An Oakland, Calif., grocery store displays a sign notifying shoppers that it accepts electronic benefit transfer cards used by state welfare departments to issue food assistance benefits. States are just beginning to implement changes to work requirements for the national food stamp program approved by Congress and President Donald Trump this summer. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
States are rushing to inform some residents who rely on food stamps that they will soon be forced to meet work requirements or lose their food assistance.
Recent federal legislation ended exemptions to work requirements for older adults, homeless people, veterans and some rural residents, among others. A rapid timeline to put the changes into effect has sparked chaos in state agencies that must cut off access if residents don’t meet certain work, education or volunteer reporting requirements.
States are implementing these permanent changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly called food stamps — amid the uncertainty of the federal government shutdown. The budget impasse could result in millions of Americans not getting their SNAP benefits next month if money runs out. But even before the shutdown, states were assessing the new work rules for food stamps — the first in a wave of cutbacks to the nation’s largest food assistance program required under President Donald Trump’s major tax and spending law enacted in July.
Known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the law mandates cuts to social service programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. In the coming years, the law will require states to pay a greater share of administering SNAP and could cause millions of Americans to lose benefits.
But states are currently confronting the end of exceptions to work requirements for older adults, homeless people, veterans and those recently living in foster care. Those could threaten benefits even for people who are working but who may struggle with the paperwork to prove they’re meeting the requirements, advocates say.
Under the new law, states have also lost funding for nutrition education programs, must end eligibility for noncitizens such as refugees and asylees, and will lose work requirement waivers for those living in areas with limited employment opportunities.
They’ve given us a virtually nonexistent window … in which to implement the changes.
– Andrea Barton Reeves, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Social Services
And the federal government wants those changes made quickly.
“They’ve given us a virtually nonexistent window — I’ll just describe it that way — in which to implement the changes, so we are working on them very quickly,” Andrea Barton Reeves, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Social Services, told lawmakers last week.
She said changing work requirements could threaten the benefits of tens of thousands of people in Connecticut.
“We do believe that if we cannot in some way either move them into another exemption category or they don’t meet the requirements, we have about 36,000 people in these new categories that are at risk of losing their SNAP benefit,” Barton Reeves told lawmakers.
The federal government issued guidance to states earlier this month saying several key changes to food stamps would need to be implemented by early November.
The Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to address poverty-related hunger, characterized that deadline as an “unreasonable” timeline for states.
In California, for example, the state previously had been approved for a waiver to work requirements through January 2026. But this month, USDA told states they had 30 days to terminate waivers issued under the previous guidelines. In California, the end of that waiver could affect benefits for an estimated 359,000 people.
Gina Plata-Nino, interim SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, said states must quickly train their social services workers on eligibility changes, communicate those changes to the public and deal with an onslaught of calls from people relying on the program.
“It’s incredibly complex,” she said.
Plata-Nino said implementation will be uneven: Some states are already in compliance with the changes, while others will phase them in as households go through regular eligibility reviews.
USDA and the White House did not respond to Stateline’s questions about the changes.
Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have said the cuts would eliminate waste in the food assistance program. In a June news release, he characterized SNAP as a “bloated, inefficient program,” but said Americans who needed food assistance would still receive it.
“Democrats will scream ‘cuts,’ but what they’re really defending is a wasteful program that discourages work, mismanages billions, and traps people in dependency. Republicans are proud to defend commonsense welfare reform, fiscal sanity, and the dignity of work,” Johnson said in the release.
Rural residents
Changes to work requirements will prove especially burdensome for rural residents, who already disproportionately rely on SNAP. Job opportunities and transportation are often limited in rural areas, making work requirements especially difficult, according to Plata-Nino.
“None of these bills came with a job offer,” Plata-Nino said. “None of them came with additional funding to address the lack of transportation. Remote and rural areas don’t have public transportation — they don’t even have taxis or Ubers.”
With waivers, states previously could show USDA evidence that certain areas had limited job opportunities, thus exempting people from work requirements.
“Because it doesn’t make sense to punish SNAP participants for not being able to find a job when there are no jobs available, right?” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the associate director of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative.
The legislation changed the criteria for proving weak labor markets to what Bauer characterized as an “utterly insane standard,” of showing unemployment rates above 10%. (The national unemployment rate was 4.3% in August, according to the most recently released figures by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
“The national economy during the Great Recession hit 10% in one month,” Bauer said. “Ten percent unemployment is a very, very high level. So they set this standard basically to end the waiver process.”
That change will not only affect recipients now but also will drastically impair the program’s ability to respond to recessions: Traditionally, SNAP has quickly helped people who lose their jobs. But the new law requires states to cover more costs, meaning they will be stretched even thinner during economic downturns when demand increases.
“Not only are these changes difficult to implement — and certainly at the speed that the administration is asking for — they could be devastating to the program, to residents who are in need in their states, and eventually SNAP may no longer be a national program because states will not be able to afford to participate,” Bauer said.
‘Widespread confusion’
Since July, Pennsylvania officials have been working to not only inform the public about the federal changes, but also to update information technology systems — a process that generally takes a minimum of 12 months.
“Strictly speaking from an IT perspective, we’re talking about massive systems that generate terabytes of data and are working with records for hundreds of thousands — and in the case of Pennsylvania, 2 million people,” said Hoa Pham, deputy secretary of the Office of Income Maintenance for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.
Pham said the timing of the federal legislation and lagging guidance from USDA was “simply not ideal.” But the state is doing its best to train thousands of employees on the changes and help affected recipients get into compliance by finding work, education or volunteer opportunities that meet federal guidelines.
The end of geographic waivers put the benefits of about 132,000 SNAP recipients at risk in Pennsylvania.
“It is difficult, it requires time, it requires planning, it requires money,” she told Stateline. “And I want to be super clear that H.R. 1 [the new law] delivered a ton of unfunded mandates to state agencies.”
Pennsylvania created a detailed webpage outlining the changes and will notify individuals if their eligibility is jeopardized in the coming months. Pham said those who depend on SNAP should make sure their contact information is up to date with both the department and the post office.
“As a state agency, we’re working very hard to make sure that people have accurate, factual information when it is most immediately necessary for them to know it,” she said.
States are implementing the SNAP changes even as the ongoing federal government shutdown might temporarily cost recipients their benefits.
New Hampshire leaders say they are days away from running out of food stamp funds. No new applications will be approved in Minnesota until the government is reopened, officials announced last week.
And the changes hit agencies already strained from staffing shortages and outdated software, said Brittany Christenson, the CEO of AidKit, a vendor that helps states administer SNAP and other public benefits.
“The result is widespread confusion among both administrators and beneficiaries, as states are tasked with integrating new compliance requirements while maintaining service continuity.
“The changes not only increase workloads for states, but they can lead to more errors and longer wait time or applicants,” Christenson said.
“Beneficiaries face a heightened risk of losing aid not because they are unwilling to work, but because they cannot meet new documentation or compliance requirements on time,” she said.
Slow trickle of changes
In Maine, the new work requirement rules are in place, but recipients have some time to meet the altered guidelines, the Portland Press Herald reported. The state estimates changes to work requirements could affect more than 40,000 recipients as soon as this fall.
The state’s Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to Stateline requests for comment. But advocates said food banks are already struggling to keep up with increased demand and decreased supply because of the high cost of food.
“They’re seeing huge increases in families and individuals showing up, needing groceries, needing food every month, some every week, and that’s before any of these cuts to SNAP have happened. So we’re really, we’re very worried,” said Anna Korsen, deputy director of Full Plates Full Potential, a nonprofit focused on ending childhood hunger in Maine.
More than 70% of Maine households receiving SNAP have at least one person working, Korsen said. While some recipients — including those who are caretakers for relatives — cannot work, many more who are employed will struggle to meet documentation requirements.
“They call them work requirements, but we’ve started calling them work reporting requirements, because we think that’s a more accurate way to portray what they are,” she said.
Alex Carter, policy advocate at the nonprofit legal aid organization Maine Equal Justice, said SNAP recipients will be affected on a rolling basis because of regular six-month eligibility reviews. For example, a 59-year-old who previously would have been exempt from the work requirement may not be notified until next month that their eligibility status is in jeopardy.
“So people are not going to be losing their benefits this month because of those changes, which I think is the thing that is hard to explain to people,” she said. “These things are happening, but we can’t tell people this will happen to you in October or this will happen to you in January. It’s different on a case-by-case basis.”
Carter said her organization is urging Mainers to ensure their contact information is correct with the state and to remain vigilant for official communications on SNAP.
While states are forced to implement the federal changes, Carter said they should emphasize they’re only the messengers. She said Congress and the president should be held responsible for the fallout when people begin losing benefits.
‘It’s very natural to think this is a state decision, or this is a departmental decision, and to direct your anger and your frustration there,” she said. “ … In this case, this is not a state decision. They are required by federal law to implement these work reporting changes.”
Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.
