On a recent tour of food banks around the state, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego stopped by Nourish south of downtown Phoenix and helped hand out food to families ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Gallego visited the food bank just weeks after the end of the federal government shutdown, which had caused demand at food banks like Nourish to spike due to an interruption in federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program, or SNAP.
Usually food banks fill a gap, providing meals for people who don’t qualify for SNAP but still struggle to afford groceries every month.
Jensina Sethi, a volunteer coordinator with Nourish, says that gap widened during the shutdown, dramatically increasing the number of families they serve each day.
“Typical is about 200 but after the SNAP thing, it jumped to 250 right away,” she said. “I've been here four years and four years ago, it was 70 families a day.”
While some Phoenix area food banks have seen numbers return to normal, Sethi says demand at Nourish hasn’t gone down even with SNAP benefits resumed.
“Yesterday, we did 306 50-pound food boxes, plus turkeys,” she said.
Gallego said he’s hearing that same message from food banks around the state.
“And unfortunately, we're hearing yes, that demand is up,” Gallego said. “They're able to meet demand thanks to a lot of great support, corporate, nonprofit support and volunteers, but it's scary that there's a lot of people who need these type of food boxes.”
Big changes
The monthlong government shutdown put a focus on food banks across the state as they stepped in to feed people who usually rely on SNAP to buy their food.
Even with that funding restored, those food banks may face an increased demand in the coming years due to changes made to the program by the Republican tax cut and spending package passed earlier this year.
Officials and advocates worry the shutdown could end up being a preview for what will happen when changes to the SNAP program included in President Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill go into effect.
Those changes include new expanded work requirements for many adults who receive SNAP benefits, which require beneficiaries to prove they work, volunteer or are looking for a job for at least 80 hours each month. The work rules which used to apply to adults 55 or younger but now apply to adults 65 and younger and to parents without children under 14.
The bill also got rid of work exemptions for homeless individuals, veterans and young adults aging out of foster care.
According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, around 124,000 of the nearly 800,000 Arizonans who use SNAP could lose benefits under the new requirements.
“We already know that there are about 700,000 people each month seeking help from food banks, and that’s just going to get worse if fewer people qualify for help,” said Terri Shoemaker with the Arizona Food Bank Network, a regional coalition of food banks.
Other changes
The federal government has historically covered almost all SNAP costs, but the Big Beautiful Bill changed that. It will increase states’ share of administrative costs from 50% to 75% and require some states to cover a portion of food assistance if they make too many mistakes in determining eligibility or benefit amounts.
States must keep that error rate below 6% starting in late 2027 to avoid the penalty. Arizona’s preliminary rate this year was over 10%, according to the Arizona Legislature’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee.
All of Arizona’s congressional Democrats voted against the bill, while every member of the state’s Republican Congressional delegation voted for the legislation.
“My colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus and I worked diligently with President Trump and House and Senate Leadership to push for significant spending reductions and reforms to Medicaid and SNAP benefits,” Congressman Andy Biggs said in a statement after the legislation passed the House. “While there is always room to improve, the historic tax cuts and reforms in this bill move us in the right direction and will power our economy.”
Most supporters, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, argued the changes to SNAP and other social programs were needed to combat alleged waste and fraud in the system.
“Pregnant women, children, seniors, single mothers, the disabled and the low income Americans among us receiving Medicaid and SNAP will have the peace of mind of knowing that we’ve made these safety nets stronger,” he said.
During a visit in September to St. Mary’s Food Bank, Democratic officials, including Governor Katie Hobbs, argued the bill’s provisions are actually just a way to shift spending onto states to pay for tax cuts backed by Trump.
The costs
Legislative budget analysts estimated the error rate penalty alone could cost Arizona up to $140 million during its first year in effect. The work requirements could also cost Arizona just under $300 million in federal funding as people lose benefits, according to the analysis.
Hobbs has long said the state doesn’t have the money to make up for those losses. During the shutdown, she tapped into remaining federal pandemic dollars to provide around $4 million to support food banks, a relatively small amount compared to $150 million it costs to pay for the state’s monthly SNAP benefits.
More recently, Hobbs said she will ask state lawmakers to come up with money to help offset some of those cuts when the legislative session begins in January.
“Certainly, we want to mitigate as much as we can some of the cuts that we're going to see from Washington,” Hobbs told KJZZ last week.
But the Republicans who control the state legislature have voiced support for the federal changes, arguing the only people who will lose benefits are those who shouldn’t have had them in the first place.
“People would be thrown off because they refuse to work and they don't have an excuse like, I'm going to school, or I'm disabled, or I have a young child at home,” Kavanagh said.
Kavanagh thinks the federal changes are a good thing, including the rule penalizing states with a high error rate.
“I think reducing payment when you have an unacceptably high error rate is an excellent inducement to get your act together,” he said. “And again, we're going to spend a lot of money on hiring new employees, so the rate should go down.”
Kavanagh prefiled a bill ahead of the next legislative session designed to help lower the error rate. Senate Bill 1002 would require the Department of Economic Services to conduct regular reviews using data from other state and federal partners to ensure it is accurately administering SNAP.
Democrats argue Arizonans with real need will lose SNAP, resulting in more strain on food banks.
“We are going to rely more and more on community partners like the St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance and other folks who are meeting those basic needs, because of the federal cuts,” Hobbs said.
Shoemaker, with the Arizona Food Bank Network, shares those concerns, but said food banks are already discussing ways to mitigate impacts, including by partnering together to make bulk purchases and reduce costs.
“What I do know is food banks are very resourceful, and we’ve been talking, not just in Arizona, but across the whole nation about these changes and how they could impact food banks and what we can do about it,” she said.
Back at Nourish, Sethi says her organization is ready to take on that challenger, for now.
“St. Mary’s said they would keep sending us food as much as we can, and we've seen a lot of donors step up and give us the money to purchase food, because we can purchase it a lot cheaper,” Sethi said. “So we just encourage people, if you have the means, to donate money to us, and we can buy food, and we will feed as many people as we can.”
The full impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on food assistance won’t be known for some time. The new work requirements are going into effect now, but other changes won’t take effect until as late as 2027.
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