When the Aid Stops

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.

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 similar group of people with the same incomes but not on SNAP 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. It also brought 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.

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 Analyses of the law describe about $186 billion in federal SNAP funding withdrawn through 2034, close to a fifth of the program.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. Several cannot easily absorb it, and some may meet it 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 in 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.

This is no longer a forecast. By March 2026, about eight months after the law passed, SNAP enrollment had already fallen by more than four million people, a 10 percent drop and the steepest in decades. And when the Senate wrote its 2026 farm bill, it declined to delay the new state cost-shift or restore any of the cuts. The chance to soften the rerun came and went.

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.

North Carolina has started to price its share. The state's first full budget since 2023 puts money toward setting up the new work requirements and warns the benefit cost-shift could eventually run to about $420 million a year. That bill lands on a state paying for SNAP benefits for the first time. The same budget restarts the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which uses Medicaid dollars to cover food, housing repairs, and transportation, but at $25 million against the $80 million requested. The state is being asked to cover more of the cost with less money.