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“If you aren’t currently on SNAP, it can be easy to view this as an abstract political debate. But food insecurity isn’t abstract—it’s your neighbors, your coworkers, and the kids in your neighborhood school going to bed hungry.”
Every single day in the Bronx, I look into the eyes of people who are fighting just to stay afloat. As a social worker with direct experience supporting unhoused adults and men returning home from prison, I know that the difference between stability and crisis often comes down to a single, essential lifeline: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
I don’t just know this as a professional; I know it as someone who has relied on SNAP to survive. I know the quiet, suffocating anxiety of walking through a grocery aisle, calculating every cent, and relying on that EBT card so you don’t have to put back a gallon of milk at the register. SNAP saves lives, reduces disease rates, improves employment outcomes, and lowers healthcare costs. It is not a luxury—it is the bedrock of America’s social safety net.
Right now, that bedrock is being systematically dismantled.
Under the federal “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), Congress enacted the largest cuts to SNAP in the program’s history—stripping food access to pay for militarized immigration enforcement and tax cuts for the wealthy. Over 4 million people nationwide are at risk of losing their benefits altogether. The legislation aggressively expanded harsh work requirements to adults up to age 64 and parents with children over 13, creating administrative hurdles designed to fail the very people who need help most.
The consequences are no longer hypothetical—they are hitting our streets in real time. Months after new federal work requirements began stripping benefits from thousands of low-income New Yorkers, an Oct. 1 milestone has opened a desperate race for people to try and re-enroll under punishing rules.
In New York City, where roughly 20 percent of residents rely on SNAP, the impact is severe. But nowhere is the damage more concentrated than right here in the Bronx, where over 40 percent of residents rely on federal food assistance and nearly 40 percent of households face active food insecurity. Federal cuts have stripped food benefits from working parents, caregivers, and children across our borough, pushing families who were already on the edge into outright desperation.
Worse still, Washington is building in a long-term policy trap. Starting Oct. 1, 2027, states will be forced to shoulder a portion of SNAP benefit costs based on their state “error rates.” Because of government shutdowns and delayed guidance from the USDA, state agencies have been left scrambling with only months to address these administrative metrics.
Let’s call this what it is: a bad-faith narrative. Opponents of SNAP love to push bullshit rhetoric about widespread “fraud” or people “abusing the system” to justify tearing down social programs. But the reality on the ground is clear: people are not scamming the system; they are desperately trying to survive in an economy that has priced them out of basic human dignity.
Furthermore, actual fraud in SNAP is exceptionally rare—disqualifications typically represent about 0.1 percent of monthly caseloads nationwide. What politicians label as “error rates” are overwhelmingly administrative, system-level mistakes—made by overloaded, understaffed government offices or confused applicants navigating endless, convoluted paperwork. Punishing states for bureaucratic agency errors forces local governments to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in unexpected costs.
For New York, this cost-shift will be catastrophic. Because our state must balance its budget annually, forced cost-sharing will compel Albany to either make devastating cuts to other essential city services or opt out of SNAP portions entirely.
When federal aid gets slashed, politicians love to pass the buck to community nonprofits, soup kitchens, and local pantries. But let me be unequivocally clear from my years on the frontlines: charities cannot fix this. Food pantries and mutual aid groups in the Bronx are already stretched past their breaking points. A local church basement pantry or a soup kitchen cannot replace a multi-billion-dollar federal safety net.
We need systemic political intervention, and we need our elected officials in Washington to step up immediately.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been a vocal champion in this fight, leading the effort to protect federal food benefits and block these draconian rollbacks. And as a constituent of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am proud to see her consistently champion working-class New Yorkers, speak out against these cruel cuts, and demand accountability.
However, holding the line requires our entire congressional delegation to treat this as the emergency it is. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand—who sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee—must do more. As Congress negotiates relief packages for farmers and prepares for the upcoming Senate Farm Bill markup, our leaders must ensure that relief for farmers is strictly coupled with relief for families. Congress must act to delay the SNAP benefit cost-sharing requirement before states are backed into an impossible corner.
If you aren’t currently on SNAP, it can be easy to view this as an abstract political debate. But food insecurity isn’t abstract—it’s your neighbors, your coworkers, and the kids in your neighborhood school going to bed hungry. We should all care deeply when the people around us are deprived of basic nourishment.
We cannot allow Washington to starve working families and weaponize administrative bureaucracy to fund corporate giveaways. It’s time for New York’s leaders to stand up, demand a delay on the SNAP cost shift, and ensure no New Yorker is forced to go hungry.
Lex Colleen (she/her) is a Bronx based social worker and community organizer focusing on criminal legal reform work and economic justice issues, including nutrition access.