Strawberry Pedlar by William P. Chappel, courtesy of The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954

They're killing SNAP. We should try to stop them.

Issue No. 13 | Saving SNAP

The Occasional Tamarkin has never been timely—a deep ambivalence about timeliness is built right into the name!—nor has it ever been about politics. But today I write to you quickly and with a little desperation. I am sickened by the conversation (or, really, the lack thereof) about SNAP. So I'm adding to the conversation myself. It's one of the only things I can do. My hope is that this piece inspires you to put some pressure on your reps, but even more so I hope that it inspires you to speak out. Especially if you, like me, are a food writer with a platform. If it's our job to write about how people eat, it's also our job to write about how they may not. Thank you, as always, for reading.

As Republicans debate the enormous bill that's now on the way to the Senate, it’s useful to pay attention to what’s a sticking point and what is not. Medicaid is clearly a sticking point. Clean energy is another one. But the decimation of SNAP—still sometimes thought of as “food stamps”—is not a sticking point at all. Here, Republicans are united: they want to kill SNAP with a million tiny cuts, and they don’t care who goes hungry because of it, even though many of the people who will suffer are the very people who put them in office.

About 42 million people depend on SNAP to feed themselves and their families. It’s not a wildly generous program: in 2024 the average person on SNAP received $6.25 per day, or $187.54 per month. If this bill gets passed by the Senate, millions of people—especially older people and parents—will lose this modest but lifesaving benefit, or have to jump through ridiculous hoops to keep it.

Here’s a quick and incomplete summary of what Republicans put into the bill that just passed in the House:

Expanded work requirements for SNAP to people up to 64 years old. Right now the work requirement applies to people up to 54 years old. Let’s say you’re a 61-year-old who is retired, or disabled, or was laid off, and you’re on a budget; SNAP helps you buy groceries so you don’t go hungry. If this bill becomes law you’ll need to scramble to find a job in order to keep getting your benefit. Which is ridiculous, because if it were easy for you to work, you probably would—the truth is that the majority of SNAP beneficiaries do.
Expanded work requirements to more parents. At present anybody with a dependent is spared a work requirement to receive SNAP. Under the new bill this exception will only apply to people with dependents age 7 and younger while, according to anti-hunger org Mazon, “carving out an exemption for anyone responsible for a child who is married to someone who works — a clear attack on single mothers and a shocking attempt to enforce marriage.”
Shifts some burden to states to pay for SNAP. The new bill asks states to kick in 5 to 25 percent of SNAP’s costs. Here’s the problem with that: the states don’t have the money in their budgets. Why would they? For 50 years, SNAP has been paid for federally. In order to pay for SNAP, states would likely end up putting further limits on who is eligible—which is exactly what Republicans want.

The above measures are carefully calculated to weaken SNAP and put it on a slow, painful path towards death. Why? I have no idea. By every measure, SNAP is effective. It is far and away the best way to address hunger. Compared to food banks—which will never adequately address hunger, and were never designed to—SNAP is more efficient, more flexible, more dignified. And SNAP stimulates economic activity: A purchase at the grocery store paid for with SNAP benefits is still a purchase for that store. In 2019 a USDA report on the “SNAP multiplier” effect found that “the total effect of $1 billion in SNAP benefits [is] $1.5 billion in gross domestic product.” So do not believe for a second that cutting SNAP is about saving money.

Anybody who doubts the power and possibility of SNAP need only look at what happened in 2021, when SNAP benefits across the board were increased 15 percent. Almost instantly, poverty rates hit record lows. And when that increase expired, poverty rates shot right up again. The signal is clear: we need more investment in SNAP, not less. Obviously, we’re a far way from that.

More poverty, more hunger, more malnourished seniors and children—that’s what we can expect if this bill passes. I’m sending this to you now because this is a disaster that can maybe still be averted. Maybe. As of this writing, the bill has just been passed by the House. Now it’s time to put pressure on the Senate.

Republicans will only feign shame on this issue if we force them to. We need to scare them. Today—right now!—tell your congresspeople that you see what’s happening with SNAP. (I told mine, and Senator Schumer wrote back! Still waiting to hear from Gillibrand.) This form makes it incredibly easy—you don’t even need to know your senator’s name (though it’s not a bad idea for you to know it). After you’ve pressured your reps, tell other people to pressure them. Post about this on social media. And if you’re a food writer or a cooking influencer (as many of my subscribers are), perhaps consider this as part of your beat—to cover what and how people eat.

We need to be loud. Not because we’re going to change anybody’s mind—we will never change the minds of the Republicans who want poor people to go hungry, who want to starve the very voters who gave them their jobs. But we can scare them. We can tell them we’re paying attention. SNAP is not a sticking point for Republicans, but if we’re loud enough today and tomorrow and over the weekend, we can make it one.