Major cuts to the country’s top nutrition-assistance program will begin to take effect this week, but state officials say it’ll be months before they know how many Vermonters will lose their food benefits.
A tax-and-budget bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in July is expected to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by 20% over the next decade. Much of that decrease flows from new work requirements that, starting Oct. 1, will apply to veterans, unhoused people, parents with children over 14 years old and older Americans.
Vermont, however, has a plan to temporarily maintain benefits for anyone who would otherwise be tossed from the rolls. The federal government gives each state a certain number of “discretionary” exemptions for people who would otherwise lose eligibility, and the state plans to use those for people now facing work requirements.
Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner of the Economic Services Division at DCF, says that will give her department until February to find possible workarounds for people whose benefits are at risk.
“That will give households plenty of time to let us know if they might meet another exemption criteria,” Gray said.
More than 65,000 Vermonters received about $155 million in nutrition assistance from SNAP last year. While the new work requirements will imperil eligibility for several thousand of them, according to Anore Horton at Hunger Free Vermont, there are ways for state agencies and nonprofits to keep most of them enrolled.
There is an exemption process that we can make a lot better use of in our state so that most people, we believe, will not have to lose their SNAP benefits.Anore Horton, Hunger Free Vermont
“While all of these changes are really complex and affect a lot of people potentially, there’s also the opportunity to preserve … benefits for almost everybody who’s eligible for them in Vermont,” Horton said.
Doing so, Horton said, will require a massive outreach campaign to help households “navigate through more bureaucracy and paperwork.”
“Either there’s ways to report the work that you are doing, or you have a situation that you are dealing with that makes it impossible for you to work,” Horton said. “And in that case, there is an exemption process that we can make a lot better use of in our state so that most people, we believe, will not have to lose their SNAP benefits.”
Many SNAP recipients, however, might not be aware of the coming changes. Alison Calderara, executive director at Capstone Community Action in Washington County, said she recently talked with clients at the organization’s food shelf in Barre.
“I can assure you that no one was aware of impending SNAP cuts,” Calderara said. “And it was incredibly worrisome to people to hear that that might be in the offing for them.”
Gray said DCF is sending notices to households that might be affected. But the state will soon have less money for such outreach — the same federal law that reduces SNAP benefits also cuts funding that Vermont nonprofits have used to help people apply for and maintain those benefits.
Gray said those cuts will be the subject of conversations with state lawmakers during the next legislative session, “because we know there’s an impact.”
“That is going to leave gaps for partners,” she said.
There’s one group of Vermonters for whom the loss of SNAP benefits is almost certain. Refugees and asylees who are in the country legally will, as a result of the federal law, no longer be eligible for the program. Gray said she isn’t yet sure how many of the approximately 1,500 non-citizen SNAP beneficiaries fall into this category.
About 2,600 households will see their benefits reduced by an average of $108 per month starting Oct. 1, due to other changes in the federal law.
Horton, with Hunger Free Vermont, said the state should invest more in food security to help Vermonters who lose benefits, and bolster the charitable food distribution system, which will likely see a spike in demand.
To that end, Hunger Free Vermont is part of a coalition that will be asking lawmakers and Republican Gov. Phil Scott to increase state income taxes on residents who make more than $500,000 a year.
“We have to raise more revenue to give our state government the power to respond to this crisis that’s been created at the federal level,” Horton said.
The prospect of diminished SNAP benefits isn’t the only challenge on elected officials’ radar. Cuts to Medicaid in the same federal legislation could see thousands of Vermonters lose health care coverage in the coming years. And Trump has indicated a desire to eliminate funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, though the latest version of the U.S. Senate’s budget proposal has restored that money.
Washington County Sen. Andrew Perchlik, the Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said lawmakers are concerned about SNAP reductions. But he said he can’t yet promise they’ll use state revenues to backfill those losses.
“I think we’re all being careful to say, ‘We’re definitely going to do that,’ because we don’t know the full breadth of the pressures that we’re going to be under,” Perchlik said. “The interest I think is definitely there in keeping that capacity going. But whether the money will actually be there to do so? That is another question.”
