Last summer, Congress passed one of the biggest cuts to food assistance in a generation. SNAP — the program a lot of folks still call food stamps — pays about $188 a month, roughly $6 a day for groceries like milk, eggs, rice, and peanut butter. It's not enough to live on, but it's the thing that lets a parent say yes to fruit this week instead of no.
In this Diving In episode, Justin walks you through what actually happened in four parts: what SNAP is and who leans on it, how the cuts ended up tucked inside Trump's 2025 budget law alongside big tax cuts for rich households, what the law actually changed, and what the data show now. The key detail: the new formula dings states for paying the wrong amount but not for wrongly turning eligible families away — a recipe for a slower, more suspicious system. By spring 2026, more than 4 million people had lost benefits, including an estimated 1.5 million children, even as nearly one in four adults still couldn't reliably afford enough food.
If your mum, your uncle, or your own household counts on this help, this is the shift that decides whether dinner is the thing that gives when the month runs long. Justin's takeaway: when politicians cut a program, don't just ask how much they saved — ask who lost what.
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