The Trump Administration Has Changed Almost Every Aspect of Food Stamps

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The Trump Administration Has Changed Almost Every Aspect of Food Stamps

Legislation and regulatory tweaks enacted over the past year have altered who is eligible, what recipients can buy and how much some receive in benefits, among other changes.

Bagging groceries at the Salem Pantry, a food pantry supplied by the Greater Boston Food Bank, on Thursday. For several years, the food bank has distributed over 100 million pounds of food annually — a number that has stayed steady despite the end of the coronavirus pandemic and a relatively low unemployment rate.

Credit...

Sophie Park For The New York Times

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The Trump Administration Has Changed Almost Every Aspect of Food Stamps

Legislation and regulatory tweaks enacted over the past year have altered who is eligible, what recipients can buy and how much some receive in benefits, among other changes.

Bagging groceries at the Salem Pantry, a food pantry supplied by the Greater Boston Food Bank, on Thursday. For several years, the food bank has distributed over 100 million pounds of food annually — a number that has stayed steady despite the end of the coronavirus pandemic and a relatively low unemployment rate.

Credit...

Sophie Park For The New York Times

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By

Linda Qiu

Reporting from Washington

April 26, 2026

President Trump and his top officials have cast a sharp decrease in the number of food stamp recipients over the past year as evidence of economic progress and increasing self-sufficiency.

But the decline of more than three million participants since Mr. Trump took office to December 2025 is the result of some of the most consequential changes and the largest funding cut to the program since its inception.

Through legislation and regulatory tweaks over the past year, the administration and its allies in Congress have achieved a long-held conservative goal of shrinking the safety net, reshaping how the federal government defines need for low-income beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Among the alterations: who is eligible, who must work to receive benefits, how much beneficiaries will receive, what can be purchased, what grocery stores that accept SNAP must stock on shelves, how states and counties administer the program and how much localities are paid by the federal government.

Combined, the moves signal a shift in the program’s goals and how it has historically operated, said Tracy Roof, a professor at the University of Richmond, in Virginia, who is writing a

book on the political history of food stamps.

“This is major,” she said. “The program is really, really changing.”

Supporters argue that the revisions

will rein in a bloated program

by encouraging able-bodied participants to work and to eat healthy food, and by incentivizing states to reduce paperwork errors, while keeping SNAP benefits generous.

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