An estimated 1.5 million children have been cut off food stamps over the past year, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The cuts are a consequence of Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” enacted by Congress last year, which featured a tax cut for the wealthy and slashed more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps.

The CBPP study is based on figures reported by 19 states comprising well over half the US population, which found 2.4 million people had been cut off food stamps since last July, including 1.1 million children. Projecting this over all 50 states, the CBPP made the conservative estimate that 4 million people have been cut off SNAP, including 1.5 million children.

The figures for some of the largest states are particularly staggering. Texas led the way, as it does in many areas of political and social reaction, reducing food stamp rolls by 597,353, of whom 317,316, more than half, were children. The largest percentage decline came in Arizona, with a Democratic-controlled state government, which saw a 48 percent decline in the food stamp rolls, and 49 percent for children, with 182,058 children losing their benefits.

Other states with large numbers of children cut off benefits include California, 156,440; Louisiana, 82,064; Massachusetts, 61,647; Pennsylvania, 59,750; Ohio, 50,477; and Michigan, 41,174. The cuts were carried out by state government of both capitalist parties: 11 have Democratic governors, eight have Republicans.

A handful of large states have not yet made public their food stamp cutoffs, including Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia and North Carolina.

There are two main mechanisms in the 2025 legislation to compel states to cut benefits. SNAP is administered by the states, but the benefits are paid by the federal Department of Agriculture. The One Big Beautiful Bill extended work requirements to older food stamp recipients, those aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt. Workers who lose their jobs at that age have particular difficulty finding new work at a decent pay rate.

States report an “error rate” to the US Department of Agriculture, which measures overpayments or underpayments, primarily due to clerical errors in the administration of the program, rather than benefits paid to ineligible or fraudulent claimants. The national average error rate was 11 percent, but the 2025 bill arbitrarily requires states to lower their error rates below 6 percent by October 2027 or face penalties of up to 15 percent of the total amount of benefits paid out to their residents.

Only nine states have met the 6 percent target rate, and the vast majority of states are expected to fail to meet the October 2027 deadline and hence incur the penalties, which will devastate their budgets. These states are moving now to eliminate people from the rolls, and several have said they will withdraw from SNAP entirely in order to avoid the penalties—leaving tens or hundreds of thousands of impoverished people, nearly half of them children, without any government food support.

In a detailed report on Arizona, published July 20, the New York Times interviewed several people who have been cut off food stamps by the state, including a cancer survivor who weighs only 69 pounds and is raising three grandsons, and a deaf woman who is having difficulty communicating with the state agency for lack of sign language assistance.

The article pointed to the administrative changes made in the One Big Beautiful Bill as the main contributor to the crisis, noting that it “made the deepest cuts in SNAP history.” The article continued: “It expanded work rules, cut in half the federal share of administrative expenses (which could lead other states to cut caseworkers, as Arizona has) and required states with high error rates to pay up to 15 percent of benefit costs.”

The Times did not, of course, examine the role of the Democratic Party in offering only token opposition to the Trump-backed legislation, and referred only in passing to Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, who oversees the implementation of the cutbacks in the state of Arizona.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has hailed the plunge in food stamp recipients as good news, presenting it as an indication that many former recipients no longer need aid because of supposed economic prosperity. But the CBPP report argues: “those declines cannot be explained by an improvement in people’s economic well-being. Nationally, unemployment has remained steady, real wages declined year-over-year in April, food insecurity remained high in 2025, and grocery costs are rising.”

More than 200 mayors, both Democrats and Republicans, issued a statement on behalf of the US Conference of Mayors asking the Senate Agriculture Committee to reconsider the SNAP cutbacks. They warned that impoverished urban areas would be devastated by the food stamp cuts and sought to have the October 2027 deadline pushed back.

A joint presentation by the CBPP and the American Academy of Pediatrics highlighted the impact of the cuts on children, who are extremely vulnerable to permanent damage from a shortage of healthy food.

Sharon Parrott, the CBPP president, said:

Republican leaders in Congress are ignoring the urgent need to help low-income families and kids who are losing SNAP and can’t afford groceries … Congress could use the budget process to help both farmers and families. At a minimum, Congress needs to slow down the hasty implementation of the massive cost-shift in SNAP costs to states.

Andrew Racine, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said food is one of the biggest determinants of health for kids, affecting their behavior and their ability to do well in school. He said:

A hungry child is a stressed child, and that chronic stress will have long-term implications for the child’s health as an adult. To the extent that we are making policy decisions today about foregoing the opportunity to feed hungry children, we are having consequences that will haunt us going forward a generation from now, and it’s entirely avoidable.

But these pleas, addressed to the same capitalist politicians who approved the cuts last year, will fall on deaf ears. Congress is now engaged in funding a massive expansion of the US military as part of Trump’s war in Iran and the US-NATO war in Ukraine, both backed by the Democrats as well as the Republicans.

A separate report by the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the number of Amazon and gig economy workers receiving food stamps and Medicaid has skyrocketed over the past five years, with SNAP effectively serving as a subsidy for the low wages paid to workers in these superexploited occupations.

The number of Amazon workers relying on federal programs for the poor nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025, in part because of the huge increase in the company’s workforce in response to the COVID pandemic. Amazon was the second-biggest employer of food stamp and Medicaid recipients, following only Walmart, the largest US employer and the largest employer of low-wage labor.

Third place on that list of shame is occupied by ride-hailing and food delivery companies operating on internet apps: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart. They were actually the biggest employer of workers receiving food stamps, but in third place in employing Medicaid recipients, a much larger group.

Other companies with large numbers of food stamp or Medicaid recipients in their workforce included McDonald’s, FedEx, Dollar Tree and Dollar General.

The GAO report consolidates figures from 11 states, with about 20 percent of the US population, and then projects the results nationally.