The U.S. Senate this week is expected to start work on the budget bill approved by the house last month. And some senators say they’re hoping for changes to what has been dubbed the ‘big beautiful bill.’
Among many other provisions, the measure would cut billions of dollars for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP – this is the program commonly referred to as food stamps. It’s currently funded by the federal government, but the House version would force states to cover part of it by 2028.
January Contreras, president and CEO of Children’s Action Alliance, joined The Show to talk about what these changes could mean for SNAP recipients.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So let’s start with how many Arizonans use SNAP. How prevalent is this program here?
JANUARY CONTRERAS: So SNAP — which again it’s assistance for groceries. These are folks who are not going to be able to fill their refrigerator without this assistance. It’s almost a million people in Arizona, which was a surprise to me, even, as I had to learn more about this looking at this budget.
BRODIE: So what would it potentially mean if, for example, Arizona was going to have to cover some of the cost of this? Is there any indication that the state can or would do that?
CONTRERAS: You know, I think it’s hard to say this is what would happen. But the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan entity, is saying, “Yes, we can predict there will be states who are not able or who don’t choose to come up with a state match.”
And so suddenly, it is possible that you could have the state Legislature for some reason — we get extra money, they decide to raid the rainy day fund — you know, those things that keep the program there. But the truth is, we already have budget issues. And it is a real threat to the program. If the state match has to be changed in this monumental way in such a short amount of time as this bill demands.
BRODIE: Are there estimates in terms of how many Arizonans could potentially lose their benefits, at least under the plan that the House has approved?
CONTRERAS: Yeah. If we look at this, we’re looking at across the country, 1.3 million people losing their assistance, 3.2 million Americans losing just based on the other details that are in that bill when it comes to SNAP. So this is a lot.
And again, the state is going to be in a position of either having to drastically reduce what these benefits are. And we’re talking $180 a month is what a person is going to get with these.
BRODIE: Less than $200 a month for food.
CONTRERAS: We’re not talking about a lot of money here. And especially when you look at the rising cost of groceries, you look at the rising cost of housing, of childcare, of car insurance. It’s really tough for folks to make it. So the timing of this is particularly painful.
BRODIE: So let’s talk about what the impacts could be. And again, we should point out this is what was in the House-passed version. It still has to go through the Senate. And there are some senators who have said — among other provisions they don’t like — this is one of them.
But for sake of argument, if some number of Arizonans lose their SNAP benefits, what does that mean for them? And what are sort of the ripple effects of that?
CONTRERAS: There are a lot of ripple effects. Yesterday in church, we were asked to pray for senior citizens, for the elderly. And the first thing that came to my mind was this bill and the loss of grocery assistance. There’s a lot of senior citizens. There’s a lot of veterans. One in five kids are facing food insecurity.
So when you think about the ripple effects, the intended or the unintended consequences, it’s big. We will have folks, senior citizens who are on a fixed income, who will not be able to have enough to eat, who will be hungry.
We will have kids in school who — by the way, school meals is tied to how many kids are on SNAP. So we won’t only have kids losing that food security in their own home. We will have kids, some of them will also have their school meals impacted. So that’s their ability to thrive in school, right?
We’re a children’s organization, Children’s Action Alliance. We want kids to have all the things that they need to thrive. And this part of this bill really moves it in the wrong direction.
BRODIE: I mean, there have been a lot of studies that suggest that kids who are not, for example, well-fed, who are hungry, are not able to learn and not able to be at their best in school. It sounds like that’s kind of what you’re talking about, but I assume it also applies to adults as well.
CONTRERAS: Yeah, absolutely. … They need to have food in their stomach to do their best in school, to learn, for brain development, for their own development. And when it comes to adults of any age, actually, SNAP is tied to helping people get to work. If you look at some of this research, it’s tied to lower costs through health insurance because they are healthier individuals.
So there’s a lot that so many of us take for granted that we can buy. Maybe we’re buying generic brands instead of the brands we love at the grocery store. But for a lot of people, that’s not the reality. It’s either you know, they’re buying ten items or they’re buying five items, and that’s a real tough reality.
BRODIE: Is there room to adjust SNAP? A lot of folks are talking about sort of the buzzwords: fraud, waste and abuse. And not necessarily in SNAP, but in Medicaid and other programs that some Republicans are looking to adjust. Are there changes that could be made to SNAP that would be OK in your mind?
CONTRERAS: Sure. Good government is what we all want, and we want our dollars to be stretched so that they’re going to the real needs of Americans, of Arizonans. I will say in this moment — and I’m a former health care fraud prosecutor — there are people out there, and there are organizations, quite frankly, that are out there to make money, money, money off of government services. That’s true here in Arizona. We’ve seen it. It’s true everywhere.
But these are the individual people that are getting tagged with being “the greatest perpetrators of waste, fraud and abuse.” It’s not. These are people who are doing their best to make it day to day.
We always have room to bring integrity to government services. We should. That’s our responsibility. But the way that that term, “preventing fraud, waste and abuse,” right now is being used to really take away from the lowest earners of this country, people who are struggling every day but making it, barely making it. And we’re using this term “waste, fraud and abuse” to instead — really, this bill is about a lot of tax cuts for the highest earners.
It’s being misused. We can, in fact, go after fraud, waste and abuse. And a lot of times that’s going after folks who are very sophisticated and are in that highest-earner category. So it takes really approaching that with the sense of honesty to say, “Let’s go look at who really is perpetrating the most fraud, waste and abuse because we can get those guys.”
