The Trump administration is rewarding states for cutting food assistance.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Monday announced some of the state-by-state disbursement from the Rural Health Transformation Program. Every state will receive between $145 million and $281 million next year—but some are rightly upset about how the money is being awarded.
The $50 billion fund was added to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act late in the process to secure the votes of senators who were concerned about the nearly $140 billion that rural hospitals are projected to lose over the next decade because of Medicaid cuts. The fund was never going to be enough money to cover the gap, but the whole endeavor was made even worse by the fact that Oz, a snake-oil TV doctor, has a lot of discretion about what health policies to push—and which states to prioritize.
This week’s disbursements were used to promote some of the administration’s goals, which include finding creative ways to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, once known as food stamps. The cuts—which will occur under the guise of promoting healthier foods to SNAP recipients—will jeopardize the health and wellbeing of millions of people, threaten small businesses, and undermine one of the last truly robust safety net programs that remains for struggling Americans.
In September, the administration outlined how it would decide to distribute the funds. That included awarding more points to states that implemented some of its “Make America Healthy Again” goals, one of which was blocking SNAP recipients from buying “non-nutritious foods.” In response, states have sought waivers from the USDA to prevent recipients from buying sugary drinks and candy; the agency has approved 12 waivers so far. Just how much these SNAP restrictions counted toward states’ awards isn’t clear because the administration hasn’t been transparent about its decision-making, but it has been crystal clear about its desire to cut SNAP.
On its face, prohibiting SNAP dollars from being spent on soda and candy might seem unobjectionable. Soda and candy are high in sugar and low in nutrition. But implementing these restrictions is burdensome for states and often difficult for grocery stores to follow. Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP deputy director at the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger policy advocacy organization, pointed to a food industry study showing that the costs of implementing the changes could be $1.6 billion. “And there’s ongoing costs that will happen,” she said. “The large retailers will figure it out. But the smaller retailers, they just can’t afford this. They would just pull out of the program.”
This is already evident when comparing the numbers of retailers who accept SNAP versus the Women, Infant and Children’s nutrition program, which has stricter rules on how the money can be spent. “We have over 266,000 retailers for SNAP, just less than 40,000 for WIC, and that’s because they have to train their staff,” she said.
Many rural Americans rely on these small local grocers. So if their local store stops accepting SNAP, they’ll have to travel farther for food, costing them time and money. They’ll also buy food less frequently and rely on more shelf-stable goods, which tend to be less nutritious than perishables.
Some small stores also rely on SNAP to keep their doors open. “Think about the millions of dollars in a community,” Plata-Nino said. “In some communities, it’s billions of dollars that SNAP brings into your local community. For some retailers, it’s the only thing keeping them afloat.” While stores might not be able to afford implementing the new restrictions, they also might not be able to afford withgoing SNAP entirely—a financial Catch-22.
States, too, will have to spend money to implement these changes. Other SNAP changes made in Trump’s budget bill—like new work requirements, the end of an educational program, eligibility increases, and an increased administrative costs for states—already mean that the program is going to be more difficult and costly for states to run. The bans on “non-nutritious” foods just pile onto the burdens.
All this is all being done to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Americans overall have unhealthy diets; SNAP participants’ diets aren’t significantly worse. In fact, they tend to have lower health care costs than low-income adults who don’t receive SNAP.
The much bigger problem for low-income Americans is that they’re more likely to suffer from hunger. They already can’t buy enough nutritious food to feed their families, and they face other structural problems like not having the gas to drive to a grocery store with fresh produce or lacking safe places to exercise. That’s as true for low-income urban Americans as it is for rural Americans.
But clearly the Trump administration, and the Republican Party broadly, is more interested in punishing people who need government assistance than in helping them. While the president chows down two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, then washes them down with a chocolate milkshake and multiple Diet Cokes, his underlings are effectively deciding what poor Americans can and can’t eat.
“This is about money and privilege,” Plata-Nino said. “It just depends what your income bracket is, whether or not your choices will be policed.”
