$175 is all Vicky Clemont receives from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program once a month.
Clemont, who lives in the Cy-Fair area with her daughter and granddaughter, suffers from epilepsy and relies on her daughter to care for her.
For her family, that $175 can only get her so few little things before they have to rely on other avenues, such as food pantries and food stamps, Clemont said.
“We have a little one in the house. She doesn't understand when she asks for something and you don’t have anything,” she said. “A 5-year-old and she’s hungry. What do you tell her?”
What’s happening
President Donald Trump is pushing for his budget reconciliation bill to pass the Senate. Within the bill is a plan to cut more than $286 billion by 2034 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
SNAP is a program that provides food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget to afford essential foods. Currently, SNAP requires most people ages 16 to 59 to follow work rules, meaning a person must be working or participating in a work program at least 20 hours per week, according to Texas Health and Human Services.
In Houston, about 350,000 households from the Fort Bend, Harris, Montgomery and Waller counties receive SNAP benefits, which equates to 22% of all state SNAP cases, according to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
According to a May 22 letter from the Congressional Budget Office, a federal agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress, if the bill were to pass, SNAP would:
- Require most able-bodied adults under the age of 65 without children younger than 7 to work, train or volunteer in order to receive SNAP funding
- Make refugees ineligible for SNAP
- Require states to pay anywhere from 5% to 25% of SNAP benefits, and increase administrative costs from 50% to 75%. Currently, the federal government pays for all SNAP benefits
- Rolling back on the 2021 update to the Thrifty Food Plan, the model used to determine SNAP benefits
The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that conducts economic and social policy research, calculated the gap between the maximum SNAP benefit and average cost for a modestly priced meal in every county if the SNAP cuts were to pass. For Harris County, there would be a gap of $0.87 per meal. According to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, that gap equates to $78 a month if a person has three meals for 30 days. Across the span of a year, Harris County SNAP recipients would be facing a $936 gap in their food budget, according to Kinder Institute.
The potential SNAP cuts also come at a time where the state of Texas is seeing a rise in food insecurity.
According to the Map the Meal Gap by Feeding America, a nonprofit organization working to end hunger in the U.S., food insecurity increased in Texas, growing from 16.4% in 2022 to 17.6% in 2023.
What they’re saying
Brian Greene, the president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank, one of the largest food banks in the nation serving more than a million people in the Houston area, said if the cuts go through, he expects the food bank to see a lot more people relying on the food bank, resulting in fewer food being distributed to people and other food pantries.
The food bank is already being stretched thin, he said, as the food bank is expected to lose $11 million in federal funding after the U.S. Department of Agriculture ended the Local Food for Schools Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement, initiatives that allowed food banks and schools to buy food from local farms and ranchers.
Greene pointed out that SNAP is more than just providing people with food, it’s also allowing them to prioritize their other expenses like rent and utilities.
Janet Ryans, the executive director of Cy-Fair Helping Hands, a nonprofit in Cy-Fair helping the homeless and people in the community through their food pantry and homeless services, said the SNAP cuts will leave people with less options to obtain healthy foods.
“There’s no doubt we will have more people coming here,” Ryans said. “They won’t have any options. Throughout the state, they’ll be going to whatever pantries are closest to them.”
More details
Ryan Pera, the executive chef at Italian restaurant Coltivare in the Heights, told Community Impact he signed an April 8 letter with 150 other chefs from around the country opposing the potential SNAP cuts and urged Congress not to allow the cuts to happen. He said he signed the letter because he knows how important it is as a chef to have healthy food on the table, and how SNAP provides millions of Texans the dollars to buy those healthy foods.
“I can’t just put my head down at the cutting board and chop onions, as much as I would love to sometimes,” Pera said. “I have to look up and see what’s happening in this world and try to do something.”
For Clemont, she’s worried that these cuts could result in less SNAP funding for her family, and that she might have to stop paying certain bills just to get food on the table.
“We’re going to have to stop paying for something just to eat,” Clemont said. “Or cut back on air conditioning just to put food on the table. Or worry about one bill just to have something to eat. Are we going to be able to pay the light bill? It’s like sacrificing.”
Stay tuned
The bill is currently headed to the Senate, with the Senate expected to make changes to the bill during the legislative period. The bill will need a majority vote of 51 out of 100 votes to pass, and if it passes the Senate, it will head to the president’s desk for him to sign or veto, according to the U.S. House of Representatives.
