Food insecurity in the United States is not an unfortunate behavioral choice, it is a tool of social control, engineered through greed, austerity, and the deliberate abandonment of the poor. The catastrophic physical, psychological, and social consequences of food insecurity, rampant diabetes and hypertension, maternal depression, childhood behavioral and developmental harm, and the stunting of educational potential, are not incidental. They are the predictable outcomes of a system that commodifies survival and upholds the illusion that basic nourishment must be earned rather than guaranteed. In a nation of abundance, hunger persists not because food is scarce, but because exploitation is policy. This is not a broken system, it is functioning precisely as designed, ensuring that deprivation, dependency, and despair remain the tools by which power maintains itself.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act or OBBBA was signed into law on July 4th, 2025. This bill is on track to make monumentally detrimental changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The OBBBA will cut $136 billion from SNAP by 2034, the largest cut to SNAP in the history of the program.
Since its inception, SNAP has functioned as an entitlement program, meaning that anyone who qualifies is entitled to receive some amount of benefits, regardless of the budget for the program or the cost. Now, as a result of OBBBA, the costs of the benefits will shift from the federal government to the states in FY27. This will further strain the states:
“Most states are required to pass balanced budgets, meaning they cannot carry over a deficit into the next year, unlike the federal government. States may thus be forced to drum up the money by increasing taxes, cutting other parts of their budgets (such as education and transportation, which are largely funded by states), or restricting SNAP eligibility and enrollment to reduce their total cost. If states can’t afford the benefit costs, they could terminate SNAP in their state. States are already proposing cuts to programs, claiming uncertainty around the impact of the SNAP cost-shift on their budgets. Cuts to SNAP will worsen food security for one in eight Americans, including one in five children, who rely on SNAP for access to food.” (McNaught)
States will be forced to scramble because of these shifts of costs from the federal government to states. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that “more than 5 million Americans will lose their food benefits while trying to jump through bureaucratic hoops created by the work requirements clause in the bill. Those requirements will now impact older Americans between the ages of 54 and 64, adults with children under age 14, as well as veterans, former foster youth, and people experiencing homelessness. In a reversal of previous law, the OBBBA now prohibits refugees and asylum-seekers from accessing food benefits through SNAP.” Additionally, able bodied adults without dependents (ABAWD) ages 18-64 will also be negatively impacted by additional requirements to receive benefits. ABAWDs will now only qualify for three months of SNAP benefits for a period of three years if they prove they are actively looking for work, do not willingly quit or reduce their hours, and must work or volunteer for a minimum of 80 hours a month.
SNAP plays a pivotal role in supporting children and their working parents. In 2014, children made up 44 percent of SNAP participants. The Executive Office of the President estimated “that one in two American children will receive SNAP assistance at some point during their childhood.” The direct benefits of SNAP can be traced back to 2015 where census data showed 4.7 million people, including 2.1 million children, were lifted out of poverty due to SNAP benefits delivered the year prior. In fact, SNAP benefits reduced the overall poverty rate by 2.8 percentage points (vs. 1.5 percentage points for the overall population), and SNAP benefits contributed most to poverty reduction among children.
Moreover, households that participate in SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid automatically qualify children to receive free school breakfast and lunch. The decrease in direct certification, a method that automatically qualifies a person for SNAP, caused by changes to SNAP and Medicaid will make it more difficult for schools to offer nutritious free meals to all students, impacting their development and education.
A sound federal government that cares about the welfare of children would not only roll back the cuts to SNAP, but would make the qualifications to join simpler. However, a social assistance program that pulls people out of poverty, like SNAP, is not beneficial to a capitalist, extractivist nation like the U.S. Instead, the country chooses to leave our most vulnerable people, children, to starve. As a result, childhood hunger will skyrocket, causing detrimental effects on their health and development. In this way, food has become a tool of oppression, controlled by political choices.
This bill is going to force families to choose between food, healthcare, and other basic necessities, exacerbating health disparities and deepening the racial wealth gap. Making the requirements more extensive hurts Black, Indigenous, and people of color the most. More than one in five Black, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), and Native Hawaiian and 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 benefit cuts or unhelpful work requirements that make it harder to receive or keep this important source of support.
How do we expect families to survive and climb out of poverty when policies like OBBBA consistently make it harder to do so? Even when people work multiple jobs to survive, they get called ‘lazy’ for asking for assistance to put food on the table and keep their lights and water on. They are told to simply ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ and blamed for the intended outcomes of capitalism. By cutting a lifesaving social program, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act codifies the destruction of resources for those at the bottom to benefit its extractive colonial rule.
Authored by Osvaldo Barba
Osvaldo Barba has a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley. His work revolves around both international war crimes and domestic threats to the working class. He hopes that more people dissect legislation to expose the threats of government harm disguised as philanthropy.
