New Bill Would Undo Cuts Designed to Let Kids to Go Hungry

Roughly 4-in-10 participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are children — which makes the way lawmakers tossed it around like a political football during the government shutdown all the more disturbing. The Trump Administration turned the program on and off like a lightswitch as the lives and budgets of 42 million people — including 16 million kids — hung in the balance. This chaos came on the heels of the steepest funding cuts in the program’s history: A nearly $200 billion gutting to be enacted over the next decade under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, passed as H.R. 1. But now, in a potential turnaround, new legislation may prevent these harmful cuts from taking place.

The 43-day government shutdown made families and kids unsure at any given moment whether they’d have the support they rely on to put food on the table, forcing them to choose between food or diapers. The tumult hit food banks, where an estimated one-third of patrons are children, straining them to fill the gaps. And it hit state agencies that are responsible for handling SNAP, making it impossible for them to accurately administer the program.

Food banks are not built to replace SNAP. They are built to supplement it. One food bank meal equals roughly nine meals provided by SNAP. Yet the shutdown forced them to try anyway — a burden that states, local communities, and charitable networks are ill-equipped to bear. As it became clear that benefits would be interrupted, food banks were catapulted into “emergency response mode.” With benefits paused, staff at one pantry in Pennsylvania reported demand unlike anything seen “even at the peak of the pandemic”. But when the food bank system is asked to pick up the slack, the math simply doesn’t add up. As the CEO of the Houston Food Bank put it: “We cannot meet the gap.”

The situation for state SNAP administrators was equally chaotic. As Alex Carter of Maine Equal Justice said: “It’s been, whiplash for everyone involved, including the state administrators who have been trying to keep up.” States found themselves squeezed between contradictory federal guidance, judicial orders, and operational realities. In one particularly striking turn, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, actually directed states to “immediately undo” full payments they had already issued — putting agency staff in the impossible position of distributing aid one day and reclaiming it the next. The combination of legal uncertainty, administrative burden, and operational risk makes clear that if states cannot manage a brief interruption from the federal government, they are surely not prepared to absorb the cost shift scheduled under H.R. 1.

Though the immediate SNAP crisis has now passed, all of it is a preview for what is coming, unless Congress charts a different path. Starting next year, H.R. 1 will require states to start paying a larger share of SNAP benefit costs for the first time in the program’s history. To put it simply: no state is in a position to absorb these cost shifts. States could be forced to narrow eligibility so that fewer children and families qualify or to make benefits less supportive of children. Under the law, if states can’t fully pay the amount owed, they could be forced to drop out of SNAP entirely, terminating benefits for everyone eligible in the state. To make matters worse: if a child loses access to SNAP because of these policy changes, they will also lose their seamless access to free school meals.

As these cuts from H.R. 1 begin to take effect  — with participants, food banks, and state governments still reeling from the shutdown chaos — it’s worth remembering the human impact of these intentional policy choices: hungry, poorly nourished children. For millions of kids, SNAP goes beyond nutrition. It provides critical support for their health, education, and overall well-being.

SNAP and Health Outcomes

When kids don’t have enough to eat, they’re likely to be sick more often, recover from illness more slowly, and be hospitalized more frequently. Hunger is associated with higher rates of asthma, anemia, and poor mental health in children. Pediatric clinicians have been sounding the alarm on this for years: when kids don’t reliably have enough to eat, their bodies and brains pay the price.

SNAP directly reduces this risk. Studies find that participation in SNAP is associated with lower rates of household and child hunger, better child health status, and lower risk of developmental delays among infants and toddlers. Families receiving SNAP are also less likely to postpone medical care or prescriptions because of cost — a critical protective factor for children with chronic conditions or disabilities, who often need regular appointments, therapies, and medications to function.

These health benefits extend into adulthood. A classic study that tracked the rollout of the Food Stamp Program across U.S. counties, found that children who had access to food stamps in early life had significantly lower rates of “metabolic syndrome” — conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes — and, for women, increased economic self-sufficiency later in life. In other words, SNAP is not just keeping kids fed this month; it is lowering their risk of serious, expensive chronic disease decades down the line. And promising new research from Northwestern University indicates that childhood participation in SNAP helps shield kids from heart disease risk factors later in life, again highlighting the program’s long-run health payoff.

For children with disabilities, these health protections are even more consequential. Disability often brings higher odds of complex chronic conditions, higher out-of-pocket medical costs, and more frequent interactions with the health care system. SNAP helps offset those pressures by freeing up scarce cash for copays, therapies, transportation to appointments, and adaptive equipment. When benefits are cut or made harder to access, it is these high-need kids who are hit hardest.

SNAP and Educational Outcomes

SNAP is critical to ensure that low-income children can keep up in school. Kids who come to school hungry have more trouble concentrating, regulating their behavior, and retaining information, and hunger is ultimately linked to worse academic performance and lower graduation rates.

Researchers have even documented the “SNAP cycle” in test scores: studies that link standardized exam data with the timing of SNAP benefit issuance find that students’ scores are lower toward the end of the benefit month, when food is most likely to be running out at home. When benefits are more adequate and last through the month, scores improve. SNAP participation can help moderate the negative association between hunger and educational outcomes, suggesting that SNAP helps buffer kids from some of the academic harm of poverty. 

For children with disabilities — who may already be navigating Individualized Education Plans, therapy pull-outs, and schools that are uneven in their compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — the stakes are even higher. A missed meal is not just a rumbling stomach; it’s lost focus in speech therapy, less stamina for physical therapy, or an increased likelihood of behavior being misread as defiance instead of a predictable response to hunger. (It’s worth remembering that these same students may also be seeing other IDEA-mandated programs disappear, as schools rely on Medicaid reimbursement to provide them — funding that also was severely cut under the One Big Beautiful Bill.) 

Schools regularly demand that children perform on standardized tests that can shape their educational trajectories, even while programs like SNAP that ensure they don’t show up to school hungry are decimated. That is not sound nutrition or education policy – it is sabotage of low-income kids’ chances to succeed, especially those who already face barriers because of disability.

SNAP and Household Stability

SNAP’s impact goes beyond individual health or test scores. It is central to whether households with children can achieve even a basic level of stability. By providing a dependable food budget, SNAP functions as a key stabilizer for households, cutting the shock of month-to-month survival that can fuel stress, instability, and ultimately family harm. When parents aren’t scrambling to make ends meet or skipping groceries so the car gets fixed, they have a cushion that reduces coercive conflict and minimizes resource-bargaining inside the home. Studies show that households receiving SNAP are less likely to be reported for child maltreatment or neglect, and that state‐level expansions of food‐assistance eligibility correlate with fewer investigations by child protective services. When  children with disabilities live in the household — where caregivers already carry added stress — the buffer provided by SNAP can be the difference between a home environment that supports healing and one where financial strain triggers maltreatment, neglect or crisis escalation.

These last six weeks have made one thing brutally clear: SNAP is an essential benefit that families rely on, especially families with children. The benefits of SNAP extend into a child’s health, academics, and their overall well-being, and they last into adulthood. Even going just a month without SNAP, the experience of the shutdown showed what life would be like for the millions of children and parents who were forced to live without it, the food banks that scrambled to do the best they could to meet impossible demand, and the state agencies who understandably could not take the place of a robust federal program. Children need Congress to protect SNAP and repeal the cuts scheduled to go into effect. Doing anything less is a deliberate policy choice that sabotages our nation’s children. 

New Bill in Congress to Protect Kids from Going Hungry

Fortunately, lawmakers introduced legislation this week in both the House and Senate that would repeal H.R.1’s devastating cuts to SNAP and reverse the state cost shift that will cripple the SNAP program. The Restoring Food Security for American Families and Farmers Act (H.R. 6088) would ensure that the 16 million children who rely on SNAP would continue to benefit from its critical role in helping them grow and reach their full potential.

For more than a half-century, SNAP has stood as one of the nation’s most durable bipartisan commitments. Its modern structure was built by an unlikely partnership between Democratic Senator George McGovern and Republican Senator Bob Dole, whose work led to the overwhelmingly bipartisan Food Stamp Act of 1977. Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton all preserved and modernized the program, recognizing that fighting hunger and supporting farmers were shared national priorities. In the 21st century, every major Farm Bill reauthorizing SNAP has passed with support from both parties. President George W. Bush signed a major expansion into law in 2002; President Obama signed a significant boost into law in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; and the 2018 Farm Bill, which Congress enacted with broad bipartisan support, was signed into law by President Trump.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats have agreed: no child in America should go hungry, and the federal government must maintain the stability of the program that keeps them fed. We need this bipartisan support to continue now more than ever. 

For a full list of cosponsors on the Restoring Food Security for American Families and Farmers Act, visit congress.gov.