The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will see changes after President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” in early July.
The new law changes the work requirements for who’s eligible to receive SNAP. Able-bodied adults without dependents up to the age of 64 will need to work 80 hours a month to receive benefits.
That’s a change from the current age cap of 54.
“Right now, almost three-quarters of able-bodied adults without dependents on SNAP have no earned income and the fraud rate is high,” wrote the White House, days before President Trump signed the bill. “We are committed to preserving SNAP for the truly needy.”
Currently, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “SNAP has two sets of work requirements, the general work requirements and the able bodied adult without dependents (ABAWD) work requirements.”
According to experts at the Urban Institute, a think tank focused on social and economic policy, the new changes could force some people who used SNAP before to rely on already overwhelmed food banks instead.
“These are basically the biggest cuts to SNAP that the program has ever seen,” said Poonam Gupta, a research associate with the Urban Institute.
“Definitely expect to see bigger lines at food banks, increased pressures on food banks to acquire enough food to be able to support the higher number of families that they’ll see,” Gupta said.
Carlos Rojo, a food bank coordinator at the Community Action Center in Pullman, Washington, said things are getting a little hectic.
“We are worried about our community and how it’s going to affect them,” he said.
Rojo said the Community Action Center currently serves around 500 families, and noted the organization is currently working to ensure it will have enough food to provide.
Hilary Seligman is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She said at the same time people could become more reliant on food banks after SNAP requirements change, food banks themselves are experiencing less funding from the federal government.
“This is a double whammy for the food banks — it’s going to be really difficult for them. But what we’ve seen over the years is that food banks always step up in a crisis,” Seligman said.
The Urban Institute estimates that over 500,000 families in Washington state could be impacted.
