Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) has decreased significantly over the past year in the US following restrictions imposed by the Trump administration, which has forced more people to seek help from food banks or go hungry, stakeholders say.

The number of people who receive food stamps has dropped from 41.6 million in July 2025, before the One Big Beautiful Act took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% decrease, according to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

While Donald Trump and other Republicans have said the changes incentivize people to find jobs, elected officials, non-profit leaders and people with food insecurity say the changes simply make it harder for Americans to feed their families.

“There is always going to be a percentage of our communities who we need to help – we have to accept that – and so, once we accept it, it is easy to just move forward and do the right thing, which is to provide resources to people who need them,” said Rhona Kamar, founder and executive director of Feed Louisville, a non-profit that aims to reduce hunger and food waste.

The Trump administration’s changes to Snap will reduce spending by about $187bn over 10 years, the congressional budget office projected.

Previously, only able-bodied people between ages 18 and 54 who did not have dependents under 18 had to meet a requirement that they work a minimum of 20 hours per week or only get benefits for a maximum of three months over three years.

Under Trump, the rules now state that people from ages 18 to 64 who do not have a dependent under 14 had to perform paid or volunteer work for at least 20 hours weekly.

The One Big Beautiful Act also stated that starting October, states had to cover 75% of the Snap administrative costs, whereas before they had to cover half.

The changes have affected some states more than others. In Arizona, the number of people enrolled in Snap dropped by 50% between July 2025 and June 2026; Kentucky experienced a 6% decrease.

“I am concerned more people are going hungry in my state because of changes to” Snap, “impacting children and the elderly”, Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat who leads the predominantly Republican state, stated in a letter this month to Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary.

But Trump and Rollins described the reduction in Snap recipients as a positive.

“Democrats don’t love” the decrease, Rollins said at a farming festival in August in Minnesota. “But for those of us that love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we move 5 million people off of food stamps.”

Critics of the changes point out that despite Trump’s promises, grocery and gas prices have increased during his second term, making it harder for families to afford necessities.

“If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the Snap program,” said Gina Plata-Nino, director of Snap at the Food Research and Action Center, a non-profit that supports anti-hunger programs.

The Food Bank Council of Michigan operates a helpline where staff answer residents’ questions about applying for Snap and accessing local food programs. The organization started getting more than three times as many calls daily after the Snap changes took effect. This week, they had to temporarily suspend the helpline because of the high call volume.

The changes have also affected Feed Louisville, which receives surplus food from restaurants and farmers and uses those ingredients to prepare meals for partner organizations. Unused items go to the agencies too.

“We have always had enough food around,” Kamar said. “But now what we are seeing is every day the shelves are empty at the end of the day, so every bit of food that comes into our kitchen every day goes right back out to the community at the end of the day.”

The decrease in Snap enrollment has also affected schools’ ability to provide free meals to students. If at least 25% of a student body are recipients of Snap or some other public benefits, the school can participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (Cep) program and use federal funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students without needing household applications.

But because fewer students are enrolled in Snap, that has made it harder for schools to serve those free meals to students who need them, the Washington Post reported this week. In Houston independent school district, 26 schools that previously provided free meals to all students under Cep are no longer eligible for the program, according to the Post.

Anti-hunger advocates also say that the employment data does not support the argument that more people have found jobs or seen their wages increase and thus no longer need food stamps. The United States added 776,000 non-farm jobs between January 2025 and September 2026. During the last 20 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the country added 2.6 million non-farm jobs, according to Factcheck.org.

“We don’t have the data to suggest that there are more jobs suddenly out there. We just know fewer people are getting benefits,” said Sheril Kirshenbaum, Food Bank Council of Michigan’s chief external relations officer.

A USDA spokesperson downplayed the effect of the Snap restrictions.

“The number of individuals receiving benefits is constantly changing and is not representative of any one policy,” the spokesperson stated in an email to the Guardian.

It could soon become even harder for people struggling with food insecurity. States will now have to pay for most of the Snap administrative costs while also preparing for an October 2027 change that will require states to pay for some of Snap benefit costs if their payment error rate is above 6%, which according to the USDA, is not a measure of fraud. (Paradoxically, states that had error rates above 13% received a delay in implementation of the requirement.)

States will now be having to pay more for existing work while also finding funding for extra work to reduce the error rate, said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That could mean longer processing times and people who need assistance having to wait longer to get it, Kirshenbaum said.

“States have been really set up to fail,” Llobrera said.

The USDA spokesperson did not respond to a question about concerns that the Snap changes have forced some Americans to go hungry.

A Louisville woman, Sandra Scott, 58, has been homeless most of her life and said that until she started receiving Snap benefits four years ago, she ate at “soup kitchens or wherever I could, but for the most part, like on the weekends, there really was not anywhere to go”.

Scott has had six back surgeries and struggled with mental illness. She became addicted to methamphetamines but got sober two years ago and now lives in a subsidized apartment. She is working to obtain her emergency responder certificate and volunteers with The Table, a non-profit restaurant that uses a pay-what-you-can model.

Asked what she would say to members of the Trump administration about the Snap changes, Scott said: “Why don’t you walk in one of our shoes, somebody in the community that doesn’t have anything, that wasn’t born into money or doesn’t have a job because it’s so hard to find or [who] can’t find affordable housing because it’s too high?”