Tens of thousands of Virginians are no longer enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that provides assistance to low-income people to help them pay for groceries.
More than 867,000 Virginians were enrolled in SNAP last June, but a year later, that number had fallen to 749,000, according to state data.
The decline comes after Republicans in Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law legislation that lowered taxes for the wealthy and cut spending for social safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid.
The legislation, known as H.R. 1, cuts $187 billion from federal SNAP funding over the next decade, according to the governor’s office. It also shifts more of the cost of funding SNAP onto states and makes it harder to access the program. The Trump administration has also cut funding for a program that sends food to food banks as they are expected to see increased demand as a result of a fall in enrollment.
For today’s story, I interviewed the leader of a nonprofit in Chesapeake focused on feeding the hungry about what she’s seeing on the ground. And I caught up with Rodrigo Soto of The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis to get some policy analysis.
Soto pointed out that labor rights are “intrinsically connected” to the conversation around SNAP funding. State lawmakers raised the minimum wage this past legislation session, and that should help more people afford groceries. But the conversion around strengthening workers’ rights needs to continue in this context of a weakening social safety net, Soto said.
“State lawmakers should continue to consider how [we can] create more economic opportunities for people so that they may not have to rely on these programs as much and can have the wages and benefits and life that they need that doesn’t require them to enroll in SNAP,” Soto said.
