In 2021, public support pushed American hunger to its lowest level on record. In 2023, ending one piece of that support measurably pushed it back up. In 2025, the country chose to cut food aid again, deeper and for good. We already ran this experiment, and the result is on file.
Most policy debates argue about what would happen if you changed something. This one does not have to. On food aid, the country ran the test in plain sight over the last five years: it raised benefits, watched hunger fall to a record low, then let part of the increase expire and watched hunger climb back. The cause and effect were measured, published, and peer-reviewed.
That makes the current round of cuts unusual: their likely outcome has already been measured once, on a smaller scale, and written down. (For the basics of how food insecurity works, see the companion primer, How to Think About Food Insecurity.)
This is not a prediction. It is a rerun. We have the tape from the last time the aid stopped.
The lowest hunger on record arrived in the middle of a pandemic, which should have made it the worst.
In 2021, the share of U.S. households that were food insecure fell to 10.2 percent, the lowest in the years the federal survey has tracked it. The economy was still unsteady, so the drop did not come from prosperity. It came from an unusual stack of public support: expanded SNAP, stimulus checks, an enlarged Child Tax Credit, free school meals. Money reached households, and fewer of them ran short of food. For one year, the country saw what generous aid does to hunger, and the answer was that it shrinks it.
Share of U.S. households that were food insecure, 2020 to 2024. Drawn to scale.
Hunger fell to a record low when aid was highest in 2021, then climbed as pandemic supports were withdrawn and prices rose. Source: USDA Economic Research Service.
When one specific benefit ended, researchers could watch what happened next, cleanly.
During the pandemic, SNAP added temporary emergency allotments, between $95 and more than $250 a month for a household. In March 2023, those allotments ended in the 35 states still paying them. That created a natural experiment: a large group of families lost a known amount of food money on a known date, while a comparable group of income-eligible nonparticipants did not.
A peer-reviewed study in Health Affairs tracked the result with Census survey data. Among SNAP participants, the end of emergency allotments led to an 8.4 percentage-point rise in food insufficiency, not having enough to eat, along with more food-pantry use and more trouble paying other bills. Applied to the country, the Penn researchers behind it estimated roughly 2 million more Americans went without enough food because the extra benefit stopped. A permanent benefit increase from 2021 was already in place and did not prevent it. Cut the support, and hunger rose, within months, by a measurable amount.
The 2023 cut was a partial, temporary benefit ending. The 2025 cut is larger, and it is permanent.
In July 2025, a federal reconciliation law enacted the largest reductions to SNAP in the program's roughly sixty-year history. Analyses of the law describe about $186 billion in federal SNAP funding withdrawn through 2034, close to a fifth of the program. For the first time, states are required to pay a share of benefit costs, between 5 and 15 percent, which several states cannot easily absorb and some may meet by tightening eligibility. Work requirements were widened to older adults up to 64 and to parents of teenagers, and exemptions for veterans and people experiencing homelessness were removed. Future benefit levels were capped to grow no faster than general inflation, rather than tracking the actual cost of food.
The details are complicated; the shape is not. This is the 2023 experiment again, run deliberately and at a far larger scale. The 2023 version was a single benefit lapsing for part of the country for a couple of years. The 2025 version pulls more money, from more people, permanently. If a temporary, partial cut produced a measurable jump in hunger, the direction of a permanent, larger one is not in question. Only the size is.
Supporters of the law argue it reins in federal spending and pushes more recipients toward work, and the program's cost is real. The 2023 evidence does not weigh in on whether those goals have merit. It establishes only what pursuing them by cutting benefits has been shown to cost: a measurable rise in hunger.
A region still recovering from a flood is a bad place to run a hunger experiment.
Western North Carolina enters this with little slack. About 29,000 Buncombe residents rely on SNAP, and in the rural counties around it the share runs to 20 or 30 percent. The food bank is already at the highest sustained demand in its history after Helene. When the same families faced a brief SNAP pause during the federal shutdown in late 2025, the local response was real and could not cover the gap, which is the lesson of a separate piece, Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger. A permanent cut does not pause. It stays.
The last five years drew the line about as clearly as social policy ever gets to. Aid up, hunger down to a record low in 2021. Aid partly withdrawn, hunger measurably up by 2023, with about 2 million more people going without enough to eat. There is no mystery left in the mechanism, and no need to wait and see.
So the 2025 cuts are best understood not as a gamble but as a decision made with the evidence in hand. Hunger is set by how much the public helps with the gap between wages and the price of food. That makes it a dial the public sets, and it turns both ways. We watched it fall when we wanted it to. We are about to watch it do the opposite, on purpose, in a region that can least afford the lesson a second time.