In an all-too-familiar move, House Republicans are proposing to drastically cut food assistance for poor Americans in order to give well-heeled Americans even more money and to shore up support for President Donald Trump. In other words, it’s business as usual.
The bill would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other federal nutrition assistance programs by a whopping $290 billion over the next decade, according to the draft text of the agricultural portion of their reconciliation bill. That’s how Republicans have decided to meet the target of $230 billion in cuts.
Why are they proposing $290 billion in cuts when only $230 billion was required? Well, because the administration needs to keep farmers—some of Trump’s staunchest backers—from fleeing the coop. That extra $60 billion would go toward strengthening the safety net for farmers, including commodity programs and crop insurance.
Then-candidate Donald Trump, center, speaks with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, left, and then-Sen. JD Vance of Ohio at a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show in October 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The proposed cuts are brutal. The work-requirement age for able-bodied adults without dependents would jump from 54 to 64, meaning that people needing nutrition assistance would need to work well into their 60s to get the absurdly meager nutrition benefits the federal government provides.
That’s bad enough, but the bill also redefines “dependent child” from children under 18 to children under 7. So, once your kid is 8, they’re just fine alone at home, or something? Apparently, kids should learn to fend for themselves early, especially since red states keep gutting child labor laws.
The bill would also shift significant SNAP costs to the states based on each state’s payment error rate. However, even some elected Republicans, craven as they are, recognize that hefty SNAP cuts would decimate poorer red states. Just gotta figure out a way to make sure only blue state residents feel pain, perhaps.
At the same time, the administration needs to ensure farmers do not receive a similar share of pain as people who are not rabid Trump fans. But that’s tough when the administration is slashing food aid to schools and food banks. Those groups receive funding to buy food from local farmers, but if they have no money, they can’t buy any local farmers’ food. But we can’t let that GOP-held desire to kick poor people in the teeth compromise the party’s electoral support among farmers.
Thus, we’re seeing a rerun of Trump’s first term, where the administration gave farmers $28 billion to help blunt the effects of tariffs. To put that into perspective, the Navy spends $22 billion yearly on shipbuilding, and the country spent $21.8 billion in the 2019 fiscal year to maintain nuclear forces.
Despite Trump’s second-term mess around tariffs and trade, there is one throughline: Now companies get to be farmers too, sort of. Where Trump provided tariff relief at the industry level in his first term, now individual companies can avoid economic pain by personally entreating the president, a totally constitutional and good thing, definitely.
That’s likely how Nvidia got the administration to back off from a plan to curb the company’s ability to sell its H20 chip to China. The company’s CEO ponied up $1 million to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and then somehow, those proposed curbs just disappeared. Trump spared Apple’s iPhones from some of his worst tariff excesses after the company’s CEO phoned the White House.
The administration’s overall theory of governance is that economic pain should be directed at people who already suffer economic pain—all so Trump’s best donors and most consistent voters can thrive. It’s not much of a theory, but they’re running with it.
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