminals.
For years, lack of investment in modernizing EBT systems, the electronic payment network used for SNAP, has enabled criminal networks to steal SNAP benefits from families by attaching skimming devices on payment terminals to capture card data. They clone and drain accounts, sometimes within hours or minutes of benefits being deposited and before families have even had a chance to use them.
This “SNAP skimming” is made possible by outdated infrastructure. Most SNAP EBT cards still rely on magnetic stripe technology, which is a lot easier to skim and replicate than more modern chip or tap-enabled systems.
In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in SNAP benefits have been stolen through these types of schemes. But the full scale of the problem is difficult to measure because federal reimbursement protections for stolen benefits expired in 2024, leaving many families without a way to recover their losses.
At the same time, the recent SNAP policy changes have shifted more administrative and financial responsibility to states, making it even harder for them to prioritize system upgrades alongside basic program operations.
This is where the conversation about “fraud” often becomes distorted. While fraud is frequently used as a justification for tightening SNAP eligibility or reducing program spending, some of the most consequential losses in the system are coming from external theft that’s both preventable and under-addressed. If anything, this is a case where stronger infrastructure and investment, not weaker access, would better protect both public dollars and the families who participate in SNAP.
