“Hunger…is a cry that rises to heaven and requires a swift response from every nation, every international organization, every regional, local or private body. No one can remain on the sidelines in the fight against hunger.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops included these words from Pope Leo XIV in a letter to the Senate on July 9 about the priorities of the Farm Bill. The bill sets agricultural policies and funds programs that address hunger in the United States. Typically passed every five years, it is currently three years overdue.
The bishops’ letter expresses their concern that the version of the Farm Bill currently under consideration in the Senate does not adequately support the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), “our nation’s most effective and responsive tool to combat hunger.” Instead of strengthening the program, the bill “shifts focus away from addressing hunger itself and toward additional administrative and compliance requirements imposed in the reconciliation legislation enacted last year that risk undermining the effectiveness of SNAP and related programs.”
The bishops are referring to H.R. 1, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed on July 4 of last year. H.R. 1 slashed federal SNAP funding—$18.7 billion annually, or the amount needed to wage one week of the Iran War—and shifted those costs to individual states. Though the changes won’t begin to go into effect for a few more months, some states have already had to do more work with not enough staff, which can delay or derail benefit applications.
The changes include reducing the amount the federal government pays in SNAP’s administrative costs from 50 percent to 25 percent, which will add millions to state budgets. While the federal government has historically paid all of the benefit costs, states will now have to contribute depending on their “error rate”—the rate at which over- or underpayment of benefits are made. States with rates above 6 percent will have to fund up to 15 percent of benefits. The bill also tightens eligibility requirements and restricts updates to the formula used to calculate benefits.
A year later, as states have prepared for these changes, four million fewer people are enrolled in SNAP—an 11 percent reduction. The reasons are multifaceted. Some people can’t meet the stricter work requirements or aren’t able to provide documentation of the work they do. Some states have effectively stopped processing new SNAP applications because the cuts have forced them to eliminate staff.
The administration trumpets the reduction of SNAP enrollees as evidence that fewer people are going hungry. That beggars belief. But it would be hard to know anyway, since the Trump administration ended the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s mandate to publish reports on food insecurity last year. Still, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has framed the reduced number of people receiving benefits as an achievement—either because the economy is better or because “waste” and “fraud” have been eliminated from the program. Rollins has called SNAP “so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt” and claimed without proof that undocumented immigrants have been getting benefits “meant for American families.”
That is willful ignorance or plain dishonesty. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for SNAP funding, and they are not somehow siphoning off its funds en masse. Moreover, the error rate being used to determine the payment burden is different from the rate of fraud. Most fraud in the SNAP program is perpetrated by retailers and other businesses that have contracts with the government, not by individual SNAP beneficiaries. Reducing error rates will not do anything to reduce such fraud. Further, the administration must be aware that some states can’t take on the added burdens; indeed, numerous states have already said they might need to leave the SNAP program entirely, and even more said they might need to narrow eligibility.
Since the Trump administration must know that its policies don’t combat hunger or make SNAP more efficient, the only conclusion left to draw is that it simply doesn’t like food assistance and that it doesn’t care about preventing hunger in the United States. “We’re experiencing a structural change that’s clearly intended to significantly reduce the resources that are available for people, regardless of how many food insecure people we have,” Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told Civil Eats.
In their letter, the bishops recommend that the Senate delay the cost-sharing shift to give states more time to adjust. The delay is in neither the House nor Senate versions of the Farm Bill. The USCCB sent its letter as the reconciliation process was underway, and it is unlikely that the provision they propose will be added to the final version.
It’s estimated that some 48 million people in the United States, including 7.3 million children, do not consistently have enough food to eat. The pope is right: no one should be on the sidelines in the fight against hunger—especially when the fight against the hungry is being so ruthlessly waged.
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