The Quiet Unraveling of America’s Food Safety Net
Maine had a plan to feed its hungry. Then came Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill.”
By Marcia Brown
As spring hit Maine and the lobstermen prepared for the summer season by repairing their traps and replacing their rope, state lawmakers set out to mend a widening hole in the American social-safety net.
Last year’s passage of the massive federal tax-and-spending One Big Beautiful Bill Act has set in motion one of the biggest transformations of the welfare state that the United States has seen in decades. For more than a generation, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which provides roughly 40 million Americans with money for groceries — has served as the country’s dominant vector for direct payments to people struggling to eat. But SNAP’s era as arguably the nation’s preeminent anti-poverty program may be ending. Already 3.5 million people nationwide have been booted from the program and, as the law’s new eligibility terms take effect this year, more are likely to follow, while others will be abruptly sent back into a workforce for which they are unprepared. Parents of teenage children and adults in their 60s will now be expected to find a job and prove they are working. Roughly 45,000 people in Maine, including veterans and homeless adults — briefly granted a reprieve from work requirements during the Biden administration — will be newly required to work or volunteer. Costs to states will balloon, as they are expected to kick in more funds to administer the program and for the first time pay part of the cost of benefits themselves.
In few places has the response been as swift as in Maine, where Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, legislative leaders and state nonprofits seven years ago committed to a 2030 goal of ensuring Mainers always have enough to eat. Now that ambitious objective — one that officials and activists believed was within reach for a small state with a motivated government, even after pandemic-era setbacks — seems even further away.
Instead, lawmakers, nonprofits and bureaucrats now see themselves spending the remainder of the decade trying to manage the impact of a federal law that will make it harder for millions of people to obtain federal nutrition assistance and health care while passing significant costs onto states. The Maine legislature passed a $500 million supplemental budget this spring that will raise revenue through a new tax on millionaires, fund increased staffing to administer SNAP and create a $30 million contingency fund to keep federal food assistance running in the event the program lapses as it did during last year’s record-setting government shutdown.
“What makes it difficult is knowing it’s not sustainable,” said Maine Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau at the state house, bleary-eyed in a worn long-sleeve tee and vest after presiding over several days of late-night sessions in April to deliver the budget and other priorities.
The new federal requirements are aimed at eliminating fraud and ensuring that adults capable of working attempt to do so. But state officials who actually administer the programs say that most real-life situations are far more complex — that those Americans who struggle to feed themselves often have health challenges or work histories or family responsibilities or transportation problems that make finding work difficult.
“What people who make these decisions in Washington don’t understand is there is constantly something that goes wrong when you’re poor,” said Fecteau, whose family relied on SNAP when he was a child.
Fecteau did not get everything he wanted in that bill, which was signed into law by Mills, and he knows lawmakers will have to come back to the table later this year to find yet more funding. Maine will have to decide whether it can afford to keep a widely used food assistance program that was birthed and sustained by the federal government afloat on a state budget — and if so, how it will have to change.
“What I find most frustrating is knowing that this is not the end,” said Fecteau. “This is likely just the beginning.”
Jeri and Mario Montes had been receiving SNAP benefits for several months before Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services told them that the grocery money materializing monthly on debit cards — covering their entire food budget — would disappear because they were not meeting the program’s work requirements.
The couple, 61 and 60, first met at their Bay Area high school in California. The two attended the same prom in 1983, but with different dates, and both served in the military shortly after high school. But it took 30 years for them to reconnect, as Jeri found work as a police officer and earned her master’s degree in public administration, and Mario worked as a grocery butcher. In 2017, they married in a backyard celebration at Mario’s mother’s house.
But loss soon interrupted their joy at finding each other later in life. Since an on-the-job accident as a police officer, Jeri has suffered from chronic pain and PTSD that kept her from full-time work. Mario injured his knee on the job and took a settlement offer from his supermarket employer to try his hand at a stand-up comedy career in California. But when the Covid-19 pandemic began, comedy clubs closed their doors, Jeri lost her mother and Mario his sister to cancer.
The two decided to start over in a new place without the loss they associated with their home state.
“’You can’t heal where you’ve been hurt,’” Mario recalled Jeri saying at the time.
With a bit of money from selling Jeri’s mom’s house, they packed their belongings into a Jeep Compass and began driving cross country. A stop in Las Vegas didn’t stick. New York City wasn’t accommodating. They landed in New Jersey, where Mario, relying on his butcher experience, opened a deli with a friend — a partnership, and the Montes’ investment in the venture, that soon soured. Jeri suffered a heart attack and a stroke, piling up new medical bills; their apartment was condemned, and they lost months of rent they had paid up front. They had nowhere to go.
“We had a plan, we had money, and then it was gone,” Jeri recalled.
They started driving again, as far north and east as roads would take them. They parked at an I-95 truck stop in coastal Maine — which Mario read once in a book was beautiful and the tap water drinkable — and began sleeping in their car. They survived on Jeri’s monthly $1,258.90 police pension: car insurance, gas and phone bills consumed much of the budget, two $15 a month Planet Fitness memberships paid for showers. Eventually they turned to their friends, starting a GoFundMe to make ends meet. When their money dwindled at the end of the month, they practiced fasting and cut down on gas.
As autumn took hold and the temperatures dropped, Jeri began applying to every shelter she could find on her phone — but they were full or didn’t accept couples. She applied online for SNAP, but never heard back from the state department that administers the program, a modern descendant of food stamps. Then Jeri learned about an event for veterans experiencing homelessness that connected them to a decades-old Portland anti-poverty nonprofit named Preble Street.
A Preble caseworker found them new winter coats, sleeping bags, boxes of food and applications for SNAP benefits. Shortly thereafter, they were given keys to a hotel room before moving into a one-room unit in a transitional housing complex for veterans.
The Montes soon began seeing $292 automatically loaded onto a debit card that they could spend at supermarkets and big-box stores that accept SNAP. While red meat and some processed foods were out of reach for the couple, Mario has refined a vegetable soup recipe and a scratch-cooked tomato sauce to top a lentil pasta that accommodates Jeri’s gluten intolerance. They could still afford just two meals a day, but no longer had to fast to stretch their budget.
The Montes did not know that just months earlier President Donald Trump had signed a law that would jeopardize the tentative stability they had found after months of living out of their car.
H.R. 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act upon its passage by Congress in July 2025, was a collection of tax cuts, new spending on immigration enforcement and aid for struggling farmers, jammed together into a single bill so it could pass the Senate under budget-reconciliation rules that require only 51 votes. When House leadership demanded spending cuts to finance it, Agriculture Committee lawmakers looked to food benefits, whose cost had ballooned during the Biden administration.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Agriculture Department had loosened the red tape around SNAP sign-ups, making it easier for states, which administer program funds, to add people to their rolls and temporarily offered additional benefit increases during the economic downturn. The Biden administration also made the first permanent update in more than 40 years to SNAP benefit calculations, adjusting them to dietary guidelines and modern eating habits as food prices spiked.
When congressional Republicans set out to slash social spending in 2025, SNAP stood as one of the most obvious targets. They looked to the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich negotiated a transformation of what was then America’s foundational welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to impose work requirements and time limits on recipients. The reimagined Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program now serves a fraction of the eligible families who once relied on welfare, and economists have found the changes did press some people into the workforce. The 1996 law also instituted the first requirement that able-bodied SNAP participants find work after three months or risk losing benefits.
The experience also provided a model for Republicans who wanted to tighten that bootstraps orientation around a program they argue is too permissive and lacks incentives for the states to rein in spending. “Too many able-bodied adults on welfare are not working at all,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote with other Trump cabinet officials in a May 2025 op-ed urging Congress to impose expanded work requirements in SNAP and, for the first time, Medicaid. “Too often we don’t even ask them to. For many, welfare is no longer a lifeline to self-sufficiency but a lifelong trap of dependency.”
Clinton’s welfare reform also left food benefits — which was formally rebranded as SNAP via the 2008 Farm Bill after a decadelong transition from stigmatized food stamps to innocuous debit cards — as the most widely used anti-poverty in-kind benefit still standing. More than two-thirds of people receiving SNAP benefits are not expected to work because they are children, elderly or disabled, according to a pre-One Big Beautiful Bill analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But others must prove they are meeting the SNAP work requirement: 80 hours a month in a paying job, a similar number of volunteer hours, or enrollment in a state-approved job training program.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act imposes these same work requirements on a much broader group of participants, including parents of teenagers, adults over the age of 55, veterans, youth aging out of the foster care system, people who are homeless. The law also tightened eligibility standards for some lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and Afghans who helped the U.S. military in the war.
“When you have a program like SNAP after H.R.1, that essentially demands that you work almost every month or get cut off, people are going to get cut off,” explained David Super, a welfare expert at Georgetown University Law Center. “The application process to SNAP is quite burdensome, quite difficult, and ironically, interferes with one’s ability to work. Once you throw someone off, they stay off.”
The Agriculture Department also allows states and counties to waive work requirements in areas where there’s a lack of sufficient jobs, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act significantly raised the threshold for doing so. California and Illinois lost statewide waivers.
For those who remain in the program, Congress did not decrease the benefit amount — known as a SNAP allotment — but did change how benefits are calculated. That is likely to shrink monthly allotments for millions of people, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
These changes cut SNAP spending by roughly 20 percent over a decade, a significant portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s total savings. The CBO estimates these changes to SNAP will save the federal government $187 billion over a decade, including $69 billion specifically from tightened work requirements. The law also creates nationwide Medicaid work requirements for the first time, changes that are expected to save an additional $326 billion over a decade by removing millions from that program.
The Montes began learning about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s impact on SNAP through frequent letters from Maine’s Department of Health about their eligibility. The categories on which the couple had relied for exemptions to work requirements — older, military veterans, and in an unstable housing situation — were disappearing, and they had to figure out what it would mean for them.
Preble Street is named for a short thoroughfare in downtown Portland, too far from the water to see the city’s bustling harbor but close enough that seagulls fly overhead. The neighborhood is gentrifying, and the nonprofit’s primary office and one of its shelters are just steps from popular neighborhood cafes and new-build high-rises welcoming home transplants who have moved to Maine since the pandemic.
While those like the Montes who receive its services still line up near the Preble Street Chapel, where the organization first operated, the anti-poverty nonprofit has expanded its footprint in the city over the last 50 years, adding shelters, housing and anti-trafficking services and moving into a larger office space around the corner. There, caseworkers are guided by the words of Progressive Era social reformer Jane Addams stenciled onto walls: “...much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to a lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experience of other people.”
Preble’s staff has been preparing since last August for the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to wash ashore. The nonprofit has dramatically increased private fundraising efforts to support an expansion of its meal service and food pantry options. A new food security hub, as the organization refers to its combined commercial kitchen, storage site and distribution center, opened last fall and is already serving more than 50,000 meals and distributing 15,000 food boxes.
The organization has led hundreds of hours of training on SNAP’s changes for its roughly 200 social workers, educating them about the new eligibility requirements so they can prove to Maine’s health department that clients qualify for food assistance and health care. Caseworkers tally on a whiteboard how many hours they have waited on hold with Maine’s health department. “My heart is just breaking for all of the people who don’t have caseworkers, which is the vast majority of people on SNAP,” said Preble Street advocacy supervisor Annika Moore, who has been training social workers on the new law. “I do not know how someone could really navigate these changes without help.”
That effort became much more complex last fall. The Agriculture Department first sent work requirements implementation guidance to states during a record-setting government shutdown last October and set a compliance deadline for weeks later — an unprecedentedly brief timeline compared to other program changes of similar significance. When benefits lapsed for the first time in SNAP’s history, low-income Mainers struggled to find adequate groceries and some pantries ran out of food entirely. State administrators scrambled to understand if they could send out partial benefits or none at all.
Even after the shutdown ended, the Agriculture Department offered inconsistent or belated answers to the state’s questions. Wrongly interpreting the law when it comes to SNAP will have severe consequences for states, which will have to contribute to the cost of benefits for the first time next year if the federal government calculates they have paid beneficiaries too much or too little. Such so-called payment error rate calculations could lead Maine to pay as much as 15 percent of the cost of benefits, or about $53 million annually.
“Maine should encourage financial independence and contribution to community,” said department spokesperson Harry Fones. “Recipients of any welfare program are not victims, they are capable people who at times, need a helping hand, not a government or leftist organizations telling them to stay idle and disengaged.”
In a mobile-home community in Bangor, where many residents are income-eligible but are failing to meet the work requirements, Suzy Young, a paralegal for the legal services nonprofit Maine Equal Justice, is struggling to get people to apply. One client, she recalled, left a decision letter from Maine’s health department sitting on her table for weeks, afraid to learn she’d been denied benefits.
“’Why do I bother? Why do I put myself through this review and the three-hour wait on the phone for DHHS just to hear I’m not eligible? I can’t work, I don’t have transportation to volunteer,’” Young, once a SNAP recipient herself, recalled being told.
For people like the Montes, the benefits landscape is a maze. After hours of phone calls to the state and her caseworkers from Preble Street, and reams of paperwork, Jeri was assured that she had successfully proven to the health department that her disabilities qualify her for an exemption from the work requirements.
But Mario had not, and caseworkers explained that to keep receiving benefits the 60-year-old would have to secure a job he can do on a bum knee.
In 2019, just months into her first term as governor, Mills signed a bipartisan resolution setting a goal to end hunger in her state by 2030. The federal government has been an unsteady partner in the project. During the pandemic, expanded federal benefits for low-income families helped drive down child poverty and hunger rates. Mills oversaw investments in a new statewide free school meals program and expanded state procurement from Maine farmers, along with efforts to streamline the application process and expand outreach to eligible residents.
“No matter how dedicated we are here in the state, no matter what our political climate is like here in Maine, we are very much at the whim of the federal government,” said Anna Korsen, who co-chairs the Ending Hunger Advisory Committee established by the 2019 resolution.
Now as she enters the final months of her second term, Mills — who ended a campaign for U.S. Senate in April — finds herself facing a very different hunger challenge. Food costs are skyrocketing just as the federal government is cutting various forms of social-welfare spending even beyond SNAP. The Trump administration slashed $1 billion in federal funding for schools and food banks to buy from local farms, and cut another roughly $500 million in federal funding for food banks promised by the Biden administration.
Korsen, who also heads the Brunswick-based nonprofit Full Plates Full Potential, said that while no formal decisions have been made, the One Big Beautiful Bill has made the self-imposed 2030 deadline “unrealistic.”
In January, when Maine will be expected to take on even more of the costs associated with running the SNAP program, a different governor could decide to drop out of the program altogether if the state can’t come up with the funds. Bobby Charles, the Republican candidate for governor, has pledged to eliminate the state income tax, jeopardizing revenue necessary for social programs.
Even if Maine can come up with the funding to pay for part of the cost of SNAP benefits required by the new law, it likely will not be able to fund the program at the level that allowed the Montes to participate. State supplementary programs, like one that gives SNAP participants extra dollars to buy fruits and vegetables, might be on the chopping block if state legislators are forced to find the funds to keep the program running, explained Fecteau.
“If we face a scenario where we’re choosing between the foundational program, and these bonus programs, I mean, we know what that choice looks like,” he said. “These are the choices that Washington is trying to force us into.”
When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, some states moved to change their programs before the deadline, anticipating costs that they just can’t shoulder. In Arizona, that has meant a near-50 percent drop in SNAP participants as the state slashed administrative staff, choking up application reviews and effectively forcing people out of the program.
Maine has taken the opposite tack, passing millions in new funding as the state works to keep eligible people in the SNAP program despite the bigger bill from the federal government. Last year, Mills’ government began preparing employees to process the newly-complicated SNAP applications and, with the supplemental budget funding, plans to hire more staff and upgrade technology. The state also partnered closely with community organizations to help more income-eligible people navigate the increasingly convoluted benefits landscape.
The supplemental budget passed this spring is the latest effort from state Democratic leadership to insulate Mainers from federal policy changes, but even the budget’s supporters acknowledge its limits. Preble Street is now planning an expansion of its lobbying work from the statehouse to Washington.
“We’re ramping up as we’re realizing that that is where our clients are being honestly affected the most,” said Moore.
Still, Maine’s SNAP rolls have declined by more than 15,000 since work requirements took effect, an 8.7 percent decline. But some anti-hunger experts say that participation could drop even lower than initial estimates.
Under Mills, Maine’s budget has grown more than 40 percent over the last decade as she advances popular but expensive policies like universal school meals. While the state legislature has passed tax increases on the wealthy, lawmakers are realistic about how much more they can raise taxes, even on wealthy Mainers.
“We’re a state of 1.4 million people,” said Fecteau. “We’re the oldest state in the nation. We have a great deal of poverty. We have older adults who have a lot of needs. We have a lot of people with disabilities. We have a lot of veterans.”
The Montes moved into their new home near Portland in early May. For their one-bedroom apartment in a mixed income housing complex for older adults, they will pay 30 percent of their income, derived entirely from Jeri’s pension. With car insurance and phone bills, that leaves them with less than $600 a month for other expenses like wifi, gas and groceries. The couple said they usually run out of money halfway through the month.
In May, the Montes began receiving $24 in SNAP benefits, a 92 percent decrease. Unless he can find work that he is physically able to do and prove that he is working 80 hours a month, Mario no longer meets the requirements for the SNAP program, and Jeri’s benefits are tied to her pension income.
Mario’s kitchen skills have helped him land two catering gigs in June. But the days he spends chopping and seasoning and preparing food, as well as his time serving it, won’t be enough for him to meet the work requirements to continue receiving SNAP benefits.
The couple plans to supplement SNAP benefits with a twice-monthly visit — all they are allowed — to a nearby food pantry and help from other Portland-area nonprofits. And they’ve decided to apply for Social Security early.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, you have a master’s degree. Why aren’t you kicking ass?’ Jeri said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t still struggle.”
