Trinity Goodman is 44 years old and lives in Oklahoma City. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in savings to keep the account open, and six pennies in a piggy bank. She had a bandage on her arm, because the way she stays alive is by selling her blood plasma twice a week.

"That's my full assets," she said.

Her food stamps come to $298 a month. You can't buy toilet paper with food stamps. You can't buy tampons with them either. So she goes to church pantries and hopes. She has never in her life been to a barber.

"I've never been to a barber or any of those places," she told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who met her on a 1,000-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. "Never. I don't have that luxury."

And now there is a real chance her $298 goes away too.

This is not the economy. This is a law.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nothing about the job market suddenly got better. Nobody stopped needing groceries.

And yet, in that same stretch, SNAP enrollment fell by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Participation dropped in every single state except Alaska. It fell by 10 percent or more in 23 states.

The Center is blunt about what that means: "It's very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline."

The last time this many people fell off food assistance this fast — outside of a temporary spike after a natural disaster — was nearly thirty years ago, after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

So what changed in July 2025? Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The Congressional Budget Office scores it as cutting SNAP by nearly $187 billion — the largest cut to food assistance in American history.

They didn't cut it because the economy improved. They cut it because they wanted to.

They took food from 1.5 million kids

Of the people pushed off SNAP, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 1.5 million are children. In the 19 states where the data is public, kids made up nearly half of everyone who lost benefits.

Children are already the age group most likely to live in poverty in America — especially children under 2 years old.

You cannot accuse a two-year-old of being lazy. You cannot accuse a two-year-old of gaming the system. There is no version of "personal responsibility" that explains taking food off a toddler's table.

Read who they specifically decided to stop protecting

This is the detail that tells you everything.

Under the old rules, a handful of groups were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits, because Congress had recognized these were people in genuine crisis. Republicans went in and deleted those protections one by one:

• Veterans.
• People experiencing homelessness.
• Young people who just aged out of foster care.

They also raised the age you're subject to work rules from 54 to 64, and extended the rules to parents caring for kids as young as 14.

Now hold that next to another person Kristof met in Oklahoma City. Courtney Williams, 31, was put into foster care at age 6, after she saw her younger sister killed. She was moved through foster homes in seven different states, carrying everything she owned in a trash bag. In one home, at age 11, the family padlocked the refrigerator, the freezer and the food cabinets. She was hungry.

When she turned 17, the checks stopped coming and her foster mother put her out. She spent roughly the next decade homeless.

Today she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps survives.

Congress had specifically written a protection into the law for kids coming out of exactly that system. Republicans took it out. They also took out the one for homeless adults — which is the other category Williams spent ten years in.

Taxpayers paid to incarcerate her three times. We would not pay to feed her.

And it's not just food

The same crew came for health care in the same bill.

Marketplace enrollment is projected to fall to about 17.5 million people in 2026, down from 22.3 million in 2025 — a drop of roughly 4.8 million — after Republicans let the enhanced premium tax credits expire. For the people who managed to hang on, KFF found the average out-of-pocket premium jumped 58% and the average deductible climbed 37%, to $3,786 a year.

That's the trick. You don't have to repeal someone's insurance. You just make it cost more than they have.

In the states Kristof drove through, the damage is already mapped out:

• In Oklahoma, an estimated 174,000 people are at risk of losing SoonerCare, with another 95,000 projected to go uninsured. About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — one of the highest rates in the country — and 1 in 4 Oklahoma kids already faces hunger.
• In Arkansas — which has the highest food insecurity rate in the nation, where 1 in 4 kids goes hungry — SNAP enrollment is already down about 9 percent, nearly 21,000 people, including almost 7,900 children. The state stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with rural hospitals expected to close.

These are not blue states being punished. Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky send Republicans to Washington. Those Republicans voted for this.

This has names attached to it

It is easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here is the roll call.

The House passed the final version on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. Every single Republican from these four states voted yes:

• Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern and Frank Lucas — the entire delegation, in a state where 1 in 4 kids already faces hunger.
• Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman — the whole delegation of the hungriest state in America. Pine Bluff, where Latoya Foster is behind on rent and where Kristof found seniors saying life was more livable under Jim Crow, sits in Westerman's district. He keeps a district office there.
• Tennessee: Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, Andy Ogles, John Rose and David Kustoff.
• Kentucky: James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers and Andy Barr.

Only two Republicans in the entire House voted no. One of them was Kentucky's Thomas Massie — so Kentucky's delegation had a live example, from their own state, of what voting no looked like. Comer, Guthrie, Rogers and Barr voted yes anyway.

In the Senate, the bill passed 50 to 50 on July 1, 2025, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, all voted yes.

It was a tie. Any one of them could have stopped it. Cotton represents the state with the worst food insecurity in the country.

Two who weren't there — and one who did something else

Two names on this list didn't cast that vote, and it's worth being precise about it.

Matt Van Epps wasn't in Congress yet. He won Tennessee's 7th district in a special election on December 2, 2025 and was sworn in two days later — five months after the bill passed. He inherits the consequences rather than owning the vote.

Sarah Sanders is Arkansas's governor, so she never had a vote on a federal bill either. But she has had plenty to say about food assistance — and what she chose to do with it is its own answer.

Arkansas is dead last, #50 out of 50, for food insecurity. No state in America struggles harder to put food on the table. Faced with that, Sanders's signature SNAP initiative was to ask Washington for permission to narrow what hungry Arkansans are allowed to buy — banning soda, certain juices and candy from food stamps, while adding rotisserie chicken. USDA approved the waiver in June 2025, and it took effect July 1, 2026 — one month before Kristof's road trip.

Sanders said the approval "sends a clear message" and that Arkansas "leads the nation in getting unhealthy, ultra-processed foods off food stamps."

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families had a different read. Their policy director, Christin Harper, told legislators that the better way to fix bad health outcomes is to address the root causes — poverty and access to medical care.

Remember what Trinity Goodman actually can't buy with her $298: toilet paper and feminine hygiene products. The problem in these states was never that poor people had too many options at the register.

"The more I work, the harder stuff gets"

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Kristof met Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother of six who works as a shift manager at Taco Bell for $13.40 an hour. Her food stamps — $1,172 a month — were cut off in May over a suspicion she says is simply a mistake in the system. She's now behind on her $650 rent and racking up a $25-a-day late fee.

"I hit rock bottom daily," she said. "The more I work, the harder stuff gets."

Then she broke down and cried.

That is not an accident of the new law. It is the mechanism. Starting in 2027, states have to pay 5 to 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs themselves, and how much they pay depends on their error rates. So states are racing to drive their error rates down — more paperwork, more re-verification, more denials. And here's the catch the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: wrongly denying benefits to an eligible family doesn't count as an error.

Republicans built a system that financially rewards states for kicking eligible people off.

Who actually gets investigated in this country

The whole thing rests on a story about the "undeserving poor" gaming the system. So look at who the government actually goes after.

ProPublica mapped IRS audit rates by county, and the most heavily audited place in America was not a billionaire enclave. It was Humphreys County, Mississippi — a rural, majority-Black county in the Delta with a median household income of about $26,000. Its audit rate ran 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the nation, where the median income was $130,000. The five most-audited counties in America were all rural, predominantly African American counties in the Deep South.

The reason is simple: so many residents there claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS audits EITC filers at rates rivaled only by the very richest Americans.

Meanwhile, this same Congress found room in the budget for tax breaks for private jets and a war with Iran.

And when they can't get the cuts through the front door, they take the money anyway. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog — found that the administration broke the law by withholding Head Start money. Between January 20 and April 15, 2025, HHS pushed out over $825 million less than the year before, about 65% of the prior year's rate. GAO ruled it violated the Impoundment Control Act. During last fall's shutdown, the administration illegally refused to deliver SNAP benefits at all.

Two-thirds of us can't afford groceries

This is not a story about a distant underclass.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll taken July 8–13, 2026 found that about two-thirds of Americans now call the cost of groceries unaffordable. Among households earning under $50,000, it's 82 percent. Among households earning over $100,000, it's 56 percent.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they don't have a good chance at improving their standard of living in this country. Fifty-four percent say the economy and high prices are the single most important thing driving their vote this year.

So the people who ran on lowering your grocery bill have instead delivered the largest food assistance cut in American history, higher insurance premiums, and record deductibles — while two-thirds of the country says it can't afford to eat.

Trinity Goodman had a message for the president.

"You do not know what you're doing to people who are struggling to live. You got money in the bank. You don't know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn't be able to handle it."

She is selling her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive. And there is a real chance they take her $298 anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Nicholas Kristof, "Meet the Americans Who Can't Afford Haircuts or Toilet Paper," The New York Times, August 1, 2026. Photo: Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times.