The Biggest Economic Story Nobody's Talking About | Diving In

Over the past year, Congress passed one of the biggest
cuts to food assistance in a generation. And what's happened
since it's been bigger, broader, and harsher than most people realize.
This is one of the biggest economic stories in the
country right now, and somehow almost nobody's talking about it.
On average, food stamps pay about one hundred and eighty
eight dollars per month. That's six dollars a day for
the typical person, six dollars a day for milk cereal.
Maybe you're trying to afford eggs, rice, peanut butter, it's
six dollars a day. It can help. It's the thing
that lets a parent say yes to fruit this week
instead of no. So hold that number in your head.
A lot of folks who need help. They're just not
getting it. It touches millions of people, and somehow almost
nobody's talking about it. So that's I'm going to do.
I'm going to tell it to you as a story
in four parts. First, let's explore what food stamps actually
are and who leans on them. Second, let's dig into
how these cuts ended up inside Trump's big twenty twenty
five budget law. The one that he calls the One
Big Beautiful Bill Act. Third, let's explore what the law
actually changed. And Fourth, well, we now know we have
data on what's happened, since we're seeing that the damage
has spread well beyond the people that the original reforms
were supposedly aimed at. I'm justin morphus. I'm an economist,
so I spent a lot of time thinking about numbers
that have real people behind them. Today, the numbers are
stark enough that I'm going to put the graphs down
and just tell you what's happening. Let's begin. So first,
what is SNAP? SNAP stands for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Many folks still call it food stamps, even though the
benefits are now delivered ill electronically using something like a
debit card rather than using old school stamps. It's the
United States main program for helping low income folks by groceries.
That last word matters, groceries. I'm not going to say
I invented that word. You know who uses the work.
I started using the work the groceries. But it's about groceries.
It's not about restaurant meals or fancy extras. Just groceries.
That's all it can be spent on is I said
the average benefit its about one hundred and eighty eight
bucks per person per month, or six bucks a day. Look,
that's not enough to live on, but it's enough to help.
It helps when the paycheck runs out before the month does.
It helps, when wrench to helps, When the power bill
lands the same week as the car needs repair, and
the kids get sick and the hours get cut, something's
got to give. For millions of families, food stamps are
what makes sure that's something that gives, isn't dinner. So
who does the program help? Often it's kids and older folks,
people with disabilities, a lot of folks getting assistance, or
workers who were stuck in low paying jobs, and a
lot of single parents trying to keep a household running
on wages that just don't stretch, not to mention childcare.
About a fifth of the people on the program are
over sixty, and about half of all households getting food
stamps include either an older adult or someone with a disability.
I don't know your family, but for a lot of folks,
that could be your mum, your uncle, or your cousin.
That's who this program's for. And that's why there's six
dollars a day. Number matters in Washington. Six bucks might
sound small, but in a family's kitchen when they're doing
it tough, it doesn't. So now let's pan back, let's
figure out how this program ended up getting cut. In
July twenty twenty five, Congress passed Trump's big budget law,
the one he calls the Big Beautiful Bill, and tucked
inside it were very large cuts to food stamps. So
why why go after food assistance? Well, that's because the
bill was trying to do something else at the same time.
It was handing out large tax cuts, especially to rich households.
And to get the whole thing through the Senate, Congress
used a special process called reconciliation. Don't let one of
those parliamentary nerds geek out too much. This is just
the fast track that lets a simple majority pass a
budget bill without having to get sixty votes in the Senate.
Here's why that matters. First of all, you can pass
the thing even without getting extra Democrats aboard, and second,
reconciliations of budget process because of that, the arithmetic has
to work if you want to put more money in
some people's pockets through tax cuts, and you need the
bill to stay inside the budget target, so that means
you need to take money out of someone else's pockets.
That someone else was in part families on food stamps.
The Congressional Budget Office, which is Congress's own non partisans corekeeper,
they say that the food stamp changes in this low
cut federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over
the next decade. So it's one of the biggest ways
that this bill made room for everything else that it
wanted to do. And the shape of it, frankly, it's ugly.
Rich households got tax cuts, poorer households got their food
aids slashed, also their healthcare. If you put all the
pieces together, this bill was the largest single redistribution from
Porter Rich in one piece of legislation in American history.
So what actually changed when this new law was passed. Well,
let's start by understanding how the old system went for decades.
The deal was this the federal government, Well, it actually
paid for all of the food stamp benefits, but the
states are in the program, the paperwork, the officers, all
of it. That's blit matted Because when families needed help
buying groceries. Well, the state didn't have to scrape together
the money for the benefits themselves. Washington would effectively pay
the grocery bill. The new law changed that in two ways. First,
it changed who can get cut off directly. Before this law,
there was already a strict rule for some adults. If
you were in a certain category and you couldn't prove
that you're putting in enough hours at work, you could
only get food stamps for three months out of every
three years. They were pretty restrictive rules, but they only
applied to folks, so you might think at least had
a chance to get by it on their own. Now
this new set of reforms, they took that rule and
they've stretched it and applied it to a bunch of others.
So those same restrictions now cover older adults, folks all
the way up to age sixty four. It now covers
some parents it's going to struggle with childcare there, and
also caregivers. They've also made it harder for states to
ease up on the rules when jobs were scarce, So
that's the first thing. More people now can be knocked
off food stamps after just three months. So for those
folks it's now the calendar rather than their need that
determines whether they qualify for assistance. But the second change,
this one may matter even more. You see, Washington has
cut in half the share that it pays the states
for actually administering the program, which means states now have
to pay part of the benefit costs themselves. In the
size of that bill that the states pay it depends
on what's called the payment error rate. Okay, so picture
yourself now running a state food stamp agency. Now you're
not just trying to help eligible families, you're also trying
to dodge a future bill from Washington. Well, that's going
to change how you and your agency behave your response.
It's likely going to mean you're going to impose more paperwork,
require more verification, impose more checks and rechecks. There'll be
more caution, more delay. The end results basically going to
make it harder for families to get help without officially
making it harder to get help. And if you've ever
dealt with one of these systems, you know exactly what
that means. On the ground, more letters that you can't decode,
more time on hold, more trips to the office, more
chances to blow a deadline, loseer document, or just give up.
A system that was already a hassle and frankly kind
of humiliating, just got worse. Here's the tweak that really matters.
That new formula that determines how much the states have
to put in well, it turns in part on that
payment error rate. Now the payment error rate officially, that
includes both over payments and under payments. So if the
state gives someone too much money, that's an error. If
it gives them too little, that's also an error. But
there's a hole in all of this, and it's a hole.
It boils my blood. You see, if a family gets
wrongly denied food stamps altogether or wrongly booted off the program,
that's not counted as an error. It doesn't show up
in the error rate. I want to say that again,
because it's the whole game. The system will ding the
state for paying the wrong amount, but not for making
it too hard for eligible folks to get through the
door in the first place. Wrong amount, that's a mistake.
Wrong family turned away empty handed. Apparently that's not a mistake.
That detail really matters for a harsher system. In a
different form of administration. So this law didn't just cut
food aid. It changed the machinery and in a way
that made food stamps harder to get and easy to lose.
And so what I want to do is help quantify
that and give you a sense of how that's actually
played out in reality. Here, I'm going to bring in
the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
These are one of the sharpest, most careful think tanks
in Washington on their stuff. When I say they're careful,
I'm in it. These folks put footnotes on their footnotes.
They've been tracking food stamp enrollment month by month, and
their numbers they're stark. Between the middle of last year
when the law passed and the most recent numbers we have,
which is from March of this year, more than four
million people lost food assistance, four million, each of them
losing roughly six dollars a day towards groceries. Let me
make that a bit plainer. The official forecast already expected
the program to shrink. Everyone knew that, But how this
has played out in practice. The actual drop has been bigger,
and it's landed sooner than the government's own budget scorekeepers.
It penciled in. That tells you something. This wasn't a
small trim around the edges. This was a big, fast,
loss of help. Now you might be wondering, Okay, there's
fewer people on food stamps. Is that a bad thing?
Maybe fewer people need the help. Hey, look, fair question.
But the evidence is that's not what's going on. That's
not what happened at all. We know that because over
this period of time unemployment's been roughly roughly flat. It's
not like all of a sudden everyone found jobs. And
the survey data they show that folks are still having
trouble affording food, and we know that food price has
been going up. In twenty twenty five, nearly one in
four adults reported not being able to reliably afford enough food.
Among working age adults living with kids, that was closer
to one in three. So the need for help it
didn't disappear. What disappeared was the help itself, and perhaps
the most important part, the folks who were now being
cut off or booted off or never allowed onto food stamps.
It's a really vulnerable group, and it's much broader than
the group that was originally intended. So even if you
like the original pitch for the law, and I'm not
sure that I do. But even if you thought genuinely
that the tighter rules on a narrower group of working
age adults was good policy, that's not just what happened.
The number of people and the types of people who
are getting kicked off food stamps, it's not that narrow sliver.
It's broad. It's messy, and it's harsh. And the clearest
way to see that is by looking at what's happening
to kids. There are some states where we can actually
see the number of kids who are getting food stamps,
and in that set of states, there's about a million
fewer kids getting food stamps by spring of twenty twenty
six relative to before with the law past. That's only
for the states for which we have data, so we
extrapolate very carefully to the rest of the country. It's
likely that we're booted more than one and a half
million kids off food stamps. That's a huge number. And
nobody fueled up on the floor of Congress and said,
our goal here is to take food off the table
for a million and a half children. That was never
the pitch, but it's what's happening, and it's kind of
inevitable because once a system gets tighter and slower and
more suspicious, the folks you keep out of food stamps,
they're not just going to be a little box. It's
going to spread to kids and working families and seniors
and people with disabilities and households that were already stretched thin.
So yes, this was a budget cut, but more than that,
this has turned out to be a redesign of the
whole machine that delivers the help. A system that used
to be about getting food to eligible families is now
under a lot more pressure to screen, to doubt, to delay,
and to deny. If you build a system to be
more suspicious, you get more suspicion. You build it to
be more cumbersome, and you get more people giving up.
Build it to be more punishing, and you get more
people punished. You shouldn't be surprised when a lot more
people get hurt than the politicians ever up to at
the time. There's a broader lesson here, And there's a
habit of mine that I want you to take away
when you think about programs like this. When politicians cut
a program, don't just ask how much money they saved.
That's what you can read in all the budget papers.
Ask who lost what. In this case, what rich households
got was tax cuts. What millions of poorer households lost
was a modest but essential food benefit, worth about six
bucks a day in Washington. Six bucks a day. It
sounds small, doesn't go very far. It sounds like nothing,
but in a kitchen where milk is running low and
the months on over yet it's a lot, and it's
a lot to do without.