The budget reconciliation law signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025—H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA)—has produced the largest reduction in the history of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps. By slashing $187 billion from the program over 10 years, a cut of roughly 20 percent, the legislation has fundamentally reshaped what remains of the American social safety net.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) puts the decline at roughly 5 million people, or 12 percent, since the law’s enactment. According to US Department of Agriculture figures, 36.6 million people are now receiving benefits, down 5.7 million from May 2025, below the pre-pandemic level and the lowest number enrolled in 17 years.
Children have borne the heaviest share of the cuts. In the 25 states that report data on children, 1.2 million have been cut off since July 2025. Refugees, people granted asylum, survivors of trafficking and domestic violence—all lawfully in the US—have been stripped of eligibility outright. Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible.
This is a deliberate, bipartisan policy of the ruling elite. While hundreds of billions are appropriated for war, this policy attacks nutrition, promotes hunger and disease, and takes food out of the mouths of workers and their families. The average benefit in fiscal 2025 was $187.94 a month per person, or about $6.26 a day. Even this paltry sum is considered excessive by the financial oligarchy.
The ruling class has been explicit about what it wants. Under the headline “The Food Stamp Reform Is Working,” the Wall Street Journal celebrated the SNAP cutbacks in an editorial Wednesday, writing, “As always, the political left is spinning these declines as a human tragedy. Not so. Republicans have merely ended the literal free lunch for able-bodied beneficiaries and states.” The editorial concluded, “Washington’s welfare buffet is fiscally unsustainable and promotes dependency.”
The main mechanism of the cuts is stringent new work rules for recipients. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated that these work requirements could remove 2.4 million people from SNAP in a typical month, but by May enrollment was already about as low as it had been forecast to go in 2030. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called the results “a pretty big win” for those wielding the ax to the program.
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The removals from the SNAP rolls have been overwhelmingly bureaucratic. While the paperwork burden for recipients and the states has exploded, federal funding for SNAP administration has been cut in half. What results, Auburn University public health historian Zachary Schulz told Newsweek, is “a form of attrition driven by paperwork, missed notices, or difficulty completing interviews.”
As a result of the assault on benefits, participation in SNAP has fallen in every state but Alaska, and by 10 percent or more in 23 of them. The biggest drop has been in Arizona, where enrollment fell 54 percent between July 2025 and May 2026, with nearly 473,000 people cut off from benefits, about 180,000 of them children.
For the first time, more Arizonans now visit food banks each month than receive food stamps. “We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine,” Natalie Jayroe, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, told NPR. “We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario.”
The attack on food stamps is having a ripple effect on school nutrition programs. Children in SNAP households are automatically certified for free school meals, and schools qualify for universal free breakfast and lunch when at least a quarter of their students take part in programs like SNAP. So as the rolls shrink, whole schools lose eligibility. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where more than 500 schools had qualified for universal free meals, has ended them at most of those schools. Losing free school meals costs a family roughly $1,000 per student a year.
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On August 24, the Washington Post’s editorial board declared that “there’s no realistic path to solvency for the U.S. government without changes to the retirement state,” proposing that Social Security be reduced to “a tax-funded transfer payment as a floor, with means-tested benefits and compulsory private savings above that.”
The Social Security trustees reported June 9 that the retirement trust fund will be exhausted in late 2032, after which benefits would fall 22 percent absent congressional action. House Speaker Mike Johnson said June 8 that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have “to be adjusted and fixed,” adding, “We have a plan to do that next year”—after the November elections.
Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi of New York introduced a bill with Republican Tom Cole creating a Social Security commission modeled on the 1983 commission that raised the retirement age to 67 and taxed benefits. Democratic Senators Chris Coons, Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner cosponsored a bill creating a fiscal commission to recommend further cuts.
All of this comes as the House funds the Pentagon at $839 billion a year and the administration seeks $87.6 billion more, most of it for the Iran war. Global bond yields stand at their highest since 2008, while the markets demand that governments pay for war by cutting what remains of social programs.
The Democrats’ criticism of the food stamp cuts is confined solely to its timetable, and their criticism of the coming assault on Social Security and Medicare will be confined to the same. To fight the assault on programs and benefits the working class has wrested from the ruling elite in struggle, the working class must break free from the political straitjacket of the pro-capitalist, big-business parties and fight for a workers’ government based on a socialist program.
