Despite promises that changes to the federal food program would not affect vulnerable people, at least 776,000 children have lost food assistance since the new law was signed last year, ProPublica reports.
H.R. 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” made unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Supporters said these “reforms” were designed to “restore integrity” to the program and ensure that federal resources are focused on the “neediest” Americans, especially children.
But even if they were not the stated targets of the changes, children have increasingly become “collateral damage,” Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, told ProPublica.
CBPP reported in May that more than 700,000 children had stopped receiving SNAP since the law was enacted in July 2025.
ProPublica independently analyzed program participation in the 12 states that provide data about the age of SNAP recipients. Reporters found that, of the 1,670,011 people no longer receiving benefits in those states, nearly half (776,134, or 46%) were children.
SNAP Benefits All of Us
Studies show that children who receive SNAP are healthier, achieve more in school, go to hospitals less often, and have better mental health as teenagers. And these improvements in outcomes for children translate into society-wide benefits.
SNAP is “a highly cost-effective investment in young children,” according to a recent study. Researchers estimated that every SNAP dollar invested in children returns $62 in value to society over their lifetimes due to improved educational outcomes, higher earnings and government tax revenue, increased life expectancy, and other benefits.
Losing SNAP has a snowball effect on children at risk of food insecurity—children who lose SNAP also lose streamlined eligibility for WIC and are not directly certified for free school meals. Reducing the number of children directly certified through SNAP also jeopardizes schools’ ability to provide free meals to all students, according to CBPP.
Cutting funding for SNAP means losing out on the health, education, and economic benefits that these nutrition programs create for children and for society at large. That’s why H.R. 1 will not save money in the long run, Mariana Chilton, an expert in child hunger at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told ProPublica.
Cutting Assistance as Food Insecurity Rises
Food insecurity has been rising significantly in recent years—from 10.2% of American households (13.5 million households) in 2021 to 13.5% (18 million households) in 2023.
According to the USDA, 47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2023, including 13.8 million children. (The USDA announced last fall that it would stop reporting critical data on food security in the U.S.)
H.R. 1’s cuts have reduced the number of SNAP participants to 37.8 million people as of February—that’s 4.3 million fewer since February 2025, ProPublica found.
These sharp drops in participation do not reflect corresponding drops in need, CBPP notes, given that Americans continue to grapple with high food insecurity, rising grocery costs, unrelenting unemployment, and declining wages.
Instead, preliminary data suggests that millions fewer people are receiving food assistance because of the law’s expanded work requirements, added paperwork, and new regulations that states are struggling to implement. Staff shortages and cuts in federal funding to states to administer SNAP have made it increasingly difficult for eligible families to access and keep SNAP benefits.
In Massachusetts, which faces a staffing shortage, the share of SNAP applicants who called an assistance line and could not reach a staff person rose from 61% in November to nearly 81% in March, according to ProPublica. CBPP found that nearly 50,000 fewer children were receiving food assistance there in March—a 15% drop in just eight months.
“Families are falling through the cracks,” Ms. Bergh said.
The burden on states will only get worse when additional cuts to federal funding kick in. Starting in October, the share of SNAP administrative costs paid by states will increase from 50% to 75%.
And next year, H.R. 1’s massive revamping of the program will require most states to pay a share of SNAP benefits for the first time in the program’s history.
The amount each state pays will be based on its error rate (overpayments and underpayments). One way to quickly cut the error rate, CBPP explains, is to delay or improperly deny benefits to eligible families (which does not count as an error).
Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, told ProPublica that the pressure to lower error rates “creates a temptation for the states to bump off working families,” who may have more volatile incomes that make it harder for state agencies to assess eligibility.
Many states will have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for SNAP starting in October 2027, CBPP says. States that cannot (or decide not to) shoulder those costs will have to further restrict eligibility or drop out of SNAP entirely.