The head of the US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday falsely told senators that “no one was kicked off” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, claiming that the millions of people—including many children—who have lost federal nutrition assistance in recent months were no longer eligible for aid or decided not to apply for it.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins declared that “no one in Washington or in America wants to see a family go hungry,” but insisted that anyone who is no longer receiving SNAP benefits has “chosen not to reapply or they’re an able-bodied adult that can either work for 20 hours a week or volunteer.”
Rollins’ testimony conflicts with a growing number of anecdotal reports and expert analyses showing that families across the United States are losing SNAP benefits at the fastest rate in decades. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that at least 700,000 children have lost SNAP since President Donald Trump signed into law a Republican budget package last summer, enacting the largest-ever cuts to the federal nutrition program.
Rollins: No one was kicked off of SNAP. If they are not on SNAP, they have chosen not to reapply or they are an able bodied adult that can work. pic.twitter.com/eaiVO9XRwb
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026
“Did 700,000 children simply not apply?” Rachel Sabella, director of the No Kid Hungry New York campaign, asked in response to Rollins’ remarks.
Katie Bergh, a CBPP policy analyst, pointed to recent reporting by NBC News, which spoke to a mother of two in Arizona who said her “benefits stopped without warning three months ago” after the state began implementing new eligibility requirements included in the Republican budget law.
“It’s been really hard,” the mother said. “We’ve been going to food banks every week… We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”
Rollins, a multimillionaire, has openly celebrated the massive and rapid decline in SNAP participation during Trump’s second White House term, claiming that the roughly 4 million people who have been “moved” off the program are closer to realizing “the American dream”—even as hunger grows to levels not seen since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This is a celebration of work and the dignity of work,” Rollins told senators on Wednesday.
But CBPP concluded in an analysis released in late April that the “dramatic” loss of SNAP benefits across the country “cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food.”
“Labor force data show that the unemployment rate was flat between July 2025 and March 2026, the most recent data available,” the think tank observed. “A more likely explanation for why people are losing access to food assistance is that states are now facing new challenges as they respond to the cuts in [the Republican budget law]—the largest in the program’s history.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
MAGAts will starve you and your children so they can brutalize immigrants and murder Iran’s. These are MAGAt family values.
The government is very efficient at being cruel.
Getting on snap and Medicaid was a huge ordeal that took months. There was so much information they wanted and so many interviews. I had very small windows to make sure I got it all done, and if I missed them I had to start all over from the beginning again. This process repeated every year.
11 days after my daughter shot herself in the face, I got a notice in the mail that I had been removed from both programs, because now that she was dead, I “made too much money”. Apparently it had gone through days before. It was fast and easy and I didn’t have to do a thing.
It was then that I realized that the whole system of hoops I had to jump through to get snap and Medicaid was unnecessary not just in practice, but it could all be done away with literally in a day. The infrastructure is actually already in place and functioning. The truth is, even the “inefficiency” of signing up was actually efficiency at being cruel. I just didn’t see it right.
The government is very efficient at being cruel.
