Food Stamps at Risk in Trump Budget Bill, Bay Area Food Banks Warn

Leaders of five major Bay Area food banks are sounding the alarm about massive and unprecedented cuts to a critical federal food assistance program.

As members of Congress wrestle over how to defray the costs of President Donald Trump’s tax cut plan, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP — or CalFresh in California — is at risk of a nearly $300 billion cut.

Leslie Bacho, CEO of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, called it “the greatest rollback of food assistance that we have seen in our modern U.S. history.”

Such a large slashing could severely hamper the program, reducing or ending benefits for nearly 700,000 people in the Bay Area alone, and roughly 40 million across the U.S., forcing even greater reliance on food banks that are already stretched thin.

“We are committed to serving anyone who needs food. We are committed to showing up every day, but we cannot replace a gutted federal safety net,” Bacho said during a news conference Tuesday.

Across the Bay Area, food bank leaders said demand for the supplemental nutrition they provide is already at or near all-time highs.

Tanis Crosby, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, said a December 2023 survey showed its clients were already struggling with historic levels of food insecurity, even before pandemic benefits ended and inflation more harshly pushed up prices on so many basic foods.

“And now we’re facing this, the most consequential cut to SNAP in our lifetimes. And it’s a choice. It’s a policy choice that this government has,” Crosby told KQED. “We need to reject this bill. We need to reject these cuts. They are not necessary, and it’s going to leave tens of thousands of people without the benefits that they rely on to survive.”

Historically, when SNAP benefits are reduced, such as when increased pandemic-era assistance ended, more people struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table lean on the network of pantries and organizations that distribute healthy staples from regional food banks into communities.

Second Harvest, for example, serves both Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, and officials say the nonprofit is currently providing meals to about 500,000 people every month, or roughly one out of every six people in the region.

Regi Young, the executive director of Alameda County Community Food Bank, said one in every four people is struggling with food insecurity in the East Bay.

“The truth is that most of the families that receive food from us are already working families, but they don’t make enough money to be able to thrive in, quite frankly, one of the most expensive places in the country,” Young said in an interview.

“And so we have a lot of families who are leveraging the monetary value of the food that they receive in order to supplement other costs — their rents, their utilities, their child care,” he said.

The federal benefits go by several names, including SNAP, CalFresh, EBT, or food stamps, and often come in the form of a reloadable debit card that people can use to purchase groceries and snacks at grocery stores, retailers and farmers markets. In California, anyone earning up to 200% of the federal poverty (PDF) level is eligible, which for a family of four would be up to $64,300 each year.

“It boggles my mind that in the wealthiest country in the world, that we would actively dismantle our most successful hunger relief program and take away vital resources from communities that need it the most in order to support tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our communities,” Young said during the news conference.

Food bank leaders say the benefits not only help those most in need, such as working-class families, students, people with disabilities and seniors, but also support local economies.

“A dollar of SNAP is generating $1.80 of economic benefit to that local community,” said Allison Goodwin, the president and CEO of Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa. “So not only are those families with young children given money into their pocket to purchase groceries, those dollars are going back out to those local retailers, grocers, food producers, the drivers that get it there.”

The proposed cuts to SNAP are the equivalent of roughly 9.5 billion meals annually, local officials said, which is far more than the entire charitable food system across the U.S. provides each year, at about 6.5 billion meals.

Caitlin Sly, the president and CEO of the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, said food banks have faced many crises before, such as the 2008 recession and the pandemic in recent years.

“And every single time, our federal government has come through to help us weather those storms,” Sly said. “Unfortunately, right now, our federal government is creating a crisis.”

Preserving SNAP benefits isn’t just about preventing more people from going hungry, Bacho added.

“It is also about dignity, and it’s about stability,” she said. “It is about the basic human right to survive in a country that has the means to do better.”