The Trump administration wants you to believe SNAP is broken. Tell that to 62,000 kids in Mass. who lost it.

Politics admin July 25, 2026 0 Comments

The Trump administration wants you to believe SNAP is broken. Tell that to 62,000 kids in Mass. who lost it.

What is reality?

This is the deep philosophical question over which this nation is currently divided.

Is reality, like, what’s actually happening before our eyes? Or is it what the hateful, self-enriching ghouls who run this country tell us is happening, despite blindingly obvious evidence to the contrary?

Trump won the 2020 election! Iran has been totally defeated! Dead ICE victims weaponized their cars! The economy is spectacular! Vandals wrecked the Reflecting Pool!

Pulling food assistance from millions of Americans? A great and glorious triumph!

About a year ago, Republicans in Congress passed what they still insist on heralding as the One Big Beautiful Bill that further slashed the safety net and gave massive tax breaks to the rich. That included huge cuts to Medicare, and to SNAP – the assistance that helps struggling Americans pay for food.

In addition to the funding cuts (which will kick in after the midterms, natch), the law introduced even more red tape into an already incredibly complicated SNAP application process, claiming the new requirements clean up a program that is riddled with fraud and abuse. It also put more of the financial burden for administering that labyrinth of red tape onto states that were already struggling with it, locking out even more applicants.

The results have been predictable. A report last week found that, in the 19 states where data is available, 2.4 million people have already lost SNAP. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nationally, 1.5 million children have lost nutritional assistance.

We’ve had one of the steepest declines in Massachusetts, which should give Trump a frisson of delight: about 175,000 people have lost benefits since last July. That’s a loss of 16 percent, and more than the entire population of Cambridge. And 62,000 of those are children.

Spectacular result, declare the Republicans who are making it happen. “A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been, and then a lot of it is just a better economy,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in May. “So people don’t need food stamps.”

Rollins is going hard on the welfare queen trope, suggesting, without evidence, that loads of SNAP recipients are driving around in Lamborghinis and Maseratis.

Big, if true. And the party says it absolutely is! Apparently, that’s good enough for millions of Americans, who seem willing, even eager, to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Are they going to grocery stores at all? Millions of Americans are living in a different reality – one that is actually real. They’re going to the supermarket each week and seeing the spiking prices. They’re running up credit cards or spending down savings or skipping utility bills to keep food on the table. They’re lining up at food pantries that are struggling with surges in demand, as private donors strain to fill a hole where the government should be.

“We’re seeing the real time impact this bureaucratic nightmare has put into place,” said Erin McAleer, who heads anti-hunger organization Project Bread. “These are folks who are struggling to afford food, and taking food away is not solving the issue for them.”

The USDA’s own data gives the lie to the stereotypes about people who are getting food assistance. Two thirds of SNAP recipient households in Massachusetts have an income below $21,640 – the poverty level for a familyof two. A quarter of households have at least one child. And 28 percent of recipients are over 60.

SNAP already has work requirements for non-disabled adults. Nationally, about two-thirds of adult recipients already work full time. They’re not suddenly entering into the job market, as Rollins suggests, because most of them are already there. Nor are they living lives of luxury at public expense: The average benefit per household in this state is $314 a month.

Fraud does exist, and has been caught by the system, including here. But given the size of the $100 billion program, it is exceedingly rare.

“The agency has so many data matching systems to catch bad actors,” said Victoria Negus, senior advocate at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. “Republicans are using [fraud] as an excuse to gut the safety net system forever.”

The new requirements they’ve imposed on applicants and states are designed to overload them, Negus said: “They’re breaking something intentionally then pointing at the broken thing and saying ‘Let’s get rid of it.’”

Even Republican states are pushing back on the lies. According to Politico, Ohio and Georgia have rejected USDA investigations that purported to find widespread SNAP fraud in their states, arguing that the department has included routine errors in its numbers. In Ohio, local authorities countered that 93 percent of the cases flagged by USDA inspectors were not actually fraud.

But what do facts matter when the Trump administration decides reality?

Congressman Jim McGovern, who has devoted his career to ending food insecurity, keeps trying to present the truth in a time when half of Congress, and a good chunk of the voters, have no use for it.

“Republicans get on the floor of the House and they say that everything is beautiful, and they expect people to believe it,” the Worcester Democrat said in an interview. “It really is frightening that the president and the Republicans are just embracing these blatant lies. They want people to believe Trump more than their own empty grocery cart, and their overdrafted bank accounts.”

It’s bad now, and it’s going to be even worse once the funding cuts kick in. There will be even less help for those families who can find a way through the bureaucratic morass to qualify for help. McGovern is bracing for “a catastrophe.”

“Can’t we agree that kids shouldn’t go hungry in the richest country on earth?” he said. “I mean, for Christ’s sake.”

In this America? Get real, Congressman.