Jacob Fischler, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Democrats on a U.S. House spending panel slammed President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to farm and nutrition programs Thursday, as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins pledged to collaborate with members of both parties to address their concerns.

The president’s budget request would make deep cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gutting programs to help feed hungry people and support farmers in need — even as the rising costs of groceries, gas and other necessities made those programs even more essential, Democrats on the House Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee told Rollins.

“It’ll be hard for our constituents to believe that USDA serves America’s farmers and rural communities when USDA is taking away their services,” the panel’s ranking Democrat, Sanford Bishop of Georgia, said.

The proposed USDA budget for fiscal 2027 would cut $4.9 billion, or nearly one-fifth of the department’s budget. Already, due to the Republican spending and tax cuts law last year, 2.5 million people have lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the department’s major food assistance initiative.

Trump overall in his budget request is seeking a huge boost in defense spending accompanied by cuts in domestic programs.

Accessibility, cooperation promised

Rollins defended the budget proposal, but projected a spirit of cooperation with the panel, which writes the annual spending bill for her department, telling Democrats and Republicans that she would be happy to address their priorities. She offered to field direct phone calls from several members.

Asked by Michigan Republican Rep. John Moolenaar about foreign growers undercutting U.S. sugar producers, she said she was ready to take on the issue in upcoming trade negotiations.

“We’ve got a lot going on around the world, but anything you hear, Congressman, that you think would be helpful for me, any way I can lean in… I would love to get more involved in that,” she said. “We are making progress but it does need to remain a priority.”

Rollins also touted some of her department’s wins over the past year, noting that bird flu cases were down 61% and that egg prices had also dropped.

The administration has also increased exports of key crops and Republicans’ massive spending and tax cuts bill raised the exemption to the federal estate tax that allows more family farms to be inherited with fewer taxes, she said.

She also called the Make America Healthy Again initiative that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spearheaded, with USDA also playing a major part, “one of our most important legacies.”

She agreed to Maine Democrat Chellie Pingree’s request to develop a “comprehensive overview” for the Make America Healthy Again philosophy.

Rollins vows no Farm Service Agency closures

Democrats on the panel, including leading members Bishop and full Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, hammered the budget request’s many cuts.

The budget would eliminate more than 70 USDA programs and was particularly ill-timed as prices continue to climb, DeLauro said.

“The price of everyday goods continues to escalate: Grocery prices are up, gas prices are up, utility costs, housing costs, health care costs are through the roof,” she said. “And the administration’s only plan is to decimate the public programs that help alleviate the strain on working families and farmers across the country.”

Bishop complained that assistance from the Farm Service Agency, which provides credit, disaster relief and other financial programs, would be more difficult for farmers to access.

Rollins sought to justify the proposed decrease, noting that the cuts Bishop mentioned made up only about 4% of the total department budget.

But she also said she would never close a Farm Service Agency office and offered to work directly with the Democrat and others to address understaffed offices.

“But as we are looking to make sure we are honoring the taxpayer, making sure we’re doing the best we can with every tax dollar, while putting the farmers first, (we are) taking key advice from you,” she said.

She added that members should contact the department “if you hear of an FSA office that isn’t fully staffed, or that the farmers aren’t getting what they need — and I realize they’re out there, I’m not living in some Pollyanna world, these are very difficult times.”

She ended her dialogue with Bishop by telling him to “feel free to call me, sir, anytime.”

Power of the purse

DeLauro and Bishop led a push to assert Congress’ power to control spending, executed by Appropriations committees in both chambers.

Bishop said he expected USDA to “not circumvent this appropriations process by refusing to spend or obligate program funding once it is signed into law.”

DeLauro quizzed Rollins about a grant program that was created in a December 2024 law to assist farmers hit by extreme weather events over the prior two years. “Not a single dime” of the $220 million appropriated in the law had been allocated to qualifying states, DeLauro said.

Again, Rollins was conciliatory, saying the issue was a priority for the department and that funding for DeLauro’s home state was “at the finish line.”

“Yes ma’am, we’re moving on that,” she said.

At least 2.5 million low-income people quickly lost help affording groceries under a Republican-passed law that added new requirements for the nation’s largest nutrition program and shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from the federal government to states, according to a study the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published Wednesday.

Some 6% of the 41 million Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, when President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, were no longer receiving benefits by the end of the year.

The left-leaning think tank’s report was based on U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agency data from July to December 2025.

Arizona was the largest outlier in the data, with a whopping 47% of people in the program — about 424,000 Arizonans — losing benefits in 2025, according to the think tank, which cited more recent state agency data in addition to last year’s USDA numbers.

Full-year 2025 data from the USDA, which operates the federal side of SNAP, shows an even bigger drop of 3.4 million people, or roughly 8% of the program’s total, CBPP said. SNAP is federally funded and administered by states, though that cost-share will change under the law.

In a late Wednesday email, a USDA spokesperson applauded the drop in SNAP participation, noting the program’s rolls had fallen below 40 million for the first time since the pandemic. The spokesperson said the program would continue “to serve those with the greatest need while also strengthening program integrity.”

“This change reflects several factors, including the most comprehensive work requirement reform since 1996, the One Big Beautiful Bill of 2025, as well as USDA initiatives that expand access to employment services, career and technical education, and case‑management support through USDA’s More Than a Job campaign,” the spokesperson wrote.

Incentives for states

The study did not intend to find a cause for the decline, co-author Joseph Llobrera, CBPP’s senior director of research for food assistance, said in an interview. But he noted the law created incentives for states to limit participation in the program.

Under a provision of the law that is not yet in force, the share of the program’s cost that states must shoulder is tied to the state’s “error rate” — the ratio of payments that were made to people who shouldn’t have qualified for benefits.

That motivates states to restrict access to the program, without providing a corresponding reward for expanding access, Llobrera said.

“So the incentive structure that’s in place, it really pushes states to make it harder to get onto the program for people who need that assistance,” he said.

The drop in participation happened without improving economic conditions, such as a decline in the unemployment rate, the researchers said.

That indicates people are moving off the rolls due to changes in the program, not because their circumstances have improved to the point they no longer need food assistance, the study said.

Many provisions of the law have not yet gone into effect. The error rate penalties, for example, start in fiscal year 2028.

Design, not a bug

In part, though, that restriction is by design, as the law’s supporters intended to cut SNAP benefits for recipients who met certain criteria and to control what they portrayed as fraud and waste at the state level.

The cuts in the federal share of SNAP funding helped pay for massive tax cuts and a boost to military spending in other parts of the megabill, which Republicans passed without any Democratic support through a process known as budget reconciliation.

The proponents of the agriculture section of the megabill championed provisions to make beneficiaries report their eligibility more often, boost work requirements, disqualify certain categories of legal immigrants, raise the age of children at which parenting would cease to qualify as work and otherwise tighten the availability of the program.

The provisions would help ensure only those who truly needed the federal assistance would get it, advocates said.

It would also create an incentive for states to control erroneous payments, which was not the case when the federal government took on the entire cost of the program before the bill’s enactment.

“It is a disservice to the truly needy to rely on SNAP,” House Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, said as the committee marked up the bill last year. “Clearly, SNAP is not working as Congress intended. We must ensure the proper incentives are in place for states to administer the program more effectively for those it serves.”

Llobrera said he understood the rhetoric in favor of increasing restrictions on the program, but that the center at the time was “raising the alarm that the bill was going to hurt people.”

A spokesperson for Thompson did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Arizona

The CBPP report included a breakout section on Arizona, where the SNAP enrollment dropped much further than any other state.

As in other states, economic gains did not explain the changes in Arizona, the case study said.

“This dramatic drop cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food,” the report said, noting that Arizona’s unemployment rate rose over the period of the study, while the cost of groceries rose about 4% in 2025.

The state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, and state agency spokespeople have blamed the GOP law for the drastic reduction in benefits, the study said, but the decline goes beyond what would be expected based on the law’s provisions.

That suggests that state administrators — even under Democratic leaders — are going beyond the minimum requirements of the law to restrict access, the authors said.

“Thus, it appears that a combination of factors, including the megabill and the state’s response to it, are contributing to the sharp decline in the number of Arizona families getting SNAP,” they wrote.

Because the law also raises the costs to states of administering the program, in addition to requiring states pay for some portion of benefits, some, including Arizona, cut staff ahead of the law’s enactment, Llobrera said.

“With the cuts to the administrative funding for states due to that megabill, those are only just going to accelerate,” he said.

Shutdown

Such changes to SNAP rules added to an already tumultuous period for the program’s recipients. Over the course of a then-record-long partial government shutdown last year, benefits were constantly turned off and on as the Trump administration said it could not spend SNAP funds during a shutdown and federal courts held that benefits must be paid.

Spokespeople for the White House did not return messages seeking comment Wednesday.