If you are inundated this fall with campaign ads alleging that “Republicans claim to support the working-class, but they cut food stamps for low-income kids to pay for a tax cut for millionaires,” just remember that outcome could have been avoided.
There’s a lot in the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” that would make conservatives happy. It would defund Planned Parenthood, a long-time goal of many advocates who object to taxpayer support of the nation’s largest abortion provider (and an increasingly important source of gender transition drugs). It would create what is essentially a national school-choice program, giving parents more options in finding the right educational environment for their kids. It expands tax credits for employers who want to provide their workers with child-care benefits. Notably, it would deliver a $500 boost to the overall value of the Child Tax Credit, helping middle- and upper-income parents afford the essentials of daily life, from diapers to child care. (Lower-income parents, such as a married family with a single breadwinner earning below the median income, will not benefit from the full value of the increased credit, however.)
Yet the bill in its current form imperils the GOP’s newfound claim to be the party of the working class. It would increase our federal budget deficit by $2.4 trillion over ten years, largely because of the expansion of tax cuts for higher-income individuals. And that tally is accounting for spending cuts, largely concentrated in domestic programs that serve working-class families.
In 2024, President Trump won a higher percentage of voters making below $50,000 than those making $150,000 or more; yet the benefits of the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” are concentrated for those in the upper- income brackets. Only 40 percent of Trump 2024 voters without a college degree want to see welfare spending decreased, compared to 50 percent of his voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher. In recognition of these pitfalls, the Senate should tweak the bill to avoid some of the least-defensible cuts.
Senator Josh Hawley has laudably drawn attention to how the bill might threaten Medicaid coverage for low-income Americans. President Trump himself recognizes the political vulnerability in being willing to “fuck around with Medicaid.” Less has been said about how the bill would take other benefits away from some of the very same voters who powered the Trump re-election.
“One in five households with children receive SNAP benefits.”
Take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. More commonly referred to as food stamps, SNAP has traditionally been a program with bipartisan backing—no one actively wants to see low-income families going without food on the table for their children. One in five households with children receive SNAP benefits at an average benefit of roughly $187 per person per month. The question is whether SNAP can be reformed in a way that encourages work without putting children at risk of going hungry.
The Republican bill charges in with an aggressive “yes.” Currently, access to SNAP benefits is conditioned on meeting certain work requirements, and appropriately so. But adults who are disabled or who have children under 18 living at home are exempt from these requirements. The “big, beautiful bill” would raise the standards for meeting the work requirement and narrow the exemption criteria to only adults with children under the age of seven.
Toughening work requirements is an idea that polls well in the abstract. But in practice, it’s hard to justify such a dramatic and rapid change to how food assistance supports low-income households. Most SNAP recipients are in households with a low-income worker, often paid hourly wages with variable schedules, so maintaining eligibility (a minimum of 20 hours per week, in the GOP text) is not always within the worker’s direct control. Single parents are particularly likely to have volatile schedules and unpredictable earnings; currently exempt from work requirements, they would now be subject to this rule change. Raising the risk of school-age children looking for snacks in a barren pantry is an odd move for a party that would like to be seen as championing families.
The bill also makes administrative changes which could bump roughly 3 million families from the SNAP program, lower participation in free and reduced school lunches by up to 4 million students, and leave 360,000 infants and young children without access to the special supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). These estimates, like any projections, should be taken with a grain of salt, but they speak to the enormous stakes of safety-net reform.
When Congress successfully reformed welfare programs in the mid-1990s, it had the evidence from state-level experiments in states like Wisconsin to assess how best to go about their goal of strengthening work and marriage and reducing dependency. The “One Big, Beautiful” change to SNAP would be implemented without anything close to that level of care, putting low-income kids at risk. Higher rates of hunger have been positively associated with all manner of worse outcomes, from school to work to crime.
That’s not to say none of the bill’s safety-net reforms are worth pursuing. As the Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen recently wrote, states have become experts in trying to play games with SNAP funds, such as gerrymandering requests for geographic waivers from work requirements. Requiring states to cover at least five percent of the program’s costs will cause heartburn in some state capitals, but is far from an egregious reinterpretation of the program.
But too much of the bill reflects the political attitudes of the Tea Party era rather than a recognition that working-class voters, including those who benefit from Medicaid and SNAP, have shifted towards supporting the President. If Republicans want to improve the political appeal (and budgetary impact) of their signature legislative idea, they should restrict, rather than expand the Section 199A Pass-Through Deduction, which most mainstream economists agree simply enriches high-income professionals, like lawyers and doctors, with little productive benefit for the economy. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates extending Section 199A will cost the federal government $819 billion in forgone revenue over the next ten years; more than three times what will be saved by the projected $267 billion in cuts to food and nutrition assistance.
There are many provisions to like in the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” but there are real imbalances in how the budgetary savings are constructed. Republicans looking to avoid midterm losses, much less solidify gains among moderate-income voters, should take heed. There is still time to make the bill something that will strengthen, rather than undermine, the party’s ability to deliver for working-class voters.