The SNAP Ripple Effect

It’s noon on a hot Tuesday in August, but the line outside the food pantry at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic church in Brooklyn, New York—which opens at 1:30 p.m.—is already more than thirty people deep. 

Barbara, age fifty, sits on her Rollator chair and waits in the line. “I had a stroke three years ago,” she tells The Progressive. Barbara speaks slowly but clearly, explaining that the stroke impaired her mobility, and that she’s at the pantry to get food while she waits for an appeal of the termination of her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to be scheduled. “I’ve brought doctor’s letters to the SNAP office,” she says. “But the workers there don’t care. They think I should work, and they cut my benefits off.” 

Barbara shakes her head in disbelief as she points to her chair. While she waits for her requested Fair Hearing—a proceeding before an administrative law judge to contest the termination of her benefits—she says she has no choice but to visit food pantries in her south Brooklyn neighborhood.

She’s not alone. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than four million people lost SNAP benefits between July 2025 and March 2026 as a result of rule changes mandated by H.R. 1—the so-called Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Donald Trump last summer. 

Many of those who lost coverage have disabilities. Researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research confirm the disproportionate impact of the reduction on people with disabilities, reporting that adults with impairments make up approximately 25 percent of SNAP recipients; children under eighteen make up 40 percent, while another 19 percent of recipients are people over the age of sixty. Moreover, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) estimates that 50 percent of SNAP-receiving households include at least one person who is disabled or elderly. 

SNAP recipients and advocates for the program describe it as a lifeline. In fact,  SNAP has long been considered one of the country’s most far-reaching anti-poverty programs, an effort to ensure that every person in the country has enough food to eat. Before the latest round of cuts too effect,  more than forty-two million people—one in eight Americans—received benefits that averaged $188 per person per month, or $6.17 a day. 

All of that has now changed: Under H.R. 1’s new rules, people under the age of sixty-five who are deemed “able-bodied” by SNAP eligibility screenings must work or volunteer for a minimum of eighty hours a month. This enables them to be re-certified every thirty days. The only exceptions are for people who can prove they are disabled, pregnant, have children under the age of fourteen living in the home, or are in drug or alcohol rehabilitation. Groups who had previously been exempted from work requirements, including veterans, unhoused people, and former foster youth, must now comply with these rules as well. Failing to do so limits a person’s SNAP eligibility to three months of benefits over the course of a three-year period. 

These changes mark the largest cuts to SNAP in its more than sixty-year history. Government sources estimate that reduced SNAP rolls will save taxpayers between $186 and $187 billion over the next ten years.

Deborah Berkman, director of the Shelter and Economic Stability Project of the New York Legal Assistance Group, tells The Progressive that people who receive Social Security Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), or a veteran’s disability pension do not have to comply with work rules. But she says they must be able to provide receipt of benefits, while those who do not receive them must jump through a series of administrative hoops in order to verify that they are actually unable to work. 

“There is a specific form that needs to be filled out to prove disability,” Berkman explains. “Many people do not understand that they and their doctors need to complete a particular form to be exempted from the work requirements. Other people, particularly if they are experiencing homelessness, may not have a primary care physician who can complete the forms accurately and in sufficient detail. But the biggest group being impacted are those whose disabilities are hidden. If someone uses a wheelchair, their impairment is obvious. If they have a mental health condition, it can be invisible and harder to prove.”

Other challenges can delay the verification of disability and cause people to lose benefits as well. These include illiteracy, intellectual disabilities, learning disorders, and a lack of English-language proficiency. Though the law requires that written notices be delivered in the recipient’s preferred language, Berkman says compliance with this rule is often spotty.

Gary Milchman, the acting CEO of a nonprofit called YAI that operates group homes and assistance programs for people with intellectual disabilities, has seen the impact of SNAP on the community his organization serves. “When the SNAP case of someone living in a supervised unit or with family goes inactive, it has a direct impact on that person’s ability to buy groceries, cook, and eat,” he says. 

“Most disabled people who can work are already working,” says Ariel Simms, CEO and president of the national disability justice organization Disability Belongs. “We need lawmakers and policymakers to challenge stereotypes about disability, and also learn about what we call the ‘Crip Tax’— the need for people with disabilities to spend money on supplies and equipment. Programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and SSI are essential income supports for those who need them.” Simms says Disability Belongs is urging people who rely on SNAP to tell their stories to legislators, policy wonks, and the public at large with the hope of changing public perceptions of need, and make clear why SNAP benefits matter.

Dr. Hilary Seligman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who studies food insecurity and health, says the cuts bear startling health implications for those impacted. “We know that SNAP is incredibly effective in reducing food insecurity and we have good data that shows that people enrolled in SNAP have better health overall,” she tells The Progressive. “SNAP may improve the quality of the food they eat, enabling them to purchase more nutritious items, or may allow them to divert their limited incomes so that they can purchase things that mitigate their disability.”

Seligman also points to the roadblocks many disabled people face when searching for employment. “We have to ask what it will take to accommodate people with different disabilities to bring them into the workforce,” she says. “The work requirement does not come with a job guarantee, or even a job referral. Neither does it come with the wrap-around support services necessary to ensure that the person is able to do the tasks that are assigned . . . . You can’t just create jobs out of thin air. The one assured outcome of the work rule mandate is that many people who can benefit from SNAP will be booted off. This will inevitably have a negative effect on health.”

According to the Hamilton Project of the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, evidence shows that work programs do not increase employment. But as Seligman indicates, they do successfully decrease participation in programs like SNAP. In 2025, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities conducted a study on the effects of work rules, which found that the Moving to Work program—a federal initiative that increased work requirements for rental assistance recipients beginning in 1996—did little to increase actual employment, although it did “cause hardship for people with low incomes, including children and people with health limitations.”

Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at FRAC, tells The Progressive, “when SNAP gets cut, people are more likely to be unable to meet other basic needs. Do you pay your rent or do you feed your children? We have thirty years of research and data to show that the only thing work programs do is weaken assistance programs.”

The upshot, she says, is that there is now more hunger in the United States than there was during the pandemic.

 “Food banks tell us that they are seeing longer lines today than they did during the COVID-19 shutdowns,” Plata-Nino says. “The fact that most policymakers are ignoring the plight of low-income people reflects a failure of political will. We know that the worst health outcomes are hunger-related, and, regardless of whether lawmakers are Democrats or Republicans, every state has a significant number of people who lack sufficient food. Legislators have the power to change this, but they need the will to do so. We are the wealthiest country on earth. We should not have people going hungry. There should not be winners and losers when it comes to food policy and food security.”

August 20, 2026

4:27 PM