Proposed SNAP cuts would push food banks toward ‘breaking point’

The Senate is expected on Friday to vote on the budget reconciliation bill that aims to reduce the federal deficit by at least $880 billion over the next ten years by cutting numerous programs, including food, health and education services.

The bill, which exceeds 1,000 pages, proposes significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, reducing its overall funding, increasing the responsibility of states for administrative costs and implementing stricter work requirements for recipients, potentially impacting millions of low-income individuals and families, as well the food banks that serve these communities.

SNAP data is a valuable tool for food banks, which often rely on state agencies to share, enabling them to understand food insecurity rates, language divides, as well as geographic and transit challenges vulnerable populations in their service region face. According to the Food Security Survey, 13.5% of U.S. households experienced food insecurity in 2023, meaning they lack sufficient access to food, an increase from 12.8% in 2022.

By collaborating with state health, economic, and transportation agencies, food banks can more accurately identify food deserts, track demand in real time, improve delivery routes and even forecast need due to economic or policy shifts.

The Northern Illinois Food Bank, which serves 13 counties and averages more than 570,000 monthly visits at its locations across the state, uses mapping technology from the software and data firm Esri to model food insecurity. It uses transportation data from three categories: people who walk to receive food, those who rely on public transit and registered household vehicles.

“We leverage state and federal data sets for transit locations and walking paths to ensure that those individuals are able to access the distribution points,” said Jennifer Kuchar, the Northern Illinois Food Bank’s director of data analytics.

Kuchar said the maps are made possible through data-sharing efforts with state agencies. Rob Desio, a senior manager at the bank’s midwest location, said he regularly meets with officials from the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services to share resources.

“We have access to the state’s integrated eligibility system that case workers use,” he said. “So we do have access, limited access, to find people’s cases. That’s a nice relationship that allows us to provide a little bit higher level of service to people who need help.”

Language and geography

In Minnesota, language can sometimes create a barrier to food bank operations. The state is home to a large population of immigrant communities — including the second-largest Hmong population and the largest Somali population in the United States — due in part to the state’s refugee resettlement programs.

Angelica Klebsch, Community Partnership Director at Second Harvest Heartland outside of Minneapolis, the second largest food bank in Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks, said the bank uses state data to identify communities that are divided by language.

“If we know that there is a large immigrant communities in our areas service, how can we then bring those actual resources with us as we are walking into those spaces?” Klebsch said. “So if you know it’s Somali or Hispanic or Hmong, then let’s bring folks who speak the language so they we can communicate.”

Klebsch added that being able to communicate also allows his food bank to learn if there are other challenges food-insecure communities are facing.

“If some of their barriers are transportation, we can try to host some distribution in that area that is the most accessible for community,” she said.

Transportation can present a significant obstacle for low-income communities that may rely on public transit to commute, or may have limited access to vehicles, especially if they’re located in a state like North Carolina, which has a varied landscape.

“North Carolina has this crazy amount of water ratio to land,” said Angie Nesius, a network data analyst at the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

Nesius said her bank uses data from North Carolina’s transportation agencies to find service area gaps around the state’s numerous bodies of water and plan delivery routes.

“Seeing the landscape has been really helpful to us, because when we take food to a partner agency or to a pop up market, our trucks need to get there,” Nesius explained.

But some states, like Arizona, don’t share data with outside organizations.

“They don’t share it,” said Marcos Gaucin, chief program officer at St. Mary’s Food Bank in Arizona. “I guess they have the information, but they don’t really put it together for us in a way that that we can say, ‘Okay, here’s where we need to go.'”

As a workaround, Gaucin said, St. Mary’s partnered with Arizona State University, which does have access to state data, to create a dashboard visualizing food insecurity across the state, revealing high rates in rural areas and among single mothers. With the help of that data, showing where help was needed most, St. Mary’s distributed 105 million meals and 130 million pounds of food last year.

“We know parts of the state, even parts of the city, that are impoverished and kind of lower income areas, but these maps give us that data to back it up at the highest levels,” Gaucin said. “They give us a visual representation of where areas of high food insecurity are and help us identify where we need to go.”

‘Winging it’

Data sharing between state and local agencies, and with nonprofits like food banks, is anything but consistent across the United States.

According to Ali Benson, director of the State Chief Data Officers Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., each state takes a different approach to its data privacy, sharing and infrastructure.

“The U.S. has an extremely federated approach to data and privacy in general,” Benson said. “Every state is different, and then sometimes even within the same state, a lot of data efforts are super decentralized.”

Benson said the Beeck Center’s work using the State Chief Data Officers Tracker, a dashboard that monitors the evolving role of CDOs in state governments, has revealed that privacy concerns, especially around personally identifiable information like Social Security numbers or income levels, can often lead agencies to refuse to share data with outside entities.

“If the compliance and risk folks don’t have an airtight way of sharing that data, the default [response] is often ‘no,’” Benson said.

States that lack chief privacy officers often lack the capacity to build clear, secure data-sharing agreements, standardized checklists or procedures for evaluating data requests, which she said can lead to confusion and hesitation that slows collaboration with external partners like food banks.

“A lot of people are winging it,” she said.

Benson said recent federal executive orders and data mandates have also further complicated the landscape. In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at reducing information silos, bypassing established privacy protections. The Department of Agriculture requested sensitive personal information of SNAP users, such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and benefit amounts. As a result of such measures, Benson said, many state agencies are uncertain about which federal policies apply to them — or how to respond when federal agencies request data.

To help states navigate this new landscape, the Beeck Center has hosted events that bring data officers, legal experts and policy professionals together.

“Getting people in the same room who don’t normally talk to each other, that’s been really effective,” she said.

Food banks also rely on datasets like the Social Vulnerability Index, managed by the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, to keep up with national food insecurity trends. The index was created in 2007 following the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which highlighted the need for improved public health preparedness and government response capabilities after Hurricane Katrina.

But the Trump administration has in recent months tried to scrub government websites of this sort of data and other resources that document economic, social and health disparities faced by millions of people. According to the human rights coalition Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, these efforts are “a deliberate attempt to suppress visibility and recognition of underserved communities.”

“We had a lot of health data that was available through the website right that was pulled earlier this year — specific nutritional sort of planned meals, resourcing, food procurement,” said Desio, the manager with the Illinois Food Bank. “If they don’t continue to update that information that would [make it] difficult for us to continue moving forward.”

‘Breaking point’

Some critics have said proposed cuts to SNAP could decrease access to food assistance, and that the cuts arrive at an inopportune time. The summer months are when food banks typically see increased demand, when school programs that provide meals end for the year.

Desio said recent funding cuts at the Department of Agriculture, including the end of the Local Food Purchase Agreement and a $500 million cut to The Emergency Food Assistance Program, both which help food banks purchase food locally, have also hurt food bank operations.

“When the SNAP pandemic allotments were allowed to expire, visits in our network went up 16%,” he said.

But food bank operators said they do not have the resources to replace the federal program.

“We cannot make up that difference, we simply can’t,” said Jason Stephany, vice president of public policy at the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. “SNAP is just one program, right? If grocery benefits are cut by 10%, we would have to double in size. And we’re one of the largest food banks in the country. It’s just not possible.

“Cuts to SNAP are going to mean more dependence on the system that we’ve created, and we want people to go to it, but the system has a breaking point. So it is something that, to be honest, I lose a little bit of sleep over.”