Senate Agriculture Committee’s Revised Work Requirement Would Risk Taking Away Food Assistance From More Than 5 Million People: State Estimates

Revised legislation released June 25 by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman would slightly modify several of the SNAP cuts in Senate Republican leaders’ reconciliation plan, but the bottom line would be the same: the legislation would take food assistance away from millions of people. More than 5 million people — about 1 in 8 SNAP participants — live in households that would be at risk of losing at least some of their food assistance under the proposal to cut off eligibility for people who don’t meet a red-tape-laden, ineffective work requirement.^[1] (See Table 1 for state-by-state estimates.) Those at risk include about 800,000 children and more than half a million adults aged 65 or older and adults with disabilities. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated that more than 2 million people in total would be cut from SNAP under the work requirement provision.

One of the harshest cuts in the Senate Agriculture Committee reconciliation plan, this proposal would take food assistance away from people — including, for the first time ever, parents whose youngest child is at least 14 years old and adults aged 55 to 64 — who can’t show that they are working 20 hours a week or prove that they qualify for an exemption. The requirement also applies to grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, and foster parents. The earlier version of the Senate plan applied to adults in households with children as young as 10 years old.^[2]

Other people at risk of losing SNAP assistance entirely or seeing their family’s benefits cut (under both the revised and original Senate Agriculture Committee plans) include veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, who would be stripped of their current exemptions from the work requirement; and people living in areas with high unemployment, as the Senate plan would make it harder for states to seek a waiver from the work requirement based on local economic conditions.

Adults subject to the requirement would only be able to receive food benefits for three months in a three-year period unless they show compliance with a 20-hour-per-week work requirement or prove they qualify for an exemption, such as having a disability.

These requirements already apply to adults aged 18 to 54 who don’t have children, and experience and the evidence show they don’t raise employment rates but instead cause many people to lose needed food benefits, deepening poverty and increasing hardship.^[3] Many people who lose SNAP are working or should have qualified for an exemption, but the bureaucratic red tape made documenting their employment or proving their exemption too difficult.^[4]

While the maximum age of dependent children whose caregivers qualify for an exemption is even lower in the House reconciliation plan (6, versus 13 in the Senate), the Senate plan would still put almost a million school-aged children at risk of hunger and food insecurity, which can have lasting consequences for their physical, cognitive, and social development and their educational success.^[5]

CBO’s preliminary estimate of the earlier version of the Senate work requirement proposal found that 2.9 million people would be cut from SNAP in a typical month, including 1.1 million people who live where jobs are scarce, 900,000 adults aged 55-64, 600,000 parents with a youngest child aged 10 or older, and 270,000 veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth.^[6] Because the revised proposal exempts slightly more people by raising the maximum age of dependent children whose caregivers qualify for an exemption (from 9 to 13), the number of people who would be cut from SNAP under the revised proposal would be slightly lower, but still more than 2 million.

Given the research consistently showing that SNAP’s work requirement does not increase employment or earnings, the vast majority of people who would lose SNAP under an expanded work requirement would lose the assistance they need to afford groceries with no improvement in their job prospects or income.^[7]

Ending SNAP eligibility for these individuals would harm not only the adults subject to the requirement but also the people they live with, including children and people with disabilities, by reducing food benefits for the entire household and putting everyone in the family at greater risk of hunger. For example, if a mother with a 14-year-old is cut off SNAP, her family’s benefit would fall from a maximum of $536 per month to just $292, based on this year’s benefit levels. That’s far too little to afford food for two people. In a small number of cases, an adult’s loss of SNAP benefits would end eligibility for the entire household.

People in every state are at risk of losing their food benefits. Table 1 provides state-by-state data.