Cutting Federal Spending: The Case Of Food Stamps

/

Down in the swamps of Washington, D.C., our Congress is said to be hard at work hammering out a budget for the coming fiscal year. With a crisis of massive deficits looming, supposedly they are going to come up with some major areas where government spending can be cut.

One of the areas under consideration for significant cuts is the program formally known as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” or SNAP, and informally known as “food stamps.” According to the latest data from the Department of Agriculture, as of February 2025 the SNAP program had some 42+ million “participation persons,” with the cost of the program running at just under $8 billion per month, which is close to $100 billion per year.

Is it possible to achieve meaningful savings in this program? That depends on whether you think that the government’s goal should be to maximize the number of people living on handouts and in a state of dependency, or whether instead you think that the government’s goal should be to maximize the number of people living by their own resources and without dependency. The history of the program over the past several decades would suggest that plenty of current program participants are fully capable of making it on their own.

However, needless to say, the left-wing press has risen to the occasion to defend every last penny of current spending on the ground that any cut would constitute a cruel blow to the vulnerable. For one example among many that are available, let me pick on my usual whipping boy, the New York Times. The Times has a piece from Monday (May 12) with the headline and subheadline “Republicans Target Federal Anti-Hunger Program as They Prepare Trump Tax Package; Limiting funding for SNAP could help defray the costs of President Trump’s tax plans, but could result in millions of low-income families losing access to aid.” Excerpt:

House Republicans on Monday proposed a series of sharp restrictions on the federal anti-hunger program known as food stamps, seeking to limit its funding and benefits as part of a sprawling package to advance President Trump’s tax cuts. . . . The moves could result in potentially millions of low-income families losing access to the safety net program.

On cue, the Times rolls out a program advocate to throw around some inflammatory rhetoric:

Proponents of the food stamp program say that it has long served as a critical lifeline for low-income families by ensuring that they do not experience hunger. . . . “Slashing billions from SNAP would deepen hunger, increase poverty, and weaken communities,” said Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research & Action Center, an advocacy group.

However, looking at the history of the program, what emerges is that it became bloated during the Covid pandemic, and the Bidenauts were only to happy to keep it that way. The best resource I find for a counter-view on food stamps is something called the Economic Policy Innovation Center, or EPIC. They have a web page called the EPIC Food Stamps Resource, updated to May 1, 2025. Some key data:

  • In 2001, when Bill Clinton left office, the number of participants in the food stamp program was 17.3 million.

  • During the George W. Bush years, food stamp enrollment went up substantially, reaching 28 million in 2008.

  • But then, once Barack Obama took office, enrollment really started to soar. As recounted in this Manhattan Contrarian post from 2013, the Obama administration undertook an aggressive advertising and outreach effort to maximize food stamp enrollment. By 2013, enrollment had reached 47.24 million. Essentially all of that increase took place during times of economic expansion, when the normal expectation would be that enrollment would decline.

  • During his first term, Trump and his people made substantial progress in decreasing the food stamp rolls. By Trump’s last year in office, enrollment was down to just over 34 million, almost a 30% decrease.

Covid was the excuse for letting the food stamp rolls begin to explode again. But at this point the pandemic has been over for at least three years. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the rolls are at a high level because the Biden people wanted them to be at a high level.

EPIC gives some insights into how the numbers come to be so high. For example, the food stamp program supposedly has work requirements for any able-bodied adults. But the work requirements “are currently waived completely or in part in 34 states.” As a result, many able-bodied adults enrolled in the program simply do not work. EPIC gives figures for 2017-19: “Before the pandemic and Biden expansions, 13 million able-bodied adults received food stamp benefits on average between 2017 and 2019, yet 62 percent of these work-capable recipients did not work at all.” Since then, the evasion of the supposed work requirements has only gotten worse.

With food stamp program expenditures currently running at an annual rate of around $100 billion or more, there is lots of room for that to be reduced without anyone actually going hungry. If Bill Clinton could have food stamp rolls of well under 20 million people, that should be achievable again.