House Committee Farm Bill’s $30 Billion SNAP Cut, Other Harmful Proposals Outweigh Improvements

In May, the House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill proposal authored by Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson that would reauthorize and modify the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and several other nutrition-related programs.^[1] While the bill includes some modest improvements, including an important provision restoring SNAP eligibility to people returning to the community from prison after a drug-related felony conviction, these would come at an unnecessary and unacceptable cost: a roughly $30 billion cut in benefits for all SNAP participants in future years, based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.Starting in 2027, the proposed limitation would cut SNAP benefits for 40 million people, including 17 million children, 6 million older adults, and 4 million people with disabilities in a typical month based on CBO’s estimates. 

The roughly $30 billion SNAP cut comes from the bill’s limitation on the Agriculture Department’s (USDA) authority to adjust the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) to accurately reflect the cost of a realistic, healthy diet. The TFP, a set of foods representing a frugal but nutritionally adequate diet, is used to set SNAP benefit levels. Starting in 2027, the proposed limitation would cut SNAP benefits for 40 million people, including 17 million children, 6 million older adults, and 4 million people with disabilities in a typical month, based on CBO’s estimates. This would be the largest SNAP cut in nearly 30 years and would grow over time as SNAP benefits became more and more inadequate.

The bill also includes harmful changes that would fundamentally alter how states administer SNAP, including misguided program integrity and privatization measures that would increase red tape and erect new access barriers for eligible households while offering no clear benefits. Most notably, the bill would allow states to outsource core SNAP eligibility functions related to application processing and eligibility determinations to private companies. When Texas and Indiana experimented with a privatization policy two decades ago, it led to widespread problems such as incorrect benefit allotments, long application backlogs, and the inappropriate release of SNAP participants’ private information.

SNAP is the country’s most important anti-hunger program, helping more than 40 million people in low-income households put food on the table in a typical month. Despite its modest benefits — only $6.20 per person per day, on average — SNAP is highly effective at reducing food insecurity, alleviating poverty, and supporting better health, educational attainment, and economic security for participants.

The farm bill offers an opportunity to build on SNAP’s effectiveness and make real progress in reducing food insecurity. Many of Chair Thompson’s stated priorities for the nutrition title — modernizing benefit delivery, supporting employment opportunities, strengthening program integrity, and promoting healthy eating — are shared by committee members on both sides of the aisle. There is also bipartisan interest in strengthening SNAP by expanding access to certain populations historically excluded from the program, such as people released from prison after a drug-related felony conviction and residents of U.S. Territories excluded from SNAP. Strong bipartisan consensus is necessary to enact a farm bill, and this consensus is achievable.

Unfortunately, the House Agriculture Committee bill takes a far different course, siphoning approximately $20 billion from future food assistance for low-income people to fund unrelated programs that do not help low-income households meet their food needs. (See Table 1.) Reflecting a bipartisan interest in reducing, not increasing, hunger and the bipartisanship needed to pass a farm bill, no farm bill in recent memory has been enacted that cut SNAP in order to pay for unrelated initiatives in other titles of the bill.

Congress should reject this misguided approach and instead pursue a farm bill that advances food security and family well-being by protecting and strengthening SNAP. The farm bill framework released by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow, which includes key improvements to SNAP without harmful benefit cuts, should be the basis for farm bill negotiations moving forward.