Harris and his family are among the 42 million Americans who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formally known as food stamps. The program was piloted in the late 1930s to address the needs of the nation’s impoverished families following the Great Depression, and signed into law in 1964. Despite false and often misogynistic and racist narratives about its beneficiaries, SNAP has long been a resource for millions of Americans of all backgrounds who have fallen on economic hardship.
So when the government shut down on Oct. 1 after Republicans in Congress refused to extend health care subsidies, folks like Harris were in distress. The Trump administration declined to fund SNAP while the government was closed, prompting lawsuits from over two dozen states. A federal judge in early November ordered that SNAP benefits be paid, but the administration continued fighting to restrict benefits.
By Nov. 18 — after a week of no food assistance and in limbo of its arrival — Harris’ family received their benefits. The delay may only be a precursor of what’s to come under Donald Trump’s administration, which has prioritized gutting government programs that benefit the less fortunate. The GOP has taken on similar priorities, and the so-called Big Beautiful Bill scales back SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs in the coming years — putting millions at risk of sinking deeper into poverty.
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Arkansas was ranked as one of the worst states for child well-being last year, due largely to its astronomical poverty rates, and Harris and his family felt the strain. Food had always been a challenge, especially with three autistic children — ages 11, seven, and five — who were picky about what they consumed. The day after his community lunch, before the family’s benefits hit, Harris went into preservation mode, converting the leftover lentil chili into grilled burritos and pairing it with $3 rotisserie chicken he found at the store. Consolidating had long become the norm with his minimal income. Because of a mental health diagnosis and chronic health issues, Harris has struggled to maintain full-time employment, and raising three children only exacerbated his stress and symptoms.
“When I was planning for my second kid, I had to quit to be a stay-at-home parent,” Harris says of his time being a full-time pre-school teacher. “I’d teach other kids and then not have energy for my own.” While it was a struggle, his husband, a software developer, had been the breadwinner — until he was laid off in September, qualifying the family of five for $1,000 worth of monthly food assistance. “We had to apply for assistance, which was a lot of hoops to get through,” says Harris, who makes $13 an hour as a Sunday school teacher at his local Jewish temple, but only for a few hours a week. “It helps little things but I had to explain that I don’t get a monthly income and there was a lot of back and forth. When we finally got approved for SNAP, they were like, ‘Oh, November, you’re not getting anything.’”
The government’s ability to interrupt aid for families in need has been stressful, with many now living in fear that the help they depend on could again be taken from them — temporarily or even permanently. Prior to the Big Beautiful Bill, which Republicans in Congress passed earlier this year, the federal government provided 100 percent of SNAP benefits (the actual money on the EBT card) and split the administrative costs with each state. The new legislation will force states to finance 75 percent of the administrative funding for SNAP benefits starting in 2027. In addition, starting in 2028, states like Arkansas with payment errors over 6 percent — for under- or over-paying benefits — will be responsible for shelling out anywhere from five to 15 percent of the actual benefit payments. Able-bodied recipients from 18 to 64 will now be required to work, volunteer, or be in work training for at least 80 hours a month.
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“There is a general feeling by the Trump administration that SNAP and Medicaid programs are overly generous and that they are not needed by the recipients who receive them,” says Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy at Harvard University who advised the Obama and Biden administrations. “They have pointed to fraud and abuse across the programs but the data shows that fraud rates are low across all programs.”
SNAP reduces food insecurity by 30 percent, lifting families out of poverty and ultimately reducing health care costs. SNAP also strengthens local economies, because, as Bleich says, “every dollar you put into SNAP produces about $1.50 to $1.80 in economic output.” But with states having to foot most of the administrative fees for SNAP, while also being on the hook for error rates (which are common and do not equate to fraud), local governments are going to have tough decisions to make concerning their citizens. Take, for instance, North Carolina, whose error rate was 10 percent in the fiscal year of 2024. By the policy’s logic, the state could be responsible for paying 15 percent of SNAP benefits. “That’s 15 percent of $3 billion, which is $450 million,” says Bleich. “States don’t have a lot of extra resources. If they absorb these additional costs they are going to have to decide whether to shrink the program or extract money from another safety net. Because so many people are in multiple programs, they stand to lose services like health care or food assistance. It’s going to have a huge impact on families and it may be generational.”
Aberdeen, Mississippi, has transformed dramatically since Katina Holloway graduated from high school in 1995. Holloway, a native of the area, recalls when nearly 8,000 people lived in the small, rural town. She remembers blatant racism — like how her school divided Black and white cheerleaders, and named separate Black and white prom queens and kings — but also a town where people could thrive. It’s far more difficult now. The population has declined to under 5,000, which Holloway partially attributes to white flight after the election of a Black mayor, and resources are scarce. Holloway says the town only had one grocery store, until recently.
“Our town is a food desert,” says Holloway, now a nurse practitioner in Los Angeles. The dearth of food options led her to partner with a local church to build a shopping plaza in her home town during the pandemic. The development houses a health clinic and Holloway’s very own grocery chain, Freshly’s Market.
“After building the plaza with the church, the grocery store that was initially supposed to come to town backed out,” she says. Holloway tried to find new vendors to no avail. She then remembered a prophecy given to her in church, where she was told she’d own a grocery store: “That memory came to me and I said to the pastor [now her business partner] that it looks like we have to open a grocery store.” Freshly’s Market now has two stores in Aberdeen, where 40 percent of her clientele, like Natasha Smith, qualify for SNAP.
When I spoke to Smith, a mom of seven, on Nov. 14, she had just received a partial payment of her $900 monthly benefits, and had already made a trip to Freshly’s to stock up. “When Freshly’s came it was wonderful because we only had one grocery store but you could never find what you needed,” Smith says. At Holloway’s store, Smith is able to buy a “pick five” where customers can choose five meats for a single price. When the SNAP benefits didn’t come through on time in November, Smith had to use money meant to pay her bills to feed her children, putting her at odds with her landlord. The partial payment allowed her to stock up on meats like chicken, sausage, and neck bones, and to purchase baby formula for her four-month-old.
Nearly 22 percent of Aberdeen residents live below the poverty line. The state of Mississippi has the highest population of Black Americans per capita, and it’s also one of the poorest states in the nation. A census report from 2023 found that during the pandemic — as Holloway was building the plaza to address the local needs — Mississippi had the highest rate of eligible SNAP beneficiaries. While Mississippians like Holloway love their home state and community, they also recognize its struggles. “We have a lot of successful people that graduated and went on but jobs can’t be found here in town,” she says. “There’s no housing here, everybody has moved out of the area, either into other nearby cities or out of state.”
Holloway’s grocery store presents opportunities for both jobs and nutrition for families, yet it doesn’t fix Mississippi’s overall systemic issues. In addition to work requirements and the error rates — Mississippi also has an error rate of 10 percent — the Big Beautiful Bill adds a new condition where states (with the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii) will be prohibited from giving waivers for work requirements to individuals living in areas where the unemployment rate doesn’t exceed 10 percent. As of August, Monroe County, which includes Aberdeen, has an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, an increase from 2024. For residents like Smith, who are already having difficulty finding work, the stakes are high.
“A lot of states would request waivers for a place like Aberdeen,” says Luke Shaefer, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, where he runs the Poverty Solutions initiative and has worked with the state on its SNAP programs in the past. “But the Trump administration wants to stop that. The biggest impact is that more places are going to have to enforce work requirements and there’s going to be a lot of people in places where it’s really hard to get a job, which means a lot of people are going to lose benefits. It’s another sort of devil in the details.”
Americans without children are sometimes overlooked in debates about government assistance. One of them, Marissa, who lives in the Denver area, has relied on SNAP. She grew up in Ohio in a family who came from the Appalachians of West Virginia, and pursued the American dream, as she was told, getting her MBA and a master’s degree in political science before heading into the workforce. Around 2017, she moved to the Rocky Mountains, where she worked at a non-profit retreat center until Covid closed it down. Just as she was coping with the job loss, a wildfire hit her town, forcing an evacuation, which led to her homelessness.
“Sometimes it was mandatory evacuation, where they told everyone to leave but then told us to go back because the Red Cross wasn’t paying for hotel rooms anymore,” she says. “Then we were on a mandatory six-week evacuation. I was trying to start a new job teaching English to Chinese people but the internet wasn’t stable enough. I was on the wait list to do delivery driving and the unemployment in Colorado was delayed for six months, because they were trying to prevent fraud. I couldn’t afford my rent anymore.”
Despite Colorado’s eviction moratorium during the pandemic, Marissa’s landlord was still adamant about payment. With no money to afford a lawyer, she was reluctant to resist him. Instead, she started living out of her GMC Yukon, using her savings for gas and food and trying to find odd jobs where she could. She also was battling a rare form of narcolepsy, which required a highly regulated medication that was hard for her to access. “You had to have an address and sign for your package,” she says.
Now living in a community called Angelica Village, where instead of paying rent she volunteers doing jobs like running the food pantry, Marissa qualified for both Medicaid and SNAP. Although she plans to continue volunteering, which would align her with the updated work requirements, the state of Colorado has a high error rate of nearly 10 percent, putting her fate back into the hands of her local government. “Despite having an education and being motivated, I am forced into poverty to afford my medication,” she says. “There’s income limits. My medication is $20,000 a month without insurance. I’m not allowed to make more money and they took my SNAP benefits and I only get $300 a month.”
In a time when inflation has raised the cost of food, many Americans are struggling to feed themselves and their families. For policy makers and researchers, the cuts and restrictions to programs like SNAP are an unnecessary evil. “As a nation, we spend about $100 Billion on SNAP every year. That’s a lot of money but a very small fraction of the federal budget,” Shaefer says. “The Biden Administration actually did some things to increase the benefit levels because they were not keeping pace with inflation. It became a more expensive program and people thought it would be a higher cost over time. There’s also a presumption that if we provide food assistance people won’t work, but this doesn’t happen on a large scale. There are people with disabilities who can’t work. If [the Big Beautiful Bill] stands, a lot of states are going to have a hard time filling the gap.”
According to Shaefer, the new work requirements are redundant given that most people on SNAP work already, but they will lead to an administrative nightmare. “People won’t know that it applies to them or they won’t report hours properly and will lose their benefits and the math of the Big Beautiful Bill is based on that happening,” she says.
SNAP also boosts local economies and businesses like Holloway’s market. A reduction of SNAP benefits will lead to increased poverty and business closures. “Around the country there are about a quarter of a million retailers, which are authorized to accept SNAP benefits,” says Bleich. “For many of these retailers, the SNAP dollars are a huge part of how they do business. If there’s a retailer located in a lower income area and a huge part of the clientele are SNAP recipients and the overall dollar amount is going down, that’s going to impact them. Grocery stores will close and there will be fewer open, which will cause local economies to weaken over time.” And a closure of food stores will ultimately limit healthy food options and resources in places like Little Rock, Aberdeen, and West Virginia, where Marissa’s family is from.
According to researchers like Shaefer, the optimism lies in the way people vote in the midterm elections. “All of this will go into effect after the midterm elections in 2026,” he says. “They didn’t want anyone to feel this pain before they went into the voting booth, so this is happening unless the government does something to stop it. The biggest impact is going to be felt by poor people who live in conservative states. Liberal states will have a little more ability to respond to these changes where West Virginia and Mississippi will not.”
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Shaefer describes the SNAP cuts as a “reverse Robin Hood action,” meant to take from those who can’t afford a quality life to make sure those who can continue to do so even more comfortably. “It seems like the goal is to give this huge tax cut and it will disproportionately go to high income folks,” Shaefer says. “We’re taking these draconian steps to finance these massive tax cuts.”
While the Big Beautiful Bill is the law of the land, the future could depend on how much people feel the effects of these changes — or realize how much they or others stand to feel the effects in the future — before November of next year. As long as Trump and congressional Republicans remain in control of the nation, Harris and his family in Arkansas, Smith and hers and Mississippi, and Marissa in Colorado will continue to live in fear that they won’t be able to make ends meet — not to mention the tens of millions of other Americans who rely on SNAP every month.
