Fiscal experts are raising red flags on Tuesday: President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is cutting food aid more drastically than estimates originally predicted.
According to new data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), millions of people have already been thrown off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.
The Big Beautiful Bill implemented massive cuts to SNAP, as well as Medicaid, in order to extend and deepen the tax cuts first passed under the first Trump administration in 2017.
"We estimate that SNAP participation nationwide fell by more than 4.5 million people (11 percent) between the law’s July 2025 enactment and April 2026, based on the latest month of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and data from the Georgia Department of Human Services provided in an open records request," said the CBPP report, noting that Georgia state data was used "due to anomalies in USDA data" for the area.
Virtually all states saw a decline in enrollment, due both to expansion of work requirements and the disenrollment of immigrants — even many who are in the United States legally.
The data alarmed many other political observers.
"Wow. The SNAP cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill — already estimated at the time to be the biggest in history — are turning out to be far, far, far deeper than expected (no shade at CBO, cost estimates are hard)," wrote Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress. "We’re witnessing the beginning of a hunger crisis in America."
All of this comes after prior reports that the Trump-backed legislation is kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of nutrition assistance around the country, including in battleground states and Republican-controlled states.
