Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is celebrating a massive drop in the number of Americans on food stamps, saying the Trump administration has moved almost 6 million people off the program in just a year and a half.
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Rollins made the claim last week during an appearance on “The Alex Marlow Show,” a Breitbart program. She said enrollment in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps low income families buy groceries, has fallen from about 43 or 44 million people to roughly 35 or 36 million.
“Welfare to work, no more illegal aliens, and no more fraud,” she said, calling it what Trump promised voters.The drop itself is real. USDA’s own data shows SNAP enrollment provisionally fell to 36.6 million people in May 2026, down from 42.2 million a year earlier. That is about 5.6 million fewer people getting help with groceries.
What Rollins did not do is break that number down. She did not say how many people were removed for fraud, how many were undocumented immigrants, and how many simply lost benefits under new rules. Someone using a dead person’s Social Security number and a working mom who missed a paperwork deadline are counted the same way in that 6 million.
Much of the decline traces back to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the tax and spending law Trump signed last summer. It expanded SNAP work requirements, meaning more adults must now work, volunteer, or take part in job training for at least 80 hours a month to keep their benefits. The rule now covers adults up to age 64 and parents whose youngest child is 14 or older. The law also ended automatic exemptions that used to protect veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults who aged out of foster care.
The paperwork is where many people are falling through the cracks. Under the new system, when someone applies or has to prove they are still eligible, the state has 30 days to process it. If the state misses that deadline, the person is automatically cut off, even if they turned in everything on time and qualify, and they have to start the process over. In Arizona, state officials said the new federal requirements set off record call volumes and extra verification steps that created real barriers for people applying. The anti-hunger group No Kid Hungry says more than a million children are among those who have lost access to SNAP over the past year.
Rollins told Marlow she reassigned the DOGE team, the Elon Musk-backed group that helped cut about 20,000 jobs at USDA, to comb through SNAP records. USDA says its fraud crackdown has prevented $5.8 billion in losses since the start of the Trump administration. Most of that comes from going after stores, not families: USDA says it has disqualified more than 5,000 retailers and shut down about 1,840 illegal card readers used to process benefit cards. Last week, the department announced action against 170 stores in New York City in an undercover investigation it called Operation SNAP Back. USDA also released a report in June that found 185,986 people who had died were still listed as receiving food stamps across 29 states.
More changes are coming. Starting in October 2027, states with high rates of payment errors will have to start covering part of the cost of SNAP benefits themselves, a penalty that kicks in when a state’s error rate goes above 6%. More than 40 states and territories were above that line in fiscal year 2025.
For families who rely on SNAP, the most important thing right now is staying on top of any letters from your state benefits office and responding to recertification requests as early as possible, since a missed deadline can cut off benefits even for people who still qualify.
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