President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” dramatically slashed spending on social safety net programs. It tightened work requirements and shifted greater costs onto states, and extended tax breaks for wealthier Americans and corporations. Those cuts included a reduction in spending of $187 billion on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.
Between July 2025, when it was passed, and February 2026, nationwide SNAP participation fell by more than 3.5 million people. This federal data was not broken down by age, but young adults are among the participants who were and will continue to be affected; one analysis estimated that nearly three million young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 are at risk of losing their SNAP benefits under the changes in the law.
Even before its passage, SNAP had “always had a very rigorous application process” that was difficult for young adults to navigate, said Ed Bolen, director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Research suggests that young adults already have difficulty accessing social safety net benefits. Roughly 55 percent of the 5.8 million young adults who qualify for SNAP do not participate in the program.
Lauren Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who researches social and safety net policies, noted that time spent job hunting does not count toward the requirement, making this mandate a significant challenge for someone just entering the workforce. Young people are less likely than older Americans to have a stable job, and are overrepresented in the gig workforce.
Those challenges may be particularly extreme for young adults aging out of foster care, who had previously had an exemption to the work requirement time limits for able-bodied young adults. However, the Republican tax and spending law ended this exemption, creating an extra challenge for a population that is more likely than its peers to undergo periods of housing instability, academic challenges, and unemployment.
A young adult experiencing homelessness would also be subject to the new requirements. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 8 percent of young adults between the age of 18 and 24 experienced homelessness in 2024. Former foster youth are particularly vulnerable, with roughly a quarter becoming homeless during the transition into adulthood. (The House of Representatives recently approved bipartisan legislation to address housing instability among former foster youth, but the future of this measure is uncertain in the Senate.)
A report by the Government Accountability Office found that in 2020—already a time marked by heightened food insecurity nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic—59 percent of college students potentially eligible for SNAP did not report receiving benefits. The GAO has also found that the Department of Education has slow-walked sharing student income data with the Agriculture Department, making it more difficult to determine who is eligible for SNAP and simplify the application process. The expiration of pandemic-era SNAP flexibilities also affected students’ ability to access benefits.
Young adults will also be affected by a move to shift the cost of SNAP administration and benefits onto states, placing greater pressure on states to either find the money to fund the program or slash benefits. Based on their “error rate”—that is, the number of over- or underpayments of SNAP benefits—states may have to pay up to 15 percent of benefit costs beginning as early as 2027.
“A hypothesis that I have is, if you are complicated as a person, that they may be not picking up the phone for you,” said Bauer. “A student SNAP participant profile is a complicated one.”
“SNAP is our most successful anti-hunger program; it reduces food insecurity, it reduces health care costs, it lifts millions of people out of poverty,” said FitzSimons. “If people lose that, they lose that baseline.”
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