Food Stamp Cuts Hit Kids

Terry H. Schwadron

June 23, 2026

Last year, the Republican Congress followed Donald Trump’s lead and cut money for food stamps, insisting that it would eliminate fraud, focus help for the most vulnerable, and not adversely affect people.

We now have reporting from federal agencies on what has happened to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The number of children receiving food assistance in at least 12 states has dropped by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. Those states are the ones to break down participation by age, and they report that of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46%, were children. Last month, another analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found there were 700,000 fewer children receiving food assistance.

Those figures say Arizona and Louisiana saw the largest percentage declines in SNAP participation among children. Massachusetts dropped food stamps for a fifth of its child recipients. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, has not detailed the impact on children aided by the program, but initial figures show that between February 2025 and 2026, 4.3 million fewer people of all ages received SNAP nationwide — a total of 37.8 million or one in ten U.S. citizens, since immigrants are excluded.

No one knows the total number of American children no longer receiving food stamp aid.

While children were not the intended targets of the legislation’s changes, they’re increasingly “collateral damage,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told ProPublica, adding that, “Families are falling through the cracks.”

The Agriculture Department’s official statement about all this was, “There is no shortage of resources for the most vulnerable among us, including children.”

As always, compare what they say with what they do.

Worsening Figures

Expect these numbers to worsen. In October, Trump-era law requires states to set work requirements for most adults to receive food stamps and to cover 75% of cost rather than 50%. States with any fraud cases or even administrative error will pay more. Those pressures, in turn, will force more off the food stamp rolls, as will the increased paperwork from households to prove that recipients are working.

The federal fund cuts have put added pressure on states to increase staff just to administer the stricter rules. In Massachusetts, officials acknowledged that the number of unanswered calls from SNAP applicants to a help line rose from 61% in November to 81% in March — a trend that was known from earlier cuts in states like Georgia.

Roll back the clock, and what Republican legislators, including Republican Representatives Glenn Thompson, Pa., chair of the House Agriculture Committee, Dusty Johnson, S.D., and John Rose, Tenn., were pushing was an “historical accomplishment” to ensure “those in need can continue to receive the assistance they need,” while dumping people who were not working or in job training programs. Basically, they insisted that was fraud.

The federal cuts and new rules are pushing states to dump working families at a time of a volatile job market just starting to deal with the arrival of AI along with economic pressures. Along with other more general attacks on aid programs, including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., talks about a need to take substantially larger whacks at “entitlement” social service programs.

Ideology of Looking Away

As food stamp eligibility in Arizona has waned, the St. Mary’s Food Bank, largest in the state, has seen a 15% increase or an additional 300,000 more visits in search of food.

In her Substack column, Cathleen Rampell noted that this is steepest decline in food-stamp enrollment in decades, byproduct of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed almost a year ago. The Medicaid equivalent is expected to start hitting at the end of this year.

She underscores that while we may see needy children getting less food assistance as horrifying, the Trump administration is selling it as success in dropping lazy grifters who were probably defrauding the government or now benefitting from the robust Trump economy.

“A lot of [the enrollment decline] is fraud,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said last month. “A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been. And then, a lot of it is just a better economy. We’ve had wage growth that has outpaced inflation for the first time since early 2021. . . So, people don’t need food stamps.”

We’re seeing a similar value imbalance in policies affecting health care access, immigration, housing, education and environment. The ideology of the Trump administration is not only to break programs, but them not to look at the results.

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