Trump’s One Big Beautiful Hunger Crisis
His solution to the food affordability crisis is to cut programs that help people afford food.
AROUND THE COUNTRY, food prices are surging, and Americans are going hungry. They’re about to get hungrier, too, given that we’ve begun the steepest decline in food-stamp enrollment in decades.
Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed almost exactly a year ago, siphoned more than $1 trillion out of federal safety-net programs to offset his regressive tax cuts. The legislation’s Medicaid cuts got the lion’s share of public attention, but the cuts to food assistance were also enormous. Spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. SNAP) will fall by nearly 20 percent over the coming decade. And unlike the Medicaid rollback, much of which was strategically delayed to begin after the midterms, the SNAP purge is already in full swing.
In the eight months following the law’s enactment, SNAP enrollment plummeted by 4.7 million, according to data released this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And so far, children appear to be the biggest victims, despite Republicans’ pledges that their SNAP “reform” would ensure the program works better for the “most vulnerable among us, including children.”
Not all states break out SNAP participation by age, but in the twelve states that do, enrollment of kids fell by at least 776,000, according to calculations from ProPublica.
Some states were especially bad.
In Massachusetts, a state normally associated with maximizing safety-net coverage, children’s food-stamp enrollment has plunged by nearly a fifth. The commonwealth’s benefits office has struggled to meet OBBB’s new bureaucratic requirements for SNAP, and has coped by just . . . not answering applicants’ phone calls. Over in Arizona, which is also struggling with the new OBBB-forced paperwork, less than half as many kids are receiving SNAP today as there were when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed.
One might see needy children getting less food assistance as a horrifying outcome. But the Trump administration has sold all this as a success story.
Those losing benefits, we’re told, were all lazy grifters who were probably defrauding the government anyway. Or, alternatively, maybe they really did once deserve their benefits, but they have since graduated out of their undignified need for federal assistance thanks to Trump’s economic boom.
“A lot of [the enrollment decline] is fraud,” USDA 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. This is a really big day. So people don’t need food stamps.”
Having looked at the numbers and talked to the experts, I feel confident in saying this is cruel, despicable bullshit. And here’s why.