Republicans tried to make a case for increasing work requirements while Democrats used the opportunity to rail against deeper cuts to SNAP.
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Republicans tried to make a case for increasing work requirements while Democrats used the opportunity to rail against deeper cuts to SNAP.
April 8, 2025
April 8, 2025 – In a House Agriculture Committee hearing today, Republicans made their case for expanding work requirements within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the country’s largest hunger-relief program. Meanwhile, Democrats used the opportunity to rail against the deeper cuts to the program that Republican party leaders are proposing.
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The hearing came during the same week that House lawmakers are expected to vote on a budget bill that might lock in those cuts. A version of the budget passed in the Senate last week, but House Republicans are eyeing more significant cuts before a vote, in order to get more fiscally conservative members of their party on board. One number that has circulated so far is $230 billion in cuts to SNAP, which would likely come from rolling back a Biden-era update called the Thrifty Food Plan that increased benefits by about $1 a day to align with the current cost of a healthy diet.
In her opening statement, Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) accused Republicans of supporting those cuts in the budget bill “to pay for tax cuts that predominantly go to billionaires and large corporations.”
“If making families hungrier so the rich can get richer weren’t bad enough, cutting SNAP also cuts farm income for America’s family farmers,” she continued. “This cut would slash farm revenue by approximately $30 billion, on top of the markets they’re losing because of the dumbest trade war in American history.”
Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) noted at one point that Democrats were talking about “a bill that doesn’t exist yet,” and his team told Civil Eats that while he did not support the 2021 update to the Thrifty Food Plan, he is not looking to roll it back now. During the hearing, he largely expressed support for SNAP while pointing to what he sees as a need to strengthen “the connection between receiving SNAP and securing employment.”
“We must preserve benefits for those truly in need, but also ensure that SNAP guides participants to independence and self-sufficiency,” he said.
Most SNAP recipients are either children or elderly; most recipients who can work do. The program also has general work requirements, employment and training programs, and additional requirements that apply to working adults without dependents. However, about 40 percent of working adults are not subject to the requirements due to state waivers, a point Republicans emphasized. “States are abusing loopholes in the law and keep people on the sidelines and stuck in lives of government dependency,” said Representative Mike Bost (R-Illinois).
During the hearing, Angela Rachidi from the American Enterprise Institute repeatedly said evidence points to the benefits of work requirements in SNAP, while Diane Schanzenbach, a professor and economist at Northwestern University, said the most recent research shows the requirements do not actually lead to increased employment.
“If I have to sit through one more Republican lecture about how SNAP discourages work, I might lose it. Spare us the condescending talk about the dignity of work. If you guys cared about that, you’d be raising the minimum wage, but you don’t,” said Representative Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts). “Call me radical, but I don’t think it’s morally right to slash a food benefit that costs a sliver of the budget while farmers get hammered and food prices go through the roof.”
Behind the scenes, lawmakers told Civil Eats that if Republicans get deep SNAP cuts into a budget bill, which they can pass through a process called reconciliation with fewer votes, the prospect of getting a 2025 farm bill passed will become even more remote. (Link to this post.)
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect Chairman Thompson’s position on a Thrifty Food Plan rollback.
July 30, 2025
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