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Republicans have embarked on an ambitious reform of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.
The reform, enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump in July and being implemented by the Agriculture Department, marks one of the most significant conservative welfare reform efforts in recent history.
Republicans contend that an overhaul is overdue. They say the program has grown far beyond what is warranted, starting in the Obama years, and that it provides benefits now akin to welfare payments rather than actual food assistance. Furthermore, they say that the health paradigm has morphed from hunger and malnourishment being the top concern to now obesity being the problem. They hope to see SNAP revert to functioning as a social safety net.
Democrats, on the other hand, decry the planned spending cuts as a wrongheaded move that will push more people into food insecurity, all to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy included in the OBBBA.
The SNAP was designed to address serious problems of malnutrition and food insecurity at a time when large numbers of people were experiencing hunger. Over the years, it has evolved into a program that provides funds that are used by some 41 million people to purchase food at grocery and convenience stores.
Just under 42 million people in the United States received SNAP benefits last year, about 12% of the population. In fiscal 2024, those food stamp benefits averaged $187.20 per participant per month. That marks a massive increase from two decades ago, before the Great Recession.
Spending and growth trajectory
The basic criticism of the food stamp program from conservatives is that the economy has improved, but spending is still at a level that would be expected if it were a recession.
For example, in 2024, SNAP spending totaled nearly $100 billion. In 2010, by comparison, spending through the program was an inflation-adjusted $93 billion, for just over 40 million beneficiaries.
But the U.S. was just emerging from a historic financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression in 2010, whereas 2024 was a period of near-full employment. As many as 15 million people were unemployed in 2010, versus a maximum of 7.1 million in 2024.
In other words, the size of the program has nearly doubled from the years before the Great Recession, out of proportion to population growth.
Conservatives argue that liberalization of the program under Democratic presidents has made it less responsive to broader economic conditions and more of a permanent welfare program than a safety net.
History of the program and its growth
The program started out modestly. The earliest iteration of food stamps began in 1939, and Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace was among those credited with its creation.
In the early years of the program, low-income people purchased food stamps. For each $1 orange stamp they purchased, they received a blue stamp worth 50 cents. The orange stamps could be used to purchase any foods, but the blue stamps could only be used for foods the USDA said were in surplus.
The program ended in 1943 as the war drew to an end, and there were fewer surpluses. But on the campaign trail in 1960, during which he famously visited impoverished areas of Appalachia, President John F. Kennedy vowed to kickstart a food stamps program. He later created a food stamp pilot program via executive order. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law a permanent food stamp program. There was still a requirement to purchase food stamps under that iteration, but the Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated it.
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, represents the most significant domestic policy achievement won by conservatives, effectively ending the cash welfare system. It shifted the federal safety net toward in-kind benefits, such as healthcare, housing, and food.
The law gave states greater administrative control over SNAP and limited eligibility for able-bodied adults without dependents. It also did away with the physical food stamps or coupons and implemented the electronic benefit transfer system, which was used in every state by 2002.
Then the Great Recession struck. The food stamp program responded the way it is supposed to, by growing to help people who had lost their jobs or income.
But it is what happened in the years afterward that drew scrutiny from conservatives. Even as economic output and employment recovered, the rolls stayed near the swollen recession levels.
“Work requirements were suspended, benefit amounts were increased — that kind of pumped up enrollment,” Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative group that advocates welfare reform, told the Washington Examiner.
And again, benefits were expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, amid the pandemic and under then-President Joe Biden, the USDA revised the Thrifty Food Plan, which is the government’s benchmark for what constitutes an adequate diet at the lowest cost. That revision found that a cost-effective diet was 21% more costly than previously assessed, so SNAP benefits experienced a big boost.
Others disagree. G. William Hoagland is a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and was the administrator of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service in the 1980s. He told the Washington Examiner that the expansion came more so because of the recession rather than actual policy changes.
“The most important factor in estimating the growth of participation was the economy,” Hoagland said.
Likewise, Kyle Ross, economic policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said the SNAP has proven to be an “economic stabilizer.”
“It’s really good in responding to recessions,” he said.
The GOP reforms
Altogether, the OBBBA will cut SNAP spending by $187 billion over the next 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Some of those savings would come from provisions leaning on states to cut down on any waste.
Another provision in the OBBBA would revise the calculation of the Thrifty Food Plan and prevent it from adding to program costs in the years ahead.
But the biggest savings would come from tighter work requirements. Republicans argue they need to be strengthened to prevent abuse, but Democrats say the rules will only save money by creating red tape that leads needy people to drop off the rolls.
The SNAP had work requirements before the legislation. Those were first imposed in 1996 on what officials call ABAWDs: able-bodied adults without dependents.
Prior to the 2025 changes, those “capable” and aged 18-54 without dependents had to meet a 20-hour-per-week work requirement, unless they lived in an area in a state that has a waiver.
The GOP bill expanded the upper age threshold for ABAWDs from 54 to 64. Now, people in that cohort will have to either work, volunteer, or participate in training for at least 80 hours per month to receive food stamps.
The bill imposed new work requirements on those who have a dependent over 14. The idea there is that at age 14, dependents would be able to be home alone.
An aide on the House Agriculture Committee also told the Washington Examiner that it is healthy for children to see their guardian working.
“What we’ve seen is a lot of studies have come out, and just the general conservative thought, is that it’s really best for kids who are growing up in poverty to have a parent or guardian who is employed,” the aide said. “That’s actually the key to their long-term success and ability to get out of the situations that they’re in and have some upward mobility.”
Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, which conducts oversight over the SNAP.
Thompson told the Washington Examiner that the OBBBA changes, combined with the push to root out fraud and error rates by the USDA, represent a “reset” and are “appropriate” for the program.
But critics of the changes say it is simply a way to kick people out of the SNAP, and in turn, cut federal spending.
Ross said the age limit increases were “pretty arbitrary.”
“These ages don’t mean anything really, the goal here is explicitly to reduce SNAP enrollment by just kicking people off their benefits,” Ross told the Washington Examiner.
Critics also argue that beneficiaries could struggle to demonstrate that they are working, volunteering, or training, or otherwise not subject to the rules. Many, they say, who should be getting benefits will be cut off because of the compliance costs.
“It’s extremely difficult to demonstrate consistent compliance with these rules,” Ross said. “And if you’re not able to consistently demonstrate compliance with, like, bringing up the sufficient paperwork to your agency, it gets counted against you.”
He argues that these reforms were rather done to offset some of the costs of the tax cuts in the GOP legislation.
The spending reductions could become a political liability for the GOP. While 12% of the U.S. receives some SNAP benefits, some key swing states that are important for both Republicans and Democrats have larger shares of beneficiaries. For instance, 15% of the Michigan population receives SNAP benefits. The corresponding shares are 13% in Georgia, 13% in North Carolina, 15% in Pennsylvania, and 15% in Nevada.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA), a member of the Agriculture Committee that oversees the SNAP, is in a fairly competitive district. He said the goal should be to make sure that people who need SNAP benefits actually receive them. He praised the idea of work requirements.
“I think that’s an important thing that we stand for, work ethic,” he told the Washington Examiner. “That if somebody’s capable of working, we should encourage that.”
Phil Kerpen, a principal at free-market group Unleash Prosperity, said that the reason the OBBBA focused on work requirements is that it is politically an easier lift than other changes. He said work requirements usually poll very well.
“Let’s say we were just cutting the benefit amount, or something like that — that’s very hard to sell politically,” Kerpen told the Washington Examiner. “If you’ve got a lot of people that are on a program that gets very, very challenging.”
Malnutrition to obesity?
Another conservative critique of the program is that it has strayed from its original mission of alleviating hunger. While SNAP spending has doubled in the past 20 years, obesity rates have spiked. That has caused more people to question how to align the program to better address that policy reality.
Douglas Besharov, a professor at the University of Maryland and an expert in welfare reform and social policy, told the Washington Examiner that SNAP has evolved over time. While in past decades the program focused on helping nutritional deficiencies, malnutrition today is vanishingly rare, but obesity has become a major concern.
“As we entered World War II, after a decade of depression … what policymakers saw was, and what the military saw was, a generation of a high level of malnutrition, so much malnutrition that many of the young men who were drafted weren’t fit to serve,” Besharov said.
But as the program evolved, he said, some advocates continued to push the line that without SNAP support, people would starve, when in reality, it functions more as an income-support program. He said that since the 1960s, malnutrition has all but disappeared.
A study found that the prevalence of underweight people in the U.S. was more than cut in half from the early 1960s to the early 2000s, down to about 1.8% of adults.
Still, the Food Research and Action Center found in 2023 that just over 5% of U.S. households experienced very low food security, meaning that meals are skipped or food intake is reduced because of cost.
But one question is why obesity has become an issue even among some of those who rely on food stamps for support. Besharov said there are myriad hypotheses, including that the quality of food being consumed has declined.
He said that food benefits such as food stamps, school lunch, and school breakfast, taken together, add up to more calories than necessary, which might be contributing to obesity problems.
Also, today, beneficiaries can spend food stamps on essentially anything at the grocery store — soda, chocolate, chips — as long as it is not alcohol or tobacco and does not come from a hot or cold food bar.
“So you can imagine, every grocery store has more than 20,000 UPCs — and so you have your highly-processed foods, you have your perimeter that is more of your whole healthy foods — but all of it is subject to purchase by a SNAP household,” Jen Tiller, senior adviser to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, told the Washington Examiner.
Given concerns about health and obesity, several states have entered into pilot programs designed to restrict SNAP recipients from purchasing certain unhealthy food items such as sweetened beverages, prepared desserts, or other junk food.
Tiller said that in addition to the dozen states engaging in the pilot program, a handful of other states have expressed interest in pursuing the idea. She said both red and blue states have applied for and been approved, and those first waivers will be implemented on Jan. 1, 2026.
“So it’s becoming very much bipartisan,” Tiller said.
Proponents of the push see it as another plank in the Make America Healthy Again agenda. Led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the MAHA movement focuses on nutritional and environmental factors that contribute to chronic conditions, such as obesity. The MAGA faction has crusaded to remove artificial ingredients from mass-produced food and to curb consumption of unhealthful snacks and sweets.
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Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that what food items are being restricted varies depending on the state’s pilot program, but that the goal is essentially the same.
“Some of the states are a little bit different on what they’re restricting, but I believe sweetened beverages is one of the more common ones, and then I think a couple states are also doing candy, for example,” Rachidi told the Washington Examiner.
