The industrial agriculture and food system of the United States simultaneously perpetuates food insecurity while intensifying climate and environmental crises. This system creates and exacerbates hunger and malnutrition through the proliferation of highly processed foods dictated by corporate monopolies and financial speculators.

As of 2024, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 47.9 million people—or 13.7 percent of US households—are food-insecure.¹ Food insecurity is a persistent state of uncertainty or inability to access or afford enough food to meet the needs of all members of a household.² The number of food-insecure households has only grown under the Trump administration’s recent cuts to vital food assistance, particularly the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

While SNAP is insufficient to address the structural causes of food insecurity, historically the program has proven to lift households out of hunger and has been one of the most effective anti-hunger programs in the United States.³ SNAP raises millions of people out of poverty each year and reduces food insecurity by nearly a third.⁴ To meet the basic needs of everyday people, Congress must restore and expand funding for SNAP and other federally funded food assistance programs by at least 25 percent, and increase the cap on those entitled to SNAP to 400 percent above the poverty level.⁵ This proposal would be a stepping stone toward a longer-term goal of universal food assistance.

Food is the third-highest household spending category, and it has increased by 33 percent since 2019.⁶ For voters, rising grocery prices have consistently ranked as the first or second top concern across major polls.⁷ As reported by CCI and Data for Progress, “The rising cost of groceries has driven nearly 50 million people in the United States to skip meals, eat less, and trade down to lower quality items or to use food banks to fill their pantry gaps.”⁸ Persistent lack of access to adequate food has cascading negative outcomes for individuals and society, including higher rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mental health disorders like depression and anxiety, developmental delays in children, higher overall medical costs, and decreased productivity for workers.⁹

The Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have only worsened this crisis by cutting funding for, and inhibiting access to, SNAP and other critical food safety nets. In 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) reduced SNAP by 20 percent over 10 years by shifting the administrative burden to states, expanding and generalizing work requirements, eliminating funding for SNAP-Ed (the Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Grant Program), tightening non-citizen eligibility, and enforcing caps on expansions to the Thrifty Food Plan and utility allowance deductions.¹⁰ In some states, the federal cuts meant a 36 percent reduction in aid to those who need it most.¹¹

As a result, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that 4 million people have already lost access, while families who remain enrolled are receiving less.¹² Those most vulnerable to the cuts have been children, single parents, people experiencing homelessness, young people aging out of foster care, and veterans.¹³ The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the cuts will impact an estimated 96,000 children per month due to the connections between SNAP and school and summer meal programs.¹⁴ Importantly, this data does not meaningfully include undocumented residents who are largely ineligible for SNAP despite the fact that they pay federal taxes and often make below the minimum wage.¹⁵ Moreover, as more financial responsibility shifts to the state level, SNAP participants in some states risk even further restrictions. In Arizona, for example, the state’s stringent new policies have pushed an additional 53.9 percent of SNAP participants in the state off of the program.¹⁶

Cuts to food assistance are only expected to increase if the Republican-led Farm Bill makes it through the Senate. The Farm Bill is the omnibus legislation that includes everything from SNAP to agriculture trade rules. While negotiations in the Senate are stalled at the time of writing, the proposed House version fails to reverse the $187 billion in cuts to SNAP.¹⁷ Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee on Agriculture is advancing another $6.2 billion cut to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year. WIC is a federal program that works alongside SNAP to provide essential nutritional support to more than 6.7 million infants, young children, and their parents.¹⁸ Even if the Farm Bill remains at an impasse, any reductions in food assistance from the initial cuts in the Trump Administration’s OBBBA are devastating to working class people and their children.¹⁹

While SNAP and other food assistance programs are critical lifelines, they were insufficient to combat food insecurity even before recent cuts. Currently in the United States, the limit to qualify for SNAP is 130 percent of the federal poverty level, which is a monthly gross income of just $1,696 for a household of one or $3,483 for a household of four.²⁰ As of 2024, the Thrifty Food Plan, which calculates the minimum cost of a meal and determines SNAP payments, was over 20 percent below the cost of an average meal in the United States at about $2.84 per meal.²¹ To address the urgency of food insecurity, Congress must expand SNAP substantially and quickly. Based on economist Craig Gundersen’s proposal, we, the authors of this report, call for a significantly expanded SNAP program that would increase spending by 25 percent, including updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, and increase participation by raising the income cap to 400 percent of the poverty line.²² Implementing this plan would virtually eliminate food insecurity in the United States.²³

We propose that expansions to SNAP must also include reducing restrictions on usage and barriers to access, including adding the ability to purchase hot food, reversing the Trump administration’s “public charge rule” for immigrants, eliminating work requirements, and significantly increasing funding for the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP)—specifically, the Double Up Food Bucks program—and changing it from a research program to a permanent part of SNAP to allow recipients’ funds to go further when purchasing fruits and vegetables.²⁴ Moreover, as food assistance is reinstated and expanded, state, federal, and community programs must prioritize participants’ accessibility and agency by increasing language options, streamlining enrollment processes, respecting Tribal autonomy, and providing culturally appropriate meals at participating federal institutions.²⁵

This proposal is backed by analysis from Gundersen, who used data from the 2019 Current Population Survey to outline SNAP expansion options and their implications for taxpayers. We estimate that the overall proposal would cost about $712.16 billion annually, or $7.12 trillion over a ten-year period, paid for via progressive taxation.²⁶ Specifically, we propose supplementing tax income with direct taxes on the top food and beverage companies, including manufacturers and retailers. Recent polls show that more than 60 percent of voters across age, gender, and party affiliation support raising taxes to increase food assistance.²⁷ Finally, the plan could also include price controls on essential goods to provide a proactive deflationary mechanism as needed.

In addition to the substantial direct benefits of reducing hunger and poverty and improving health outcomes, investments in SNAP more than pay for themselves and positively ripple through society.²⁸ Physically and mentally developing children who are nourished because their parents can afford enough healthy food will experience a lifetime of advantages, as will the society they inhabit. SNAP has widespread economic benefits, as US GDP increases by $1.54 for every $1 distributed through the program.²⁹ Moreover, legislative reporting in Oregon on the Double Up Food Bucks program shows that for every $1 million invested, it ensures an estimated $500,000 to $2.58 million in reduced healthcare expenditures.³⁰ By the same logic, cuts to SNAP are damaging far beyond the direct harm to those who would otherwise receive the benefits, such as reduced business for grocery stores, decreasing local economic activity, and increased overall healthcare costs.³¹

Ultimately, while SNAP and other federal programs are critical stopgap measures against food insecurity, they must be paired with efforts to address the structural drivers of hunger. Solutions not outlined here but still imperative include raising the minimum wage, creating public healthcare and childcare, building affordable housing, strengthening and protecting unions, and more.

Interrelated with rising hunger and malnutrition, the industrial agriculture model will continue to fuel climate and environmental crises, which only further worsen food insecurity. Through an over-reliance on monocultures and synthetic pesticides and fertilizers made from fossil fuels, these industrialized systems create both localized pollution and broad ecological and climate degradation through runoff, biodiversity loss, and fossil fuel dependence.³² Together, agriculture accounts for 11 percent of annual US greenhouse gas emissions.³³ Left unchecked, the ongoing increase in extreme weather events intensified by the climate crisis, such as droughts and floods, will continue to wreak havoc on agricultural production, jeopardizing long-term food affordability and stability. Moreover, the system’s dependence on planet-warming fossil fuels increases food price volatility; price spikes in production inputs lead to increased consumer costs.³⁴

As part of a Green Economic Populist approach, steps to expand SNAP and make healthy food a human right should be enacted in conjunction with policies to make US agriculture more sustainable for all.³⁵ This includes breaking up monopolies, enhancing and enforcing environmental and labor regulations, building up agroecological alternatives, ensuring fair pricing for producers, and redistributing land and power across agriculture and food governance.³⁶ Improving the food system and mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis requires a transformative, holistic approach that targets structural forces underpinning monopolization and monocultures, and connects food access to how it is grown.