ALT Graph showing actual monthly SNAP participation from July 2024 to July 2026, with horizontal lines showing actual average participation in fiscal year 2025 (42.1 million), CBO's projected fiscal year 2026 average participation (39.3 million), and projected fiscal year 2026 participation based on actual data (37.6 million).

ALT State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.

ALT The enrollment drop makes the growing crisis "invisible, when hundreds of thousands leave the rolls, it can look like need went down, when really it just moved to the food bank and food pantry lines," she said. In the food bank's 12-county service area, SNAP enrollment fell by about 67,000, from 280,715 to 213,654, "pulling roughly $12.7 million per month in food-assistance dollars out of our community," King said. "At a moment when groceries, health care, housing and the overall cost of living are all climbing, the safety net is contracting."