The House Budget Committee-approved budget plan would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) by more than $150 billion — over 20 percent — over the next ten years (2017-2026). A cut of this magnitude would necessitate ending food assistance for millions of low-income families, cutting benefits for millions of these households, or some combination of the two.(1) The committee has proposed similarly deep SNAP cuts in each of its last five budgets. This year’s budget has two categories of SNAP cuts:...

The cuts would come on top of SNAP cuts that occurred in recent years or are occurring under current law....

Claims that cuts are needed to rein in SNAP are misplaced. As it was designed to do, SNAP expanded to meet growing need in the wake of the Great Recession. But SNAP caseloads and spending have since begun falling. The number of SNAP recipients shrank by 2.6 million people in the three years after peaking in December 2012, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects SNAP spending to return to its 1995 level as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020 under current law.(5)

Roughly 90 percent of SNAP spending goes for food assistance, and most of the rest covers state administrative costs to determine program eligibility and operate SNAP properly. Therefore, policymakers couldn’t achieve cuts of the magnitude in the House Budget Committee’s block grant without substantially scaling back eligibility or reducing benefits deeply, with significant effects on low-income people.(6) Table 1 provides state-by-state estimates of the potential impact.