The Trump administration on Thursday issued sweeping new rules barring illegal immigrants from a host of federal welfare benefits, including food stamps, Title X family planning funds, homelessness assistance, and substance abuse treatment funds. 

Several Cabinet departments, including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, were involved in drafting the regulation, which reinterprets the 1996 welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The new regulation rescinds a 1998 interpretation of the phrase “federal public benefit” that allowed illegal immigrants to take part in public health assistance programs. 

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“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement Thursday. “Today’s action changes that—it restores integrity to federal social programs, enforces the rule of law, and protects vital resources for the American people.”

The HHS indicated that the Head Start program, a federally funded early learning and nutrition program for low-income children under age 5, would now be counted as a “federal public benefit” under the 1996 law and would only be open to U.S. citizens and qualified aliens.

Roughly one million children and families are enrolled in a Head Start-funded program each year in the United States, to the tune of nearly $12.3 billion in fiscal 2024. 

HHS estimates that excluding non-citizens from Head Start will create the conditions in which “American citizens could receive as much as $374 million in additional Head Start services annually.”

“Head Start’s classification under the new PRWORA interpretation puts American families first by ensuring taxpayer-funded benefits are reserved for eligible individuals,” said Andrew Gradison, acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families. 

The benefits change will also affect various programs under the purview of USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves more than 42.1 million people annually, or nearly 13% of the U.S. population. 

Rollins said in a press release that the “generosity of the American taxpayer has long been abused” by faulty interpretations of the 1996 welfare reform law, which Thursday’s action seeks to rectify.

“Illegal aliens should not receive government dollars,” Rollins said. “This effort is one of many by the Department of Agriculture to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse of USDA’s programs and policies.”

Reforming the SNAP program was an essential part of funding President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation legislation, signed into law last week. 

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According to the policy think tank Urban Institute, roughly 22.3 million U.S. families would lose some or all of their SNAP benefits from changes made in the reconciliation bill. 

Other food assistance programs affected by the new regulation include the nutrition assistance program for Women, Infants, and Children, the national school lunch and breakfast programs, and the USDA Food and Nutrition Service Disaster Assistance program.