On May 22, House Republicans passed their tax and budget bill, which would enact the largest cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history, and sent the package to the Senate. About $286 billion would be gutted from the program, representing a nearly 30 percent cut. Policies in the proposal that would take the most away from hungry families include offloading a portion of benefit costs to states, blocking future increases to SNAP benefits, and expanding burdensome paperwork requirements to families with children and older Americans, which would kick millions off essential food assistance.
In addition to these changes is a provision that would make it nearly impossible for states to receive waivers from these burdensome paperwork requirements, even during the worst economic downturns. This would increase the costs of administering the SNAP program. Additionally, administrative costs would rise due to a provision that increases the share of expenses states pay from 50 percent to 75 percent. Restricting state flexibility while increasing the cost to administer the program would result in states paying more in program costs to serve fewer people.
New analysis from the Center for American Progress finds that in the months during and after the past three recessions of the 21st century, no more than 42.1 percent of counties would have been eligible for a waiver under the House Republican proposal. This means hungry families that recently lost a job or cannot find enough work to meet the minimum threshold of 80 hours per month would be kicked off of SNAP. At the same time, states would have to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in additional administrative funds per year just to keep their programs functioning, which could lead to cuts in times of tight budgets, such as during recessions.
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Restrictions in state flexibility would force SNAP cuts when there are no job prospects
Estimates suggest that 5.4 million people in 2.7 million households would lose more than $3,000 per year in SNAP benefits, on average, under the House Republican plan through expansions to the program’s paperwork requirement, which imposes a three-month time limit on benefits in a three-year period unless recipients demonstrate compliance. The House Republican plan would, for the first time, include parents with children as young as 7 along with older Americans ages 55 to 64. It would also include people living in areas without enough jobs, as one of the most devastating changes included in the plan would make it nearly impossible for states to receive waivers from these expanded paperwork requirements to account for poor labor market conditions.
Estimates suggest that 5.4 million people in 2.7 million households would lose more than $3,000 per year in SNAP benefits, on average, under the House Republican plan.
Currently, states and counties or county equivalents can receive waivers for meeting one of two criteria. The first is by having an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent. The second is by demonstrating a lack of sufficient jobs, which can be done in multiple ways, such as by having an unemployment rate at least 20 percent higher than the national average or by having high enough unemployment to qualify for additional weeks of extended benefits under the unemployment insurance system.
The House Republican plan would eliminate this second criteria entirely and only allow waivers for individual counties instead of entire states. It would also reduce the number of discretionary exemptions states can use to temporarily exempt SNAP participants from the time limit when they are struggling to find work or submit necessary paperwork—from 8 percent of individuals subject to the requirement down to 1 percent.
Participants usually cannot meet the paperwork requirement through job search alone, so people actively trying to find work are still at risk of losing benefits.
These changes would drastically reduce state flexibility to respond to rising unemployment or decreasing job availability. Only 10 counties would currently be eligible for waivers, excluding notable struggling labor markets such as the greater Washington, D.C., region, which has experienced rising unemployment accelerated by the Trump administration’s federal workforce reductions. This means people who recently lost a job could be kicked off of SNAP because their county does not meet the extremely high bar of exceeding 10 percent unemployment needed to get a waiver. Importantly, participants usually cannot meet the paperwork requirement through job search alone, so people actively trying to find work are still at risk of losing benefits. This is particularly dangerous during recessions. (see Figure 1)
To download county-level 12-month and three-month peak unemployment rates, click here.
Surpassing 10 percent unemployment can be rare even during severe economic downturns. When looking back at the spikes in unemployment in the months during and after the 2001 recession, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 recession, only 4.5, 42.1, and 10.7 percent of counties would have been eligible for a “readily approvable” waiver, respectively. This would entail taking the path of least resistance by submitting data in a waiver request that demonstrate an average 12-month unemployment rate of more than 10 percent, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture has historically approved. Counties could try to support their case by instead providing data for an average three-month unemployment rate of more than 10 percent, but this does not enjoy the same preferential status. Barely more than half of all counties would ever meet the required threshold using the three-month average, at 10.6 percent after the 2001 recession, 54.8 percent after the Great Recession, and 52.7 percent for the COVID-19 recession.
County SNAP time-limit waiver eligibility during economic downturns
4.5%
of counties during and after the 2001 recession would have been eligible for a readily approvable SNAP time-limit waiver under the House Republican proposal
42.1%
of counties during and after the Great Recession of 2007–2009 would have been eligible for a readily approvable SNAP time-limit waiver under the House Republican proposal
10.7%
of counties during and after the COVID-19 pandemic recession of 2020 would have been eligible for a readily approvable SNAP time-limit waiver under the House Republican proposal
It should be noted that ineligible counties often do not have substantially lower unemployment rates than eligible ones. For instance, after the Great Recession, more than 850 counties—27 percent of all counties—had a peak 12-month average unemployment rate ranging from 8 to 10 percent. These parts of the country still experienced severe economic hardship but did not exceed the 10 percent threshold. Throughout the past three recessions, counties in every state experiencing high unemployment would not have been given the flexibility they needed to ensure SNAP recipients were not kicked off their benefits for not finding enough work in a labor market with no jobs. (see Table 1)
Time-limit waivers protect states and SNAP recipients during recessions
In response to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 recession, the federal government passed legislation that suspended the SNAP time limit nationwide. In the case of the Great Recession, however, the suspension ended in 2010 when national unemployment was still above 9 percent. Fortunately, about 90 percent of counties remained eligible for waivers from the time limit since they qualified for extended unemployment benefits, a link that would be cut under the House Republican proposal since it falls under the category of evidence used to claim a lack of sufficient jobs.
States would struggle to recover from downturns without the full strength of SNAP to combat poverty and food insecurity. As unemployment rises, people who are out of work remain unemployed for longer periods, meaning families are more likely to burn through their savings and need help to put food on the table. People who rely on SNAP are often more likely to face systemic labor market challenges that are only exacerbated during recessions—such as higher unemployment rates among those without college degrees. Taking food away during times of crisis when people need it the most is not going to increase employment. In fact, access to SNAP is what helps states recover more quickly from recessions by injecting money into the economy and supporting jobs.
Increasing state administrative costs means poorer service for families in need
State budgets would be significantly strained if they were forced to implement and pay for burdensome and expensive-to-administer paperwork requirements following the House Agriculture Committee proposal. Prior research demonstrates that paperwork requirements cost tens of millions of dollars for states to administer and that decreasing administrative burdens by streamlining eligibility actually cuts down on administrative costs. Moreover, these increased costs would coincide with states shouldering a larger percentage of administrative costs. Already, states fund about half of the cost to administer the program, but under the new proposal, their share would increase to 75 percent.
As Table 2 shows, states would have been on the hook for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in additional administrative funding under the proposal had it been in effect during fiscal year 2023. In total, states would have had to come up with an additional $2.5 billion combined just for one year, disproportionately affecting states with higher administrative costs per case per month. Notably, these are conservative estimates, as they do not account for the implementation of costly paperwork requirements.
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Conclusion
SNAP is an excellent tool to combat recessions, but the House Republican plan weakens the program’s ability to respond to economic downturns and limits states’ flexibility to provide food assistance to those in need. Burdensome paperwork requirements, alongside an increase in state administrative spending, would greatly increase the cost for states to administer SNAP while decreasing the number of families the program serves. The Senate should not take this package up for consideration.
The authors would like to thank Emily Gee, Colin Seeberger, Madeline Shepherd, Sachin Shiva, Mimla Wardak, Aurelia Glass, Bianca Serbin, Anh Nguyen, Beatrice Aronson, and Steve Bonitatibus for their valuable review and assistance.