A House GOP-backed proposal that would cut billions in federal dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest food assistance program, is drawing concerns from Republicans in the upper chamber.
The proposal, included in House Republicans’ recently passed package to enact President Trump’s tax priorities and spending cuts, would require states to cover a share of SNAP benefits costs, which are currently completely funded by the federal government.
“That’s something that I heard some members voice concern about,” Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) said Thursday. “So, we’ll need to address that.”
While Boozman said Senate Republicans aren’t drawing a red line around the plan just yet, members “want to look specifically at how those particular policies will affect their individual states.”
“Some of that we know, some of it we don’t.”
The House bill calls for the federal share of the cost of SNAP to go from 100 percent in the next two fiscal years to 95 percent starting fiscal 2028.
It also includes language that would increase states’ shares of the costs in fiscal 2028 depending on their payment error rates. If the error rate is 6 percent or higher, states would be subject to a sliding scale that could see their share of allotments rise to a range of between 15 percent and 25 percent.
“That’s in the we’ll see category. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told The Hill on Thursday when asked about the idea.
“We’re going to talk to committee members who can talk to our caucus as a whole,” he said, but he noted that the House’s cost-share pitch for states goes “beyond” what some senators had been looking at for “accountability” efforts.
Republicans defending the proposal say the measure would hold states accountable for billions of dollars in erroneous payments to participants annually, providing an incentive for states to keep their payment error rates down.
“We’ve seen that when states actually focus on error rates, they can bring them down very quickly, and obviously that’s what we want, but we don’t want people who are not eligible for the program receiving payments,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) said. “These error rates are far too high.”
In fiscal 2023, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that the national payment error rate was 11.68 percent. The vast majority of states on the list have payment error rates, which factors in a state’s overpayments and underpayments, above 6 percent.
But Democrats have sharply criticized the proposal, which they argue could lead to states cutting benefits on their own.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the SNAP proposal would reduce direct spending by more than $128 billion from 2028 to 2034 — accounting for a chunk of the minimum $230 billion in savings the House Agriculture Committee was instructed to find as part of the lower chamber’s first stab at crafting Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Other proposals in the bill would tighten eligibility requirements for the program, seek to block the federal government from being able to increase monthly benefits in the future, and increase states’ share of costs to administer SNAP.
Democrats are seizing on an analysis they requested from CBO on the potential effects of the plan, which estimated about 1.3 million people could see their benefits reduced or eliminated in an average month between 2025 and 2034 if lawmakers take the approach to require states to cover some benefit costs.
While the CBO noted “there would be a variety of state responses to the new requirement,” it said it expects “that some states would maintain current benefits and eligibility and others would modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave the program altogether because of the increased costs.”
“In CBO’s view, state responses would vary; thus, CBO estimated state responses in the aggregate using a probabilistic approach to account for a range of possible outcomes,” it said in a letter Thursday.
The CBO estimated that such reductions or eliminations in benefits would lead to a roughly $30 billion decrease in direct spending from 2028 to 2034. It also estimated “subsidies provided through child nutrition programs would decrease for about 420,000 children in an average month, reducing direct spending by about $700 million over the 2028–2034 period.”
The CBO noted that the analysis does “not account for interactions among provisions,” explaining that the sum of effects to separately enact each measure would differ from the effects of enacting multiple proposed SNAP reforms at once due to the overlap in affected populations.
In a statement on Thursday, Rep. Angie Craig (Minn.), top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, accused Republicans of waging an “attack on working Americans that takes food away from families.”
“The Republicans’ budget will make America hungrier, poorer and sicker. Parents struggling to afford groceries for their families and seniors living on fixed incomes will have their food taken away if this bill becomes law,” she said.
SNAP work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents would also expand under the plan, which calls for increasing the age threshold at which such adults must continue to work to qualify from up to 54 to 64 years of age.
While many of the proposals are supported by Republicans of various factions in both chambers, some voted for the plan this week with the expectation that the Senate would eventually make some changes.
Rep. Don Bacon (D-Neb.), a key moderate, said he’s open to states fronting a portion of SNAP benefit costs, but he wasn’t entirely in favor of the 5 percent to 25 percent cost-sharing range for states.
“I really didn’t like it, but I don’t mind a small mark, because, really, they execute it, and if they’re not executing them well, this gives them skin in the game,” Bacon told The Hill. But he added that 25 percent “seems a little high.”