June 12, 2025 – The Senate Agriculture Committee released its proposed text for Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” last night, which included slightly pared-back cuts to the country’s largest food assistance program—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—compared to the House version passed at the end of May. While the House plan proposed cuts of nearly $300 billion in SNAP spending, the Senate’s plan would cut $209 billion from the program.
“This bill takes a commonsense approach to reforming SNAP—cutting waste, increasing state accountability, and helping recipients transition to self-sufficiency through work and training. It’s about being good stewards of taxpayer dollars while giving folks the tools to succeed,” Chairman John Boozman (R-Arkansas) said in a statement.
The Senate’s plan keeps many of the House’s changes to SNAP, including eliminating the popular SNAP-Ed program that provides nutrition education to low-income families, barring refugees and asylum seekers from accessing benefits, and requiring that future changes to the Thrifty Food Plan be cost-neutral.
However, there are other slight differences in the Senate bill. Compared to the House version, the age limit for the strictest work requirements is 64 rather than 65; parents will be required to work if their children are 10 or older, rather than 7 or older; and states would need to pay for 15 percent of the program’s costs, rather than the 25 percent proposed by the House.
Policy analysts at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) predicted those costs are still too high for many states to take on and would likely result in states having to cut food assistance.
“Despite differences around the edges, the Senate proposal mirrors the misguided priorities and harmful impacts of its House counterpart: millions of people would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries, all to help to pay for trillions in tax cuts skewed to the wealthy,” CBPP Vice President of Food Assistance Ty Jones Cox said in a statement.
In a document released with the text of the bill, Senate Republicans called the claim that millions would lose food assistance “false,” but did not provide clear evidence to the contrary.
The Senate’s bill also increases spending on farm bill programs including commodity payments, crop insurance, and conservation programs. Like the House bill, it would incorporate additional money from the Inflation Reduction Act into conservation funding, but strip the funding of its original designation for climate-smart practices.
The future of the bill remains uncertain. The Senate is aiming to get all of the components together and vote before the July 4 holiday. The changes are significant enough that it will then have to be passed again by the House before President Trump can sign it into law. The House passed their version by the narrowest of margins, and there are several other provisions that many Republicans still disagree on. (Link to this post.)
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