Republican states hit by crisis of Trump's own making: insider

There is a growing food crisis across the U.S. due to President Donald Trump’s cuts to the SNAP program, with the hardest hit states being those that are “traditionally Republican.”

This is according to former Treasury advisor Steve Rattner, who on Thursday shared data from the USDA showing that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program had plunged by 5 million people over the course of Trump's second term. “Over 5 million low-income Americans — including at least 1.5 million children — have lost access to food assistance due to Trump's SNAP cuts last year,” Rattner explained. “Most of the hardest hit states are traditionally Republican, resulting in growing hunger crises in states like Arizona.”

Last year, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed $186 billion from the SNAP budget over 10 years – the largest reduction in the program’s history. The act also imposed strict work requirements on SNAP participants. For the first time, adults between the ages of 55 and 64 and adults with children over 14 must work at least 20 hours a week or only receive benefits for up to three months over three years. What’s more, there has been a significant increase in the paperwork required, causing bureaucratic bottlenecks, while much of the administrative costs are being shifted from federal to state budgets.

According to Harvard public health policy professor Sara Bleich, “The SNAP program helps more than 42 million Americans buy food each month. That’s one in eight Americans, and 70 percent of those participants are the elderly, disabled, or children. The program is reaching vulnerable populations. When we look at levels of participation by state, we see that there tends to be a higher percentage of participants in the Southern and Southwest parts of the country, largely due to larger populations of families that have lower income.”

The USDA reports that food insecurity is an issue across most of the country, but that it tends to impact red states and counties the most. The states of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Nevada, and New Mexico have the highest rates of food insecurity – eight of which went to Trump in 2024, while Nevada's electors were split. These states have been among some of the hardest hit by Trump’s SNAP cuts.

Rattner has noted other alarming economic signals in recent weeks, such as persistently high inflation, lower-than-expected growth, an exploding national deficit, and a frozen labor market. With the midterms looming and voters overwhelmingly expressing that economic matters are their foremost concerns, Republican candidates have been careful to distance themselves from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.