Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s latest budget blueprint is out, and it again calls for eviscerating nearly every program that helps families afford the basics, including cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)— shrinking the program by one-third. While the president’s budget is unlikely to become law as is, because it requires approval from Congress, Trump is using another mechanism to take food away from hungry Americans by fiat.
Last month, President Trump released a proposed rule that would dramatically scale back eligibility for SNAP by curtailing states’ flexibility to help jobless or underemployed workers in hard-hit regions. By the administration’s own estimate, the rule would take food assistance away from some 755,000 Americans. While the impact of Trump’s proposed rule would be dire for SNAP recipients, a new CAP analysis lays out how Trump’s proposed cuts would also harm the U.S. economy and eliminate jobs.
The analysis finds that Trump’s proposed SNAP cuts would cost the United States nearly 18,900 jobs in 2020 alone, and more than 178,000 job-years over the next 10 years. Furthermore, because SNAP produces the greatest “bang for the buck”of any major economically responsive spending program—generating as much as $1.74 in economic activity for every $1 of SNAP benefits spent during an economic downturn—Trump’s proposed rule would shrink economic activity by as much as $2.6 billion per year during the next recession.
The authors then applied this analysis to the larger proposed cuts to SNAP in Trump’s latest budget proposal, were it to become law as is, and found that the proposed budget would result in 221,815 jobs lost in 2020 alone, and more than 2.8 million job-years lost over the next decade. Rachel West, one of the authors of the analysis, said:
The harm from Trump’s proposed SNAP rule would extend far past struggling American workers—it would also deal a blow to the U.S. economy. Because SNAP benefits are typically spent quickly and completely, they are one of our nation’s most powerful sources of economic stimulus, creating far more than $1 in economic activity for every $1 spent and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. Trump’s cruel and imprudent SNAP cuts would cost the United States billions of dollars in gross domestic product and more than 178,000 jobs over the next decade.
Click here to read the column: “Trump’s Effort to Cut SNAP by Fiat Would Kill 178,000 Jobs Over the Next Decade” by Rachel West and Rebecca Vallas
For more information or to speak to an expert, contact Julia Cusick at [email protected] or 202-495-3682.