Payments through SNAP, the federal food assistance program, have been delayed during the government shutdown, but program cuts in this summer’s budget bill already put vulnerable families at long-term risk of going hungry.
SNAP cuts of $186 billion over the next decade were part of an overall $1.1 trillion spending cut that partially offset the $4.5 trillion in revenue lost to tax cuts in the . The bill’s overall changes to SNAP, which includes a requirement that some states pay a share of benefit costs for the first time, could lead to more families going hungry.
“There are likely to be more families who are food insecure. Families will be less able to get the right kinds of food or enough food, and that may have repercussions for children, who are a particularly vulnerable group.” — Marianne Bitler, Economics Department Chair, UC Davis
that primarily gives families at or below 130% of the poverty line, just a year for a household of three people, funds to buy food with Electronic Benefits Cards, or EBTs. In 2023, about people received an average of $400 monthly SNAP food assistance benefits. Of households who received SNAP benefits, 34% included children and teens.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" requires states to pay a larger share of SNAP costs. In 2027 this will include, for the first time in the program’s history, a share of the program benefits paid to recipients based on a state’s benefit error rate.
The error rate is the average of overpayments and underpayments for individual SNAP benefits. States with at or above 6% must from 5% to as much as 15%. This graph shows each state’s error rates would have affected their mandatory contributions in 2024.
"States are not exactly rolling in funds, so they can make their systems more efficient and cut error rates,” said Bitler, who is a faculty affiliate of the . “One approach some states may take is to change processes to be more stringent in checking eligibility for groups of people with high error rates, possibly reducing participation."
SNAP funding changed
Research in economics has documented the impacts of SNAP and its predecessor the which began in 1939. While many studies have confirmed that it does reduce food insecurity, as the program is intended to do, it also and drives that continue later in life.
The program also increases lifetime earnings. In a recent , Bitler reports that women born in counties with the SNAP predecessor Food Stamp Program available in early life had 3% higher earnings, roughly $800 annually in 2019 dollars, at age 32.
In addition to direct program cuts, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added work requirements that the Congressional Budget Office estimated could mean people qualifying for SNAP each month.
A estimated that after "big beautiful bill" SNAP cuts, states will reduce or eliminate SNAP benefits for about 300,000 people each month. It also estimated that subsidies provided through child nutrition programs will decrease monthly for about 96,000 children.
Cuts to SNAP could also affect grocers and other stores that accept EBT because the benefits can’t be used to buy anything other than food. The total monetary value of benefits paid through SNAP, which was $93.6 billion in 2024, go directly to food retailers.
Bitler’s research shows that SNAP funds drive both retail sales and jobs. In a , Bitler and her co-authors summarized their findings which showed SNAP adoption increased retail sales by as much as 1.6 percentage points. SNAP adoption also increased real payrolls by 4.2% for both food stores and grocery stores.
Media Resources
Media contact:
- Alex Russell, College of Letters and Science, parussell@ucdavis.edu
- Karen Nikos-Rose, News and Media Relations, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu