The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, provides money for low-income families to spend on food.
It’s one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the country, covering about 42 million people.
President Donald Trump’s "Big Beautiful Bill" makes the largest-ever cut to SNAP, which is expected to leave millions with reduced benefits or none at all.
Dr. Hilary Seligman is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
She spoke with KAXE reporter Megan Buffington this week to help explain the impact the cuts will have.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I've seen with a lot of the Medicaid [cuts] discussion that there's going to be an outsized impact on rural communities. Is the same true for SNAP?
The same is true for SNAP. One of the things that is important about SNAP is that about 97% of all the money that's put into people’s SNAP benefits gets spent in local communities within a month, and this is a really important driver of local economic activity, which is especially important in rural communities.
People are spending that money in local grocery stores. That supports the cashiers in the grocery store, the agricultural workers, the truck drivers that bring the food into the grocery stores. So, there's a big local economic hit when SNAP benefits get reduced.
What will the impact of these cuts be to Indigenous communities?
Impacts in Indigenous communities, I expect, might be important for two reasons. No. 1 is, rates of food insecurity are extremely high in Indigenous communities, and SNAP is one of the most effective things that the United States has for reducing food insecurity rates. People enrolled in SNAP are likely to have a reduction in their food insecurity of up to 30%, which is an enormous amount of improvement.
The second is that Indigenous communities are at very high risk for obesity, diabetes and complications of diabetes, like high blood pressure and heart disease. And we know that when people are enrolled in SNAP, they are likely to eat a healthier diet, and a healthier diet helps protect people from these diseases. And so, there's a really important potential impact on chronic diseases in Indigenous communities, and in all communities as well.
The University of Minnesota Extension announced it would be laying off 60 county SNAP educators throughout the state who lead programming on healthy eating, healthy lifestyles. Can you speak to that education element of SNAP that will be going away?
Yes, across the country for a long time, the educators that you're referring to have been paid through something called the SNAP-Ed program, and the current iteration of the bill includes complete elimination of the SNAP-Ed program. And so, it's not surprising that there's going to be job reductions here.
Many of the barriers to healthy dietary intake in the United States are related to a lack of affordable, healthy food options, and some of the barriers are related to education, and so it's really important that we have people in the community who can support our families and understanding what foods to purchase with their individual health needs.
You mentioned the economic ripple of these cuts. Can you elaborate on what that could look like?
We estimate that every $1 in SNAP benefits generates more than $1.50 in local economic activity, and this is money that's going to your local grocery store, that's going to the truck drivers and the farm workers in your community, to the cashiers. So, we do expect that with reductions in SNAP benefit levels, it is going to take an impact on local economic activity, and it's likely the food system and your grocery stores in your community where you might see that impact. This is important in rural communities because rural communities are already struggling, in some cases, to make sure that there's access to healthy foods available in a reasonable distance.
What types of people and communities are going to be hardest hit by these cuts?
One of the things that these SNAP cuts do is increase work requirements, and that means that there's going to be a lot of paperwork required to prove that you're eligible for SNAP benefits because you are working a certain number of hours per month.
For many people who are working in the informal economy, collecting this paperwork is going to be difficult. If you spend your time taking care of an older adult or a disabled person, it might be difficult to prove those as working hours. If you spend your time working in informal economies, supporting your local community again, it may be more difficult to prove those work hours, and that's going to make it more difficult for people to access their benefits.
One of the things we’ve heard, especially from county governments, is the cuts will create additional administrative burdens. Can you speak a bit more to what that might look like?
Historically, the federal government has covered the entire cost of the SNAP benefit and about half of the cost of the administration of that SNAP benefit. And with this new system, a lot of those costs are going to be shifted onto the state. But the states also, in this moment, are facing difficult budget decisions. And it's anticipated that the states are not going to be able to pick up all of the costs that the federal government is stepping out of. And that's going to leave people without the benefits that they have come to rely on. So in the long term, the losers are probably going to be the people who are receiving SNAP who are no longer going to be able to make ends meet.
Can you talk about the tie between SNAP and Medicaid cuts?
Both SNAP and Medicaid really support our lowest-income households in the United States with getting access to the food and the health care they need. As a matter of fact, the majority of SNAP beneficiaries are already enrolled in Medicaid, and so the cuts to SNAP are hitting households at the exact same time as the cuts to Medicaid, which just puts even more pressure on the household budget.
We know that when people lose access to SNAP benefits, they are less likely to be healthy, and now we're also saying to those families, "At the same time that you're less likely to be healthy, you're going to have less access to health care." And we're really worried that this is going to have a really challenging impact on the health of people living in low-income households. Because not only can they not afford the food they need to be healthy, but also when they do get sick, they're going to have reduced access to health care.
What resources are out there to backfill these cuts?
Traditionally, we've had a very robust charitable food system, the system of food banks and food pantries, and local communities that helped to catch people who were falling between the cracks, who for one reason or another, couldn't enroll in the SNAP benefits that they were entitled to. One of the things that we're seeing right now is that that program, that system, is also under a ton of strain, and there have been massive budget reductions for food banks and food pantries as well.
So, we're seeing this triple loss of food banks and food pantries, SNAP and access to Medicaid. So, what this means is it's going to be some really, really difficult years for our low-income households, and this might have generational impacts on children's ability to maintain their health, to develop in the way that they need to develop in order to become healthy working adults.
What is your pitch to those who might not be directly impacted by these cuts? Why should they care?
When people don't have the healthy food that they need to eat, they are less likely to show up in peak condition to be a good student at school, to be a good worker in the workplace, and this affects all of us.
If we want our local communities to thrive, we need everybody in them to be working at their best. And that means access to healthy food people need and not having to spend a lot of their time every month worrying about where their next meal is going to come from. We know from decades’ worth of research that healthy food access makes the United States stronger and healthier, and these cuts really threaten the capacity of the U.S. to get healthy food to all the people who need it.
