GOP Food Stamp Work Requirements Hit Just as Jobs Dry Up
President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, trade wars, and actual wars are coming together to maximize hunger in America. The GOP’s new work requirements for food stamps began in February, forcing more people to work at least 80 hours a month to get the benefit. At the same time, jobs are harder to find, economists and researchers said, especially the low-wage jobs that food stamp beneficiaries should be able to turn to for the new requirement.
The end result is easy to anticipate, said Ismael Cid-Martinez, economist with the Economic Policy Institute. More people will lose their food stamps because they can’t find work. They’ll go without and suffer all the attendant problems that come with chronic hunger. That condition causes people to fall sick more frequently and puts them at greater risk of chronic disease, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. For adults, that means even more difficulty finding a job. For kids, it also means delayed physical development and the inability to concentrate at school.
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Martinez and others also warned that losing food stamps will also mean that more people will struggle to pay all their bills, putting them at greater risk of crushing debt, eviction, and homelessness.
The consequences extend beyond an individual’s personal hardship. A study from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that every $1 cut from SNAP costs society between $14 and $20.
“Not to be overly pessimistic about this, but I think that one of the important things to keep in mind is, these are all policy choices,” Cid-Martinez said. “We’re not in this position because of forces beyond our control.”
Trump’s mega-spending bill last year cut $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to fund trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest people and corporations, plus a huge increase in funding for ethnic cleansing and imperialism. The cuts to the program were the deepest in history and included a provision that took effect February 1 requiring so-called “able-bodied adults” between ages 18 and 64 to work for at least 80 hours a month or meet other demands. The requirement applied to the age group as long as they had no dependents younger than 14 years old. Before the spending bill, work requirements applied to adults ages 18 to 54 and exempted those with dependents up to the age of 18.
“These are all policy choices. We’re not in this position because of forces beyond our control.”
Ismael Cid-Martinez, Economic Policy Institute
The additional decade of required work is now hitting people who have already left the workforce, said Rita Vega, citywide deputy director of the housing benefits initiative at Legal Services NYC. “We have a lot of clients who are older, and their question is, ‘I’m already retired, do I have to work?’ The answer is yes, unless you have some exemption,” she said in an interview. She’s especially worried about people who need food stamps, who have a physical or mental disability, and cannot understand the new work requirements or how to get an exemption. Many who actually have jobs will still lose their benefits because they failed to fill out the new forms properly, or, advocates said, because officials have failed to file them.
The punishment for failing to meet the requirements is steep; those who are required to work and can’t find a job lose their food stamps after three months. To get them back again, a beneficiary must meet the work requirement for 30 days or wait three years to reapply.
Vega noted that while some adults can get an exemption to the new requirement, such as having a disability, the new law has erased some of those, including for unhoused people, veterans, and young adults who have recently aged out of foster care. The next couple of months will be a “testing ground” for how many people are harmed, she said, including by the forced decision to buy food over paying for rent, which can lead to eviction and homelessness.
“The domino effect is there,” she said. “If you don’t have enough income, you cannot afford to live, and afford to live in the city especially.”
ALREADY, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HAVE LOST their SNAP benefits, according to a new tracker that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released last Wednesday. The data shows that between July 2025, when Trump signed the mega-bill into law, and December 2025, participation in SNAP dropped in every single state. Nationwide, the program lost 2.5 million people, or 6 percent. The CBPP expects that once Trump’s first round of cuts are fully implemented, four million people will lose some or all of their food stamp benefits.
Lawmakers will decide whether to increase that number even more when they consider the second round of cuts Trump put in his 2027 budget proposal, which would cut another $6.3 billion from SNAP. He’s also seeking cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) by $1.4 billion, and the elimination of a food program for low-income seniors.
As the Prospect has repeatedly noted, 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, more than 12 percent of the population. Cutting SNAP funding hurts children the most and forces more people to rely on overburdened food banks, take on additional work, surrender their pets, move house, and/or make other life-altering decisions to survive.
Last August, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the work requirements will reduce average monthly participation in the program by about 2.4 million people between 2025 and 2034. About one million of those will be “able-bodied adults ages 18 to 54 (or 18 to 49, starting in 2031)” who would have previously received a waiver.
But those figures came before this year’s job market, researchers said. They expect more people will struggle to meet the work requirement than originally expected and will add to the growing number of people who lose their benefits.
At the end of February, hiring dropped to its lowest level since 2011 outside of the pandemic, according to the most recent Labor Department monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, released in late March. Available positions fell from the upwardly revised 7.2 million in January to 6.9 million a month later, a contraction of 300,000 available jobs. The rate of job openings shrank from 4.4 percent to 4.2 percent; accommodation and food services lost 211,000 jobs, and mining and logging lost 12,000 jobs. Employers hired 4.8 million workers, contributing to a year-to-date decrease of 387,000. Hires decreased in food services by 178,000 workers and in construction by 88,000 workers.
That report coincided with the April 3 Employment Situation Summary report, which emphasized that nonfarm payroll increased by 178,000 in March and that the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3 percent, leading to some glowing coverage calling it a “strong showing” after a temporary period of “weakness.” But it also found that the number of long-term unemployed people is up by 322,000 for the year. And while the number of unemployed people who want a job but can’t find one is six million, about the same as the month before, the number of discouraged workers is up, the subset of unemployed people who believe there are no jobs for them. There were more than half a million discouraged workers in March, 144,000 more than the month before.
In short, there are fewer jobs to go around, fewer benefits on offer, and much more harm on the way from skyrocketing oil prices and a choked-off supply chain. If Tuesday’s warning from the International Monetary Fund holds true, America will soon be in a recession, along with the rest of the world.
“A slowdown in job gains is ultimately going to hurt workers at the lower part of the job distribution the worst,” Cid-Martinez said, adding, “Who are the workers more likely to depend on social policy, whether it’s Medicaid or SNAP? It turns out it’s the low-wage workers … they’re the first to be impacted by macroeconomic forces.”
He said the situation illustrates that policymakers misunderstand how the economy works.
“I think we don’t talk sufficiently about the value of low-wage workers, the returns to the programs we cut last year,” Cid-Martinez said. “These folks make up our economy, they are our economy.”
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