Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration passed a budget blueprint to pay for tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor rich households at the expense of working people. Communities of color will be disproportionately impacted by these potential cuts. In addition to targeting Medicaid—we highlighted how Medicaid cuts would be especially harmful for people of color and children here—the budget resolution also tees up Congress to slash $230 billion in agricultural spending over the next 10 years. Finding cuts that large will almost certainly require reducing nutrition spending by cutting the country’s largest food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is run out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

These draconian cuts, along with the troubling momentum to add even more stringent work requirements to benefits like SNAP and Medicaid, will leave economically vulnerable families who depend on these support systems exposed to even more hardship during a time of unprecedented economic mismanagement, chaos, and uncertainty.

SNAP supplements low-income families’ grocery budget to help them access essential and healthy foods. In December 2024, SNAP had more than 42 million participants, with an average monthly benefit per person of approximately $189. Nearly eight in 10 (79%) households participating in SNAP include at least one member who is a child, an elderly adult, or a person with a disability. SNAP benefits help these families avoid hunger and falling deeper into economic insecurity and poverty.  

Cuts to SNAP will disproportionately harm families of color

More than 22 million households participated in SNAP by the end of last year. In between 2019 and 2023, more than one in 10 (11.8%) households participated in the program. While many of these families (43.1%) are non-Hispanic white,1 families of color are more likely to rely on SNAP benefits to supplement their food budget (see Figure A). More than one in five Black, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHPI) households relied on SNAP to meet their nutritional needs in the 2019–2023 period. These families, along with Hispanic households, are more than twice as likely to participate in SNAP than their non-Hispanic white peers, leaving them particularly vulnerable to SNAP benefits cuts or unhelpful work requirements that make it harder to receive or keep this important source of support.  

SNAP benefits keep millions of children and people of color out of poverty each year

The country’s largest nutritional assistance program does more than help families put food on the table. SNAP is one of the country’s most effective poverty alleviation programs. In 2023 alone, SNAP kept more than three million people out of poverty, among which nearly two in five (39.3%) were children.

The poverty reduction success of SNAP also helps bridge racial and ethnic disparities. More than two-thirds of the individuals that SNAP helped lift out of poverty in 2023 were people of color (see Figure B below). More than two million people of color, including over 800,000 Black and over 900,000 Hispanic people, avoided poverty thanks to the support provided by SNAP.  

In addition to helping low-income families cover their grocery bills, SNAP helps connect families with other sources of support. For example, SNAP helps families and children in need qualify for additional support via the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). While WIC supports pregnant women, infants, and children under the age of five who face nutritional risks, NSLP provides reduced-cost or free lunches to low-income children in public and non-profit private schools.

As in the case of SNAP, the support of both WIC and NSLP extends beyond nutritional assistance. Both programs combined helped lift more than one million people out of poverty in 2023, with people of color accounting for more than three-quarters (77.3%) of these individuals. Republican attacks on the USDA budget will restrict access to these life-saving resources at home and in school.

Families and children of color need expanded SNAP benefits—not cuts—to avoid rising food insecurity

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are looking to slash spending on nutritional assistance and to restrict access to benefits despite rising food insecurity since 2021. In 2023, the latest year for which estimates are available, 18 million households (13.5%) were unable to afford enough food to meet the needs of all their members at some point that year. This latest figure is higher than the 10.0% of families that experienced similar hardship in 2021. Hidden in these overall statistics is the disproportionate impact of food insecurity borne by families of color.

In 2023, more than one in five Black (23.3%) and Hispanic (21.9%) households experienced food insecurity (see Figure C). These families were twice as likely as their non-Hispanic white peers (9.9%) to experience food insecurity that year. Food insecurity reached a low point for Black and Hispanic households in 2019, but these families have struggled to hold on to the periods of progress since 2001, given the impact of the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rising food prices caused by the pandemic.

We see similar outcomes for the subset of households with children. While households of color with children have experienced a significant reduction in food insecurity since the height of the Great Recession, much of this progress has eroded. For Hispanic households with children, the prevalence of food insecurity has nearly doubled, rising from the low of 7.8% in 2019 to 14.0% in 2023 (see Figure D). While the rise in food insecurity has been a little more muted for Black households with children since 2015, both Black and Hispanic households with children remained more than twice as likely to experience food insecurity as their non-Hispanic peers in 2023.

Even more families will need SNAP because of Trump’s economic mismanagement

It is clear that SNAP and other nutritional assistance programs under the USDA help families and children avoid poverty and food insecurity. SNAP benefits, for example, reduce the likelihood of being food insecure by about 30%. The positive link between improved food security and SNAP applies across different types of households, including those with children. SNAP is also particularly responsive to changing economic conditions. Because SNAP benefits are means-tested, the program supports even more individuals and households in need during economic downturns; an increase in the unemployment rate of 1 percentage point, for example, is associated with an additional two to three million additional participants in the program.

Because SNAP spending rises as private activity slows during recessions, the program is a particularly effective “automatic stabilizer,” keeping recessions shorter and less severe than they would otherwise be. Each additional dollar in SNAP benefits disbursed during periods of overall economic slack, for example, increases overall spending in the economy by $1.54. During an economic contraction, every $1 billion spent on SNAP generates more than 10,000 jobs.

If Republicans in Congress and President Trump were serious about lifting millions of people out of poverty, helping people address the cost of living and reduce food insecurity, and helping our economy rebound from crises, they would strengthen SNAP and other social safety net programs—not gut them. Cutting SNAP benefits or tightening the rules to discourage more people from accessing them will only expose more families to food insecurity. These concerns are especially relevant as the prospects of slower economic growth and higher food prices rise in the face of chaotic and harmful policies ushered by the Trump administration. The social safety net offered by programs like SNAP is essential to mitigating the economic pain that looms ahead.

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1. White households account for 43.1% of SNAP participating households. The share of white families participating in SNAP relative to the population of white families in the United States is 7.9%, as shown in Figure A.