Glenn Thompson Food Assistance Lies Pennsylvania

"Absolutely No Reductions." Two Months Later, Glenn Thompson Personally Released the Text That Cut Food Assistance.

In March 2025 the House Agriculture chairman told Pennsylvania reporters that SNAP cuts were 'a rumor' and 'just misinformation.' In May he released the committee text that wrote them. About 98,000 Pennsylvanians have since lost their food benefits.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

"Absolutely No Reductions." Two Months Later, Glenn Thompson Personally Released the Text That Cut Food Assistance.

On March 12, 2025, a reporter for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star asked the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee a direct question: would cuts to SNAP — food assistance — be on the table in the coming farm bill?

Glenn Thompson did not hedge.

"Absolutely no reductions in the nutritional benefits."

He went further. He said the whole idea was made up, and that the people saying it were acting in bad faith:

"I think that's a rumor that was started by folks who are anti-farming, and anti-Farm Bill... There has never been a situation where we're reducing or cutting benefits. That is just misinformation that some people have heard and others are purposely expressing."

He even described SNAP expansions he said his farm bill would deliver — eligibility for people previously incarcerated on felony drug charges, and a fix so that the wages of 18-to-21-year-olds still in high school wouldn't count against their family's benefits. He called it "the right thing to do and a righteous thing to do."

That was March. Here is May.

Two months later, he wrote the cuts himself

On May 12, 2025, Thompson's own office put out a press release with the headline "Chairman Thompson Releases Budget Reconciliation Text." The committee print he released was the food-assistance section of what became Trump's budget bill. His statement announcing it read:

"For far too long, the SNAP program has drifted from a bridge to support American households in need to a permanent destination riddled with bureaucratic inefficiencies, misplaced incentives, and limited accountability. This portion of the One Big, Beautiful Bill restores the program's original intent, offering a temporary helping hand while encouraging work, cracking down on loopholes exploited by states, and protecting taxpayer dollars..."

Two of the five documents his office linked in that release were one-pagers on "state accountability" and "prioritizing work in SNAP."

Sixty days earlier, warnings that this was coming were "a rumor" started by "folks who are anti-farming."

This is the part that separates Thompson from every other House Republican who voted for the bill. He didn't just vote for it. He wrote that part of it, released it under his own name, and put out a statement defending it the same day. He is the chairman. It is his committee's text. Then on July 3, 2025, he voted for final passage, which cleared the House 218 to 214.

What actually happened to Pennsylvania

A year on, the Capital-Star went back and checked.

Roughly 98,000 Pennsylvanians no longer receive food benefits because of requirements the law imposed, according to the state Department of Human Services. Total SNAP enrollment in Pennsylvania fell from 1.96 million in July 2025 to 1.74 million in May 2026 — an 11% drop. The department attributes less than half of that decline to the new law, which is how you get to the 98,000 figure.

Pennsylvania had one of the highest SNAP participation rates in the country, meaning nearly every eligible resident was enrolled. More than half of the people on it in the commonwealth are families with children.

What changed for them:

Starting last fall, anyone required to work had to document at least 20 hours a week of work, volunteering or schooling, or lose benefits. Parents with children under 14 and people with certain disabilities were exempt — parents of a 14-year-old were not.
Veterans and former foster youth, who had been exempt from the added requirements, no longer are.
The state cost-shift hasn't even started yet. When it does, Pennsylvania will have to pick up as much as $400 million in administrative costs it doesn't pay today, on top of a share of benefits. Penalties begin next fall.

And in Thompson's own district, 46,392 households — about 15% of all households in PA-15 — rely on SNAP to put food on the table, according to USDA data. That includes 17,190 households with children and 19,052 with someone over 60 in them.

The expansions he promised

Notice what's missing from the list of things that actually happened.

In March, Thompson said his farm bill would expand SNAP to people leaving prison after drug convictions, and would stop penalizing families whose teenagers work. He described both as matters of basic decency. Neither is why anybody remembers the 2025 SNAP fight.

What passed instead — through his committee, under his name — went the other direction: more paperwork, more conditions, fewer exemptions, and a bill for the states.

"It's not logical"

Anyone in the 15th District who wanted to ask Thompson how "absolutely no reductions" turned into 98,000 people losing benefits has run into the same wall.

He does not hold open, in-person town halls, and hasn't for years. In February 2017, after he turned down repeated requests for one in State College, about 350 constituents held a town hall without him and put their questions to a life-size cardboard cutout of him at the podium; his office called the people asking "paid activists" and "political opposition."

In March 2025 — the same month as the "misinformation" interview — more than 200 people rallied outside his Bellefonte office, some holding "missing" posters reading "Last seen: avoiding his constituents." He wasn't there. Constituents have since shown up outside that office nearly every Tuesday, through a record heat wave. Asked why he wouldn't attend a town hall, he told the Centre Daily Times it was "not logical."

His office won't release his calendar either. It doesn't have to — neither federal nor state open-records law covers a member of Congress's schedule, as Spotlight PA documented — so there is no way for anyone in PA-15 to check where he actually is.

Why this one is different

Politicians break promises constantly. This is a narrower and worse thing.

Thompson wasn't caught between a promise and a party leadership that overruled him. He was the leadership on this. The gavel of the House Agriculture Committee is the single most powerful position in Congress on SNAP policy, and he was holding it in both March and May. Nobody made him say "absolutely no reductions." Nobody made him call the people warning about cuts anti-farming liars. And nobody made him put his own name on the text sixty days later.

It's the same instinct that shows up in the rest of his record as chairman — writing a farm bill provision shielding pesticide manufacturers from cancer lawsuits that a bipartisan House majority had to strip out 280 to 142, and voting against the law protecting same-sex marriage three days before attending his own gay son's wedding.

Seventeen years in Congress. A gavel over the nation's food policy. And 98,000 Pennsylvanians who were told, on the record, that this wasn't going to happen.