This article is part of “Unaffordable America,” a series examining rising economic inequality in the U.S. and the policies that drive it.
PHOENIX — The line outside a suburban office building was already 15 people long when Tiffany Hudson showed up with her 7-year-old son cradling his blanket. It was 7 a.m. At the front of the line was a woman hooked up to an oxygen tank who had arrived 90 minutes before the building opened.
Like others there, Husdon had come to the Arizona Department of Economic Security office in Surprise, a Phoenix suburb, to find out why the food stamp benefits for her and her two children were cut off after the state began implementing new eligibility requirements under President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson said. She’s a single mom who had received about $600 a month in food assistance to supplement her income as a part-time caretaker. Her benefits stopped without warning three months ago. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”
Hudson and her children have been swept up in a wave of new restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles that have begun to ripple across the country as a result of Trump’s marquee legislation, which he signed into law with great fanfare nearly a year ago during a Fourth of July celebration. The law extends tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often referred to as food stamps, over the next decade. Now, the consequences of those cuts are showing up on Americans’ kitchen tables.
Since the law was enacted last summer, about 3.5 million people have fallen off the SNAP rolls nationwide as of January, according to federal data. No state has seen a more dramatic drop than Arizona, which offers a window into what may be in store for other states.
“It’s a frightening time for the folks we serve,” said Natalie Jayroe, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, which has already been struggling with limited food after the federal funding cuts from the early days of the second Trump administration. “The overwhelming uncertainty and anxiety that the folks we serve are facing — it’s hard to describe.”
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Arizona has moved more rapidly and aggressively than other states to enact the federal government’s expanded work requirements, which proponents of the legislation argued would push people off of federal assistance and into the labor force. The state has also increased the amount of documentation people must submit when applying for food stamps and put new review systems in place to avoid hefty federal penalties for states with errors over a certain level, a requirement Republican backers of the change argued would root out waste and fraud.
In practice, though, these changes are going beyond their stated aims and have made it harder for many more people in Arizona to receive food assistance, even if they should be eligible, according to policy analysts, service providers and more than two dozen people who said they believed they were wrongly cut off from the program.
The number of people receiving food stamps in the state has fallen by around 50% as of March compared to a year earlier, including about 200,000 children who have lost their benefits, according to state data. Those numbers are showing up in the lines at Arizona food banks, some of which are seeing record demand.
The SNAP cuts come at a time of growing wealth inequality in the U.S. The richest households have seen their wealth balloon in recent years from investment gains, while lower-income households have seen their wage growth slow, their job prospects weaken and their costs continue to rise. Now, the divide between the rich and poor in America is the widest it has been in at least a generation — and growing, according to Federal Reserve figures.
“I think it’s a really cruel time to be taking grocery money away from low-income people with prices where they are and for reasons that are beyond their control,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. She called the new work requirements in the law “a cruel policy to try to use hunger as leverage over people.”
Joseph Llobrera, a senior director of research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, sees this as a warning for the rest of the country.
“We’re going to see more and more people lose access to this program at a time when need hasn’t gone down, and is probably going to go up, given, among other factors, rising energy costs and how that ripples through the economy,” Llobrera said. “We’re going to see the human cost continue to mount.”
The Arizona Department of Economic Security, which administers federally funded SNAP benefits, acknowledged the drop in people receiving food stamps, including some who should be getting them. The state had to adjust to the new eligibility requirements under last year’s law and has also been stepping up efforts to reduce its payment error rate to avoid federal penalties starting in 2027. Doing so, though, has required additional documentation for each case and strained an already overstretched workforce, leading to delays in approving benefits.
“We acknowledge that many families are awaiting critical assistance, and our teams remain committed to finding every possible solution to minimize elevated wait times. Processing delays are driven in large part by the requirements in H.R. 1,” Department of Economic Security spokesman Brett Bezio said in a statement, referring to the legislative title for Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
The White House said the law is intended to reduce federal spending and “restores basic work requirements, prioritizes American citizens, and implements reasonable cost-sharing measures with states to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“President Trump is strengthening SNAP for the Americans who need it by ensuring these programs are sustainable for future generations,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly.
Long lines for help
Hudson sees no reason why she should have lost her food stamps. As a mother caring for two young children, she should be exempt from the law’s expanded work requirements, which mandate that able-bodied adults under the age of 65 must work at least 80 hours a month unless they care for a child under the age of 14. Hudson typically works around 50 hours a month while being the primary caretaker for her children, including one who is autistic.
She described being caught in a monthslong paperwork back-and-forth with state employees since February, when her benefits failed to arrive. Unable to reach anyone by phone, she finally decided to show up in person at the office in Surprise. On the morning she arrived at 7 a.m., her second visit that week, she had a backpack full of paperwork she was told she needed to provide to verify her income and expenses to have her benefits restored.
But after waiting for four hours to speak with someone, she was told she needed more documentation, including a written statement from her father explaining that a Zelle transfer for her birthday was a one-time gift and not a recurring payment, she said.
While Hudson waited in line for answers, Dawn Savinski waited in line 2 miles away for a few bags of groceries at St. Mary’s Food Bank. Her $238 a month in food benefits were cut off several months ago because she wasn’t meeting the new 80 hour-a-month work requirement. At 62, Savinski retired from working cleaning jobs because of her deteriorating health, but she isn’t legally designated as disabled.
“They told me I was an able-bodied adult and had to work. I’m 62 and newly retired, and I can’t work,” Savinski said. “There are a lot of people like me who fall into that crack. They say that they help the elderly, but they don’t really.”
A few spots away from in line from Savinksi was Cricket Shiloh Anderson. The 79-year-old said she had been receiving $24 a month in food stamps — a small sum, but one she relied on to help her afford essentials like dairy, soups and rice. But she stopped getting those benefits several months ago, and she wasn’t sure why.
Savinski and Anderson were among more than 900 people who passed through the food bank between 7:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. on a recent Tuesday, many pushing grocery carts that clattered between the parking lot and the warehouse-style distribution center where volunteers in yellow and orange vests handed out food — a bag of avocados, a carton of strawberries, a loaf of bread, a box of coffee pods.
One of those volunteers was Enoch Asmah, who had come to Arizona from Ghana last June to be with his wife, who is a student. He said he hadn’t expected to see this level of need in the U.S.
“There are such huge numbers of people who really need some help with food around here. I never knew this could be the situation here. Personally, that has been a big surprise for me,” Asmah said.
Among those who showed up that morning were a woman who had come with her elderly father, a young Native American couple, a man in an addiction recovery program and a mother with a toddler clinging to her leg. All said they had lost their food stamp benefits in recent months, even though they believed they should have been exempt from the work requirements. Native Americans and people participating in drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs are among those who are exempt.
“It’s impacting us tremendously,” said Nichole Benedict, whose benefits stopped without explanation in December for her and her three children, ages 8, 9 and 10. “My boys are telling me nonstop, ‘I’m hungry, I’m hungry.’ I’m trying to keep up with that, trying to make sure that they’re fed. It’s just really, really difficult.”
Milton Liu, head of St. Mary’s Food Bank in Arizona, said demand is already up as much as 25% over the past year in some rural counties, and he expects it to continue to rise.
“We think we’re just starting to see the impact of this,” Liu said of the fallout from the federal changes, which Arizona has implemented more quickly than other states. “We think we’re at the front end of it in Arizona, and we think Arizona might be at the front end for the rest of the country.”
The next day, a stream of more than 1,000 cars crept through the parking lot of another St. Mary’s Food Bank location in Phoenix. In one of those cars was Jena Hannon, who said she has been disabled since birth and relies on a walker and a wheelchair to help her get around. She said she lost her food stamp benefits in November when the paperwork for their six-month recertification didn’t arrive because of the government shutdown. Even after the government reopened, she and her husband still haven’t been able to get their benefits restored and haven’t been able to reach anyone by phone for help.
“I have heart issues and seizures, and I’ve been in and out of the hospital, so I have a hard time getting to the food stamp office,” said Hannon, who was previously receiving $528 a month in benefits for her and her husband, who is her full-time caretaker. “As disabled people, we are supposed to be getting our food stamps before everyone else, and I’m not getting anything. I barely have money to eat.”
Smaller staff, higher stakes
Monika Spencer used to be on the other end of processing SNAP applications before she and around 400 other workers at the Arizona Department of Economic Security were laid off last July, which the state attributed to federal funding cuts.
Even before the added requirements and the staffing cuts, she said workers were stretched thin. From the moment the phone lines opened at 8 a.m., Spencer said she took calls nonstop. Processing one application could take her up to two hours.
“We were already understaffed as it was,” Spencer said.
Since then, the state has imposed even more demands on workers, not just to verify that someone is working the required hours or meets an exemption under changes to the law, but also to increasingly document a range of other factors for every application, including income, expenses, utility bills, household size and disability. Processing those additional documents requires more time and can create barriers for applicants, like those who are self-employed or have varying work schedules.
That push for more documentation and verification is a response to a lesser-known provision in the law that requires states to lower their so-called payment error rate, which measures whether someone was paid more or less than the amount they were eligible for. If a state’s payment error rate rises above 6% it will have to cover costs for a portion of the state’s food stamp benefits, which have historically been paid for entirely with federal funds.
Arizona’s error rate was 8.8% in fiscal year 2024 and projected to be around 10% in fiscal year 2025. If the state doesn’t lower that rate this year, it could face as much as $208 million in SNAP costs starting in late 2027, according to a state analysis in September.
For states already facing tight budgets, those costs could be devastating and cause some to drop the food stamp program entirely if they are unable or unwilling to pick up the added expense.
Arizona has been working to improve its system, said Bezio, the state agency spokesman. After the layoffs in July, the state has allocated $6.4 million toward overtime, technology improvements and hiring new staff, including 120 workers who started in March and 300 currently in training. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, requested an additional $48.4 million in funding from the Republican-controlled state Legislature to address the added costs from implementing the federal changes.
By focusing on reducing Arizona’s payment error rate, “we are safeguarding the long-term viability of SNAP for those who qualify, ensuring the program remains a stable resource for vulnerable Arizonans,” Bezio said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP at the federal level, said the department has provided guidance and technical assistance to states that need support complying with the new requirements.
“USDA is committed to preserving the integrity of our programs and respecting the generosity of American taxpayers,” the agency said in a statement.
Spencer hasn’t been able to find a new job since being laid off nearly a year ago and is now on the other side of the system — applying for food stamps herself. Despite understanding how the process works, she said her application was denied in March, two months after she applied, because of a lack of documentation. She said she believes the agency’s decades-old website didn’t properly save all the documents she uploaded, and she has submitted an appeal.
In the meantime, she and her 11-year-old autistic son have had to make drastic cuts to their budget. They are eating less, going to food banks and have had to move out of their home to rent a single room they are sharing in a two-bedroom apartment.
“It just bothers me because people who are receiving SNAP need it. They’re not just loafing around and buying T-bone steaks and living life high on the hog,” Spencer said.
A growing gap
Even if Arizona is able to improve its systems, millions of people nationwide are projected to lose their benefits by design because of the expanded work requirements. That has food banks and nonprofits bracing for a longer-term impact.
Outside of Arizona, other states are starting to see substantial drop-offs in enrollment since the law was enacted, including a 24% decline in Georgia and a 12% decline in Virginia and Tennessee as of January, according to the most recent federal data available.
At St. Mary’s Food Bank, Liu said his organization and others across the country aren’t equipped to replace the level of resources being cut from the food stamp program.
“We’ve worked really hard to fill the gap for folks as they need more help, but the reality is that St. Mary’s Food Bank and the other partners we have can only fill a small portion of that gap,” Liu said.
Health care organizations worry they will be next to feel the effects.
Bill Ellert, chief medical officer for Circle the City, an organization that provides medical care to homeless people in the Phoenix area, said he anticipates a rise in complications from high blood pressure, kidney disease and other chronic conditions as his patients lose their SNAP benefits and are unable to afford healthier foods, which tend to be more expensive. Under the changes in the law, people experiencing homelessness are now required to meet the 80 hour-a-month work requirement if they are under the age of 65 and not disabled or caring for a young child.
Many of his patients receive Medicaid, which they could also be at risk of losing next year when similar cuts go into effect for that program.
“These things are done to save money, and unfortunately, what people don’t realize is that it’s going to cost more in the long run from a medical standpoint,” Ellert said. “These are people that are going to end up in the hospital, and we all know that hospital care is much more expensive than if we can prevent things. We might not be seeing the effects of that right now, but we’re going to start seeing them in probably six months.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
