Trump administration turned away 13% of Americans enrolled in food stamps | Trump administration

Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) has declined significantly over the past year in the United States following restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which forced more people to seek help from food banks or go hungry, according to stakeholders.

The number of people on food stamps fell from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% decline, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

While Donald Trump and other Republicans have said the changes encourage people to find jobs, elected officials, nonprofit leaders and food-insecure people say the changes simply make it harder for Americans to feed their families.

“There’s always going to be a percentage of our communities that we have to help — we have to accept that — and so once we accept that, it’s easy to move forward and do the right thing, which is provide resources to people who need them,” said Rhona Kamar, founder and executive director of Feed Louisville, a nonprofit that aims to reduce hunger and food waste.

The Trump administration’s changes to Snap will reduce spending by about $187 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office has projected.

Previously, only able-bodied people aged 18 to 54 who had no dependents under the age of 18 had to fulfill the requirement to work a minimum of 20 hours per week or only receive benefits for a maximum of three months over three years.

Under Trump, the rules now state that people ages 18 to 64 who do not have a dependent under the age of 14 must perform paid or volunteer work for at least 20 hours per week.

The One Big Beautiful Act also stipulated that starting in October, states had to cover 75% of Snap’s administrative costs, up from half before.

The changes affected some states more than others. In Arizona, the number of people signed up for Snap fell by 50% between July 2025 and June 2026; Kentucky saw a 6% decline.

“I fear more people will go hungry in my state because of Snap’s changes, which impact children and seniors,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who leads the Republican-majority state, said in a letter this month to Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

But Trump and Rollins described the reduction in Snap recipients as positive.

“Democrats don’t like” the decrease, Rollins said at an August agricultural festival in Minnesota. “But for those of us who love work, celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we take 5 million people off food stamps.”

Critics of the changes point out that despite Trump’s promises, food and gasoline prices rose during his second term, making it harder for families to access basic necessities.

“If people were paid enough, they wouldn’t be in the Snap program,” said Gina Plata-Nino, Snap director at the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that supports hunger-relief programs.

The Food Bank Council of Michigan operates a hotline where staff answer residents’ questions about applying for Snap and accessing local food programs. The organization began receiving more than three times as many calls per day after the Snap changes took effect. This week they had to temporarily suspend the helpline due to high call volume.

The changes also affected Feed Louisville, which receives surplus food from restaurants and farmers and uses those ingredients to prepare meals for partner organizations. Unused items also go to agencies.

“We always had enough food,” Kamar said. “But now what we’re seeing is that every day the shelves are empty at the end of the day, so every piece of food that comes into our kitchen every day goes right back into the community at the end of the day.”

The decline in Snap enrollment has also affected schools’ ability to provide free meals to students. If at least 25% of a student body receives Snap or other public benefits, the school can participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (Cep) program and use federal funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students without the need for household applications.

But with fewer students signed up for Snap, it’s harder for schools to serve those free meals to students who need them, The Washington Post reported this week. In the Houston Independent School District, 26 schools that previously offered free meals to all Cep students are no longer eligible for the program, according to the Post.

Anti-hunger advocates also say the employment data doesn’t support the argument that more people have found jobs or seen their wages increase and therefore no longer need food stamps. The United States created 776,000 nonfarm jobs between January 2025 and September 2026. In the last 20 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the country added 2.6 million nonfarm jobs, according to Factcheck.org.

“We don’t have data to suggest that there are suddenly more jobs. We just know that fewer people are receiving benefits,” said Sheril Kirshenbaum, external relations manager for the Food Bank Council of Michigan.

A USDA spokesperson downplayed the effect of the Snap restrictions.

“The number of people receiving benefits is constantly changing and is not representative of any particular policy,” the spokesperson said in an email to the Guardian.

It could soon become even more difficult for people facing food insecurity. States will now have to pay most of Snap’s administrative costs while preparing for an October 2027 change that will require states to pay a portion of Snap benefit costs if their payment error rate is above 6%, which the USDA says is not a measure of fraud. (Paradoxically, states that had error rates above 13% experienced a delay in implementing this requirement.)

States will now have to pay more for existing work while finding funds for additional work to reduce the error rate, said Joseph Llobrera, senior research director for the food aid team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That could mean longer processing times and people who need help would have to wait longer to get it, Kirshenbaum said.

“States are actually doomed to fail,” Llobrera said.

The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about concerns that the Snap changes have forced some Americans to go hungry.

One Louisville woman, Sandra Scott, 58, has been homeless most of her life and said that until she started receiving Snap benefits four years ago, she ate at “soup kitchens or wherever I could, but for the most part, like on weekends, there was really nowhere to go.”

Scott underwent six back surgeries and battled mental illness. She became addicted to methamphetamines, but got sober two years ago and now lives in a subsidized apartment. She is working to obtain her emergency responder certification and volunteers with The Table, a nonprofit restaurant that uses a pay-what-you-can model.

When asked what she would say to members of the Trump administration about the Snap changes, Scott responded: “Why don’t you walk in our shoes, someone in the community who has nothing, who wasn’t born into money or doesn’t have a job because it’s so hard to find or (who) can’t find affordable housing because it’s too high?”