The administration of United States President Donald Trump has proposed new eligibility requirements for the country’s largest food aid programme that would see some 6.3 million people removed from it.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a proposed rule (PDF) on Tuesday that would end automatic eligibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), doing away with current provisions that automatically make households eligible for the programme if they meet state-administered requirements for another programme, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
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“These revisions would ensure that SNAP benefits are targeted to needy households that have qualified for TANF assistance while still aligning categorical eligibility’s statutory purpose of simplifying program administration,” the agency said in the proposal, which will be open to public comments for 30 days.
More than 36 million people are currently enrolled in SNAP, which is the largest federal food aid programme for low-income families. An individual in the programme receives an average of about $190 each month, while a household receives an average monthly benefit of $356 in groceries.
The SNAP programme itself requires that households earn less than 130 percent of the federal government’s poverty level to qualify. Currently, households that qualify for the TANF programme – which has requirements that vary by state and can accommodate households earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level – are also automatically eligible for SNAP.
According to the USDA, the proposed changes would remove about 17 percent of SNAP beneficiaries from the programme, some 6.3 million people. The cuts would also have other one-off effects, including removing 1.8 million children from a federal programme providing them with free school lunches, because they would no longer qualify for the SNAP programme.
Democratic lawmakers have criticised the Republican administration’s attempt to cut the federal food aid programme.
“The proposed rule would make it harder to meet basic needs and roll back efforts to streamline federal programs,” Minnesota Democratic Representative Angie Craig said in a statement on Monday.
“SNAP is a highly effective and efficient program when it is allowed to work as designed,” Craig’s statement continued. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration and the outgoing Republican majority in Congress have undermined the program’s integrity at every turn, harming millions of vulnerable Americans in the process.”
Democratic Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey called the proposal “despicable” in a social media post on Monday.
“Trump is set to kick millions more people off of SNAP, when Americans are already struggling with grocery prices. It is despicable. We need to be helping people afford groceries, not deepening cuts to the safety net that keeps families from going hungry,” Booker said.
Builds on previous Trump moves targeting food aid
The new cuts build on previous changes to the SNAP programme by the Trump administration, which has said many of those receiving aid through the federal government are not in need of it.
Some 5.5 million people lost access to SNAP benefits under Trump already, due to changes mandated by the July 2025 Big Beautiful Bill. The legislation expanded work requirements for beneficiaries and made certain categories of immigrants ineligible for the aid. States struggled with new administrative changes and with covering additional costs the federal government passed on to them under the bill.
Then, in November 2025, Trump briefly withheld funding for the SNAP programme entirely, using it as leverage to force Democrats to agree to passing a federal budget. The Democrats refused, and as a result, the federal government was shut down for more than a month. Towards the end of that impasse, Trump refused to use emergency funds to cover the SNAP programme.
At the time, Trump said the administration of former President Joe Biden had been responsible for burdening the government with “billions of billions” of dollars in more spending because of the programme. The benefits, Trump claimed in a Truth Social post without evidence, had been “haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!”
The Supreme Court eventually struck down lower court rulings, saying Trump could not legally withhold the funding for SNAP, just as lawmakers in Congress reached an agreement to pass a new federal budget and reopen the government.
The Trump administration has continued to push for changes to SNAP.
In December 2025, the administration threatened to withhold funding for the programme from 21 states that refused to hand over data on beneficiaries to the federal government, which the administration said it needed to examine in order to cut fraud.
The new proposal is now open for public comment for the next 30 days.
