Take a bow, Republicans: Millions more Americans are going hungry, thanks to you

This is the horrifying result of the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in That Republican Bill. (You know, the one they like to call by the most ridiculous name possible.)

• SNAP participation is down by more than 4.5 million people, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That's 4.5 million people who were already, by definition, struggling to put enough food on the table and now have much less.
• At least a million, and likely more than 1.5 million, children have lost their SNAP benefits. That's 1.5 million hungry kids, brought to you by legislation Republicans like to call "beautiful."
• SNAP participation dropped by 55% in Arizona before rebounding slightly. According to the most recent data, the drop is now only 48%. (But that gap between 55% and 48% means people who were going hungry for some period of time. More about them in a minute.)
• Arizona is an outlier, but not by enough. SNAP participation has dropped by 10% or more in 23 states.

These numbers are hungry people.

The New York Times did a deep dive on Arizona, where burdensome new paperwork requirements combined with cuts to the staff who process the paperwork have led to many people being cut from SNAP despite being eligible even under the 2025 Republican law. Some Arizonans got notices requiring them to prove their eligibility that were dated after the deadline for providing the proof.

This is the kind of thing that's going on:

Four months into an appeal, Ms. McDonald, a cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds, bustles to food banks, stretches ground turkey with oatmeal, and skips meals to feed three [teenage grandsons she is raising]. But grocery bills have left her behind on the rent, and she describes her worries as a mental tax, paid nightly on her pillow.

“I go to sleep thinking about what are we going to have,” she says. “I’m exhausted.”

And this:

[One 28-year-old woman's] $24,000-a-year job is not enough to keep her and two children fed, she said, and food banks offer less help than SNAP. She stopped breastfeeding because she fears she lacks nutrients, and after exhausting her cash on groceries, she sold her TV to pay the rent. She said she has lost 50 pounds and has fantasies about stealing food. 

Arizona is extreme, but to be clear, what's going on is states responding to a federal law. If the Trump administration deems them to have error rates too high – to be making too many mistakes about who's eligible or how much they should get – states will face massive fines that will force even greater cuts in the aid they distribute. Those cuts are coming in 2027.

In my home state of Massachusetts, nearly 175,000 people have lost SNAP benefits. More than 61,000 of them are children.

During the school year, I volunteer at a free food market. Almost everyone who comes to it either has kids at home or is an elder. A typical haul might include a shelf-stable container of milk, some rice, some beans, some oatmeal or cereal, a jar of peanut butter, a couple cans of tuna, a dozen eggs, and some fruits and vegetables – some apples, bananas, carrots, potatoes, onions, and maybe two or three things like avocados or mangos, peppers or lettuce, zucchini or plantains. It's not bad, but it's not replacing an average monthly benefit of $204 for an individual or $715 for a family of four. What it should be is a nice extra, a bridge in a hard week or month, not a constant necessity. But it was already a necessity for too many even before the latest round of cruelty.

A conversation that lives in my mind was with a woman who came over from housing for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. She arrived at the end of the market – her neighbor had just told her about it – and most of the good stuff was gone. No more eggs or milk, not much produce. She asked if it was ok to take a second zucchini. Take all the zucchini you want, we told her. We're almost done here anyway. She asked if she could take a second can of soup. Of course. She kept asking and we kept saying yes, at the end of the market it would be put out for families picking their kids up from afterschool, then maybe sent to another food pantry, but she had missed so much of what we'd had, she should have extra of what was left. She had that kind of excited-but-rattled demeanor you get when something wonderful has been held out to you and you're still thinking maybe it's too good to be true. She left with two bags of food, of mac and cheese, tomato sauce, tuna, canned peaches, those zucchini and soup, and some peanut butter – not a lot of variety, unless you've been mostly living on cereal and peanut butter, which she had.

"This is going to be more food than I've had in my house in weeks," she said, a little breathless. Two bags of food that was what we had left at the end of the day. I think of her when I read about a 69-pound cancer survivor grandmother going to Arizona food banks and skipping meals. And now, thanks to Republicans, there are so many more people for whom food pantries will be the only way to feed themselves and their kids.