It is a national disgrace that in the richest country in the history of the world, food-stamp enrollment dropped by 5.7 million people in a single year — driven by deliberate Republican policy aimed at veterans, homeless Americans, parents of teenagers, and older workers who could not find jobs. The reason is that Congress’s 2025 budget deliberately made it harder for the poorest Americans to eat, requiring states to police the rolls because the political priority was making the program smaller, not because fraud had suddenly become a crisis.
According to new U.S. Department of Agriculture data, enrollment has fallen to 36.6 million from 42.3 million between May 2025 and May 2026 — a return to pre-pandemic levels that should shame a wealthy nation, not one to celebrate. The share of Americans in need (10.7%) is higher than it was two decades ago (8.9%), reflecting decades of stagnating working-class wages and the rising cost of putting food on the table in America.
According to USDA state-level reporting, nearly half of states registered enrollment declines greater than 10%, including Connecticut (15.7%), Indiana (15.8%), Texas (16.6%), Utah and Illinois (16.7%), Oklahoma (19.6%), Louisiana (21.5%), Florida (22.2%), Nevada (23.1%), Georgia (36.5%) and Arizona (53.8%) — a punishing retreat that has fallen hardest on the working poor, the disabled, parents of teenagers, and the homeless veterans the reforms specifically singled out.
The families who lost their food assistance are not a talking point. They are the working poor, the disabled, the parents of teenagers, the homeless veterans the reforms specifically punished. Republicans have ended nutrition assistance for able-bodied adults ages 55 to 64, parents of children over age 13, veterans, and people experiencing homelessness. That is the policy, plainly stated — a punitive rewrite of the social contract that treats hunger as a character flaw and help as a reward for compliance.
The GOP’s 2025 budget expanded food-stamp work requirements for able-bodied adults to ages 55 to 64 and for parents with children over age 13, eliminated exemptions for veterans and the homeless, and closed a loophole that had let 15 states suspend work requirements owing to “insufficient jobs” — that is, it withdrew the recognition that in many American regions there are simply no jobs to be had.
A stated reform goal was to “encourage work” and to stop “enabling the homeless with drug addictions who resist treatment.” The premise that a hungry person with a substance abuse disorder becomes sober because a food-stamp card is taken away is not a theory of addiction — it is cruelty dressed as policy. Treatment works. Starvation does not.
The reform also generally required states with payment error rates at or above 6% — roughly the average before the pandemic — to pay an increasing share of benefits (between 5% and 15%). Error rates climbed during the pandemic and averaged 10.6% across all states last year. The point of reform, in practice, was to give states a financial incentive to drop people from the rolls. Hunger, in turn, is treated as the predictable and acceptable output of the program.
The defense offered for the new error rule is that the left calls errors administrative lapses that cannot be helped, and that overpayments are seven times larger than underpayments. The same error rate that throws a working mother off benefits is the error rate that quietly allows low-wage employers to keep wages low, because their workers can eat through public assistance. The overpayment-underpayment ratio is a feature of rushed eligibility verification, not of recipient fraud.
When the federal government fully funded the program, the political incentive for states was to enroll everyone who was eligible. Now that states have skin in the game, they are doing more due diligence — pushing eligible families off the rolls as quickly as possible to avoid paying the penalty. That is what “more due diligence” means in practice: hunger-policing with a financial motive, state welfare agencies turned into collection agents for the federal government and rewarded for every eligible person they strip from the rolls. Food stamps are on track to cost $85.7 billion this fiscal year, far less than the $100 billion the Congressional Budget Office projected in its baseline budget in February and the $107 billion forecasted in January 2025 — a 20% reduction in spending achieved by removing the hungry from the program, not by reducing hunger — a $21 billion cut to nutrition assistance for American families.
CBO tends to underproject the cost of entitlement expansions because financial incentives affect behavior. In this case, CBO appears to have underprojected the savings from the GOP reforms, because removing eligibility does not remove need — it removes help. The easiest way to make entitlement costs look good is to deny the entitlement.
Republicans last summer also imposed work requirements on working-age, able-bodied Medicaid beneficiaries and limited a scheme that states use to draw additional federal funds for low-income patients. It was a cruel start, and states still have little incentive to drop low-income residents from their Medicaid rolls since they receive more money from the feds the more they spend — the same penalty the food-stamp reforms pretend to solve.
The next step, according to the policy’s advocates, is for Congress to reduce the 90% federal payment match for the ObamaCare expansion population on Medicaid — which would gut coverage for millions of low-income adults — and to ban federal waivers that let states cover non-medical benefits like housing assistance and in-home help for the chronically ill. These are precisely the supports the policy’s authors dismiss as fraud, and they would simply return the chronically ill to institutional care at far greater public cost.
The federal government operates more than a dozen food assistance programs, which provide grocery money for new parents and their toddlers, as well as free school breakfasts and lunches for lower-income children. Some states provide free school meals for all children — one of the most effective anti-hunger and anti-poverty investments a society can make. Telling states they can boost food assistance “with their own tax dollars” is a shrug at the federal responsibility to feed American children.
Federal nutrition assistance for children, veterans, the disabled, and the working poor is the floor of a civilized society, not a buffet. The GOP’s food stamp results show what happens when lawmakers stop having the political will to feed Americans in need: 5.7 million more people go hungry. The hunger is working. The question is whether Congress has the political will to feed people instead.
