Last year, an average of 42 million Americans got help buying groceries every month — roughly 1 in 8 of us. As of April, that number was down to 37 million.

More than 4 million people lost food assistance in nine months. A huge share of them are kids.

Nothing about the economy explains it. Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent that entire time. Grocery prices kept going up. Nobody woke up one morning and stopped needing food.

What changed is the law. Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" in July 2025, and in state after state the decline accelerated right after it was signed.

And here's the part worth sitting with: the biggest cut hasn't even happened yet. It starts in October.

What the Agriculture Secretary said about it

In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a number to social media like a scoreboard: "4.3 million off SNAP and counting!"

She added that "Americans are getting back to work," that "healthy employment numbers mean less reliance on government programs," and that America "is back in business!"

In late April, on Fox Business, she had given the same explanation for the drop: "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."

The Associated Press ran that claim through the data and the researchers who study it. It didn't hold up.

Caitlin Caspi, who studies food insecurity at the University of Connecticut, told the AP the shape of the decline doesn't match a jobs story at all: "We're not seeing a linear kind of drop-off. We do not see, for example, a pattern of decline in unemployment that would match the pattern of decline in SNAP participation." She also said flatly that she sees no evidence of a drop in fraud driving it.

Roger Figueroa, who studies nutrition at Cornell, pointed to a different cause: "What we've seen in terms of the data is that the trend in participation declines seems to be related to the program being harder to access."

That's the whole story. They made it harder. Then they took credit for the result.

The USDA's own line to NPR was that participation "tends to fluctuate" and the drop isn't representative of any one policy. That's a strange thing to say about the sharpest decline in three decades — the last time this many people fell off this fast was after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

Arizona is what this looks like when it's finished

If you want to see where the rest of the country is headed, look at Arizona.

Arizona had 882,419 people on SNAP in July 2025. By April, it was 400,641. That's a 54.6% drop. More than half the program, gone in nine months. No other state is close — the next steepest declines are Louisiana at 21%, Florida at 19% and Oklahoma at about 18%.

Then there's this, from the Arizona Food Bank Network, which has tracked the numbers the same way since 2016: for the first time, more Arizonans are visiting food banks each month than are enrolled in food stamps.

Their conclusion is one sentence long. "People need food banks now more than at any point in the last 10 years."

Natalie Jayroe, who runs the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, told NPR what that means for everyone else. "We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine," she said. "We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario."

This has names attached to it in Arizona

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

The House passed the final version of the bill on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. It came down to four votes. Every single Republican in Arizona's delegation voted yes:

• Andy Biggs — AZ-05, now running for governor
• David Schweikert — AZ-01, also now running for governor
• Paul Gosar — AZ-09
• Eli Crane — AZ-02
• Juan Ciscomani — AZ-06
• Abraham Hamadeh — AZ-08

All six of them represent a state where 1 in 5 kids already faces hunger. Any one of them could have flipped it.

Nine months later, more than half the people on food stamps in their state are off the program, and Arizonans are lining up at food banks in numbers the state hasn't seen in a decade. Biggs and Schweikert are now asking those same Arizonans to make one of them governor — the office that will have to decide, starting in October, whether Arizona can still afford to run SNAP at all.

Who they specifically decided to stop protecting

The eligibility changes weren't a broad trim. Congress went in and named groups.

Under the old rules, certain people were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits because lawmakers had recognized they were in genuine crisis. Republicans deleted those protections:

• Veterans
• People experiencing homelessness
• Young people aging out of foster care

They also pushed work rules onto parents with a child as young as 14, and raised the top age from 54 all the way to 64. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the work-rule changes alone will cut about 2.4 million people from SNAP in an average month through 2034.

And they ended food aid for a small group of legal immigrants — refugees, people seeking asylum, and victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

Those are the people the "waste, fraud and abuse" language was covering for.

The human version of this is not abstract. We wrote yesterday about a woman in Oklahoma City who sells her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive and had $3.78 in her checking account. Her food stamps come to $298 a month, and there's a real chance she loses those too.

The bill that hits in October

Here's what almost nobody is talking about.

For decades, Washington and the states split the cost of running SNAP 50-50. Starting October 1, 2026 — this fall — the federal government drops to 25%, and states have to cover 75%.

Then, on October 1, 2027, states start paying for the food benefits themselves for the first time in the program's history — between 5% and 15%, depending on their "error rate." Almost half of states could owe $100 million or more.

An error rate sounds like fraud. It isn't. It's a count of overpayments and underpayments, mostly honest mistakes — a typo, a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family not knowing what to report. We've walked through how that formula works and why it quietly rewards states for kicking eligible people off: wrongly denying someone benefits doesn't count as an error at all.

The Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality ran the state budgets. On average, states will have to spend two to three times more of their own money on SNAP — a median increase of about 202%. In 15 states it's more than 300%. In Florida, nearly 770%.

States have to balance their budgets. So that money comes out of schools, roads, or the food program itself.

Some states are already talking about quitting

A survey of state SNAP agencies this spring found 29% saying they may have to narrow eligibility further, and 11% saying they might withdraw or pause the program entirely.

Of the 39 states that responded, 15 said they are now prioritizing payment accuracy over getting benefits to people on time. That is the trade-off in plain language: paperwork first, hungry families second.

"There's really an existential crisis in the future of SNAP," said Lexie Kuznick of the American Public Human Services Association.

And there's no backstop. Starsky Wilson of the Children's Defense Fund said it as bluntly as it can be said: "There's no replacement for SNAP if a state gets rid of it."

It doesn't stop at the poor

If you don't use SNAP, you still pay for this.

Every food stamp dollar gets spent at a grocery store, usually within days, usually close to home. The National Grocers Association estimates the eligibility cuts total $88 billion over ten years, and that SNAP sales will fall about 8.7% on average over the next nine years.

In a small town, that's the difference between the grocery store staying open and not. When it closes, everybody drives farther for milk.

The bottom line

Republicans campaigned on bringing down the cost of groceries. What they passed instead is the largest cut to food assistance in American history — nearly $187 billion — and they timed the expensive parts to land after the votes were counted.

Four million people are already gone. The state cost shift starts in October. The benefit cost shift lands in 2027.

And the official in charge of feeding this country is posting the casualty count like a win.

We deserve better.

Source

Juliana Kim, Over 4 million people are no longer receiving food aid amid sweeping changes to SNAP, NPR, August 3, 2026. Lead photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.