The Big Beautiful Bill did not just cut Medicaid. It cut food stamps too.
Since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed on July 4, 2025, SNAP participation has dropped by more than 3.5 million people. That is a 9 percent decline in eight months. And the biggest cuts have not hit yet. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 2.4 million people will be removed from the program in a typical month over the next decade. The provisions driving those numbers are still rolling out.
Here is what is actually in the bill.
The Program
SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — serves about 42 million Americans. It is the largest food assistance program in the country and one of the most effective anti-poverty tools the federal government operates. Benefits average about $6 per person per day. The program expands automatically during recessions, when more families qualify, and contracts as the economy improves. That automatic stabilizer function is part of what makes it work. The Big Beautiful Bill cut into both the eligibility and the funding.
The Money
The law reduces SNAP funding by $186 billion over ten years. That is a 20 percent cut and the largest reduction in the history of the program. The CBO scored it that way. The figure is not a projection based on assumptions about how states will respond. It is the direct result of the provisions Congress wrote into the bill.
For comparison: the Medicaid cuts in the same bill totaled $880 billion over ten years and received considerably more attention. The SNAP cuts have been quieter. The people losing benefits have not.
The Work Requirements
The most consequential change is the expansion of work requirements. Under previous law, able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 54 had to document 20 hours per week of work, job training, or community service to receive SNAP. The Big Beautiful Bill raised that age ceiling to 64 and extended requirements to parents with children older than 14.
The CBO estimates that 800,000 adults between 55 and 64 will lose SNAP in a typical month because of the age expansion alone. Many of these are people with chronic health conditions that make sustained employment difficult. Many face age-related discrimination in hiring. The requirement to document 20 hours of work per week does not change those realities. It just cuts off their benefits if they cannot meet the paperwork threshold.
Research on earlier state-level work requirement experiments found the same pattern that emerged in Medicaid: most people who lost coverage were already working. They lost benefits because they could not navigate the documentation requirements, not because they were not working. SNAP enrollment fell. Food insecurity rose. Employment did not change.
The Cost Shift
Starting in October 2027, states will begin absorbing costs the federal government used to cover. The bill ties state cost-sharing to payment error rates. States with error rates above 6 percent will be required to cover between 5 and 15 percent of SNAP benefits themselves. Since no state has a 0 percent error rate and the federal threshold is set low enough to capture most states, this is a cost shift built into the design of the law.
The administrative funding split is also changing. SNAP administration has historically been split 50-50 between the federal government and states. Starting in 2027, states will cover 75 percent of administrative costs and the federal government will cover 25. Running the program just got three times more expensive for states.
States that cannot absorb those costs face a clear set of choices: cut eligibility, reduce benefits, or find the money somewhere else in their budgets. None of those options are good. All of them fall on the people who use the program.
What Is Already Happening
The 3.5 million people who have already lost SNAP since July are not a projection. They are people who had benefits in the summer and do not have them now. The cuts that have landed so far are early implementation. The work requirement expansion, the state cost-sharing provisions, and the administrative funding shift are all still coming.
Brookings noted that the SNAP cuts will also significantly weaken the program’s ability to respond to a recession. When job losses spike, more families qualify for food assistance. That automatic response has historically helped stabilize the economy during downturns. The Big Beautiful Bill made that response smaller and slower.
Congress called it a budget bill. The CBO called it the largest cut to food assistance in American history. The 3.5 million people who have already lost benefits did not need the CBO to tell them that. They already know.