SNAP benefits have been pulled from roughly 5 million people since the One Big Beautiful Bill became law, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and more than 1.5 million of them are children. That is a drop of about 12 percent. USDA numbers put current enrollment at 36.6 million, down 5.7 million from May 2025, which is below where it sat before the pandemic and the lowest total in 17 years.
The decline is not one policy. Dottie Rosenbaum, director of federal SNAP policy at CBPP, told ABC News it comes from a combination of changed work requirements, administrative hurdles in the application process, and the cost shift states are bracing for. The law raised the upper age limit for able bodied adults without dependents who have to meet work requirements from 54 to 64, which swept in a decade of people who had never been subject to them.
The administrative hurdle piece is the part that gets undercounted. Losing benefits because you failed a work requirement and losing them because the recertification paperwork got harder look identical in the enrollment numbers, and only one of those is a policy anyone voted for. People who still qualify are falling off the rolls because the process to prove it changed.
October 1 is the date to put on your calendar. That is when states go from covering 50 percent of the administrative cost of running SNAP to 75 percent. State and national food assistance groups are asking Congress to pass a resolution delaying it so states have more time to prepare for the larger bill, and unless that happens in the next few weeks, it takes effect automatically.
Then there is the change that has not arrived yet. Beginning in October 2027, states will have to pay between 5 percent and 15 percent of actual benefit costs. That has never happened in the history of the program. Benefits have always been federally funded, with states handling administration. For many states that is hundreds of millions of dollars a year appearing in a budget that was not built for it, and the likely response is tighter eligibility, thinner outreach or both.
The law cuts about $187 billion from SNAP over ten years, roughly 20 percent of the program. Supporters argued before passage that the changes would cut waste and add accountability. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and others in the administration have pointed to the enrollment decline as evidence of an improving economy and rising wages.
Food banks cannot absorb what is coming off. SNAP provides about nine meals for every one the emergency food system supplies, and federal aid to food banks has been cut as well. Erin McAleer, president of Project Bread in Massachusetts, said the scale of this is bigger than pantries and food banks can meet.
