How Many People Will Lose SNAP Benefits Under the Trump Administration's New Rule?
About 6.3 million people — in 3.2 million households — would lose SNAP benefits under the Trump administration's new proposed rule, by the Agriculture Department's own analysis published with the rule. That is nearly 18 percent of everyone in the program, and the department expects the full effect in fiscal year 2029. Nothing changes today: the rule was published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, November 10, and the public has 30 days, until December 10, to comment on it.
The plain reality is that the households in the department's count are not breaking any rule. Federal law generally limits food stamps to households earning no more than 130 percent of the poverty line, but for years states have used a policy called broad-based categorical eligibility to qualify households that receive services funded by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — child care help, job training — at incomes up to 200 percent of the poverty line, with looser asset tests. The Agriculture Department says 45 state agencies use it. The administration claims the policy is a loophole that has, in a department spokesperson's words, "bloated the welfare rolls for decades," and White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster told CBS News the administration "will continue to stop fraudsters stealing from these important programs" — the same fraud fight behind the food stamp fraud charges the administration has brought this year. The rule itself, however, does not describe these households as fraudsters; it says they qualify under rules their states adopted and would lose benefits because their income or assets exceed the limits the department now wants enforced.
"These are working families."
That was Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, answering the fraud framing, and it states the common-sense principle in this fight plainly: a family that followed every rule its state set is not cheating because Washington later decides to move the line. The consequence of moving it reaches well past the grocery store. Because SNAP enrolment also confers other help, the department estimates about 1.8 million children would lose automatic eligibility for free school meals and about 5,500 women, infants and children would lose WIC, while federal SNAP spending falls by about $44.6 billion over five years — on top of the more than 5.5 million people who, by the department's own data, have already lost benefits since the July 2025 tax law, bringing enrolment down to about 36 million. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told CBS News the new cut would reach families just above 130 percent of the poverty line, about $35,500 a year for a family of three. If those households did everything their state asked of them, the question that follows is the one the comment period now puts to the country: are they the loophole, or is the loophole the excuse?
The details that decide who is hit are in the mechanism. The proposal, titled "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Reforming Categorical Eligibility" (docket FNA-2026-0661), would limit automatic eligibility to households receiving TANF "assistance" — essentially ongoing cash aid — instead of the wider services most states now use. The department says the change would make eligibility more standardized and "preserve benefits for the truly needy." It is not a new idea: a similar rule was proposed in 2019 and withdrawn by the Biden administration in 2021. Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, answered it in the terms the families affected are most likely to use:
"The proposed rule would make it harder to meet basic needs and roll back efforts to streamline federal programs."