May 13, 2025 10:44 AM UTC

Like Those Medicaid Cuts? You'll LOVE The Food Stamp Cuts

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

As Politico’s Grace Yarrow reports, while Colorado’s Rep. Gabe Evans and the House Energy and Commerce Committee put the finishing touches on their bill to throw almost 9 million Americans off of Medicaid coverage over the next decade, the Republican-controlled House Agriculture Committee is working on squeezing hundreds of billions of dollars out of food assistance as America’s self-imposed belt-tightening campaign under the GOP trifecta in Washington ramps up.

In other words, literal belt tightening:

The House Agriculture Committee’s reconciliation proposal would save up to $300 billion over the next decade largely through cuts to the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, according to long-awaited Congressional Budget Office estimates viewed by POLITICO.

The savings from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be well over the committee’s instructed target of $230 billion in spending cuts, giving House Republicans just enough wiggle room to include a $60 billion farm bill package in their megabill.

The committee will meet Tuesday night to mark up its portion of the bill.

What does cutting $300 billion from the food assistance program that 42 million Americans including half a million in Colorado look like, you ask? There’s the standard erection of new paperwork and physical work requirements intended to make keeping coverage harder, while bureaucratically knocking some number of recipients out of the program whether they are eligible or not. But that’s just the beginning, as the Center for American Progress’ Kyle Ross outlined yesterday in their analysis of the Agriculture Committee’s proposed cuts:

House Republicans made their priorities apparent in their recent proposal, released by the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, to enact the largest Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cut in history. The package aims to cut $290 billion (nearly 30 percent) from SNAP, largely by shifting benefit costs to states for the first time, linking this new cost-sharing formula to state error rates.

The package would also expand burdensome paperwork requirements to older Americans and families with children and freeze future benefit increases that would help households adjust to rising food costs.

Members of the committee have claimed that the reconciliation process would target waste, fraud, and abuse while preserving benefits for those most in need, but SNAP is not filled with wasteful spending. The proposed cuts will take food away from eligible children and families in need.

Every time you read about a proposal to “shift costs to the states” as a Colorado resident, the first thing to understand is that Colorado has no financial means to absorb these proposed cost shifts due to our already tight and constitutionally-mandated balanced budget. A “cost shift to states” for vital programs like food assistance is not actually a cut, but a shirking of responsibility by one party, the GOP-controlled federal government, requiring another, in this case the states, to make up as much of the difference as possible. Just like the impending Medicaid cuts, these changes to food stamp funding will require the legislature to take action, likely before the next regular session, and we’ll be watching local Republicans like Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer of the state’s Joint Budget Committee to see how they square what Republicans are doing in Washington with the best interests of Coloradans.

The second major problem with these proposed SNAP benefit cuts is they eliminate increases meant to keep pace with the rising cost of food–which after years of inflation seems like a plan designed to force recipients to eat less over time:

Preventing future benefit increases will result in outdated benefits and prevent recipients from keeping pace with the rising costs associated with maintaining a healthy diet.

All of this forecast misery inflicted on Americans at the neediest end of the economy raises the obvious question, just like with the cuts Gabe Evans is championing to Medicaid: why are we doing this? Current polls show public support for the SNAP program over 60%, with only 33% supporting cuts to the program. The only reason 10% of the population of Colorado is facing jeopardized food security is the same reason hundreds of thousands of Coloradans are worried about losing their health coverage.

This is what Donald Trump wants. This is what Republicans want. They are doing this not because they have to, or because the voters support it, but because they can.