The transition from childhood to adulthood can be one of the most difficult phases in a person’s life, marked as it is by a series of existential challenges: This is the critical period when we obtain education and find employment, all while seeking stability and identity. For very low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 24, a new law approved last summer by the Republican-led Congress could offer new complications, particularly in accessing a key nutrition program.
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.
The legislation made several changes to SNAP that will particularly affect young adults, including tighter work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents—among them, eliminating a prior exemption for adults that have aged out of foster care—and shifting a greater amount of the costs of SNAP from the federal government to states.
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.
“We do expect there to be a significant number of young adults who are impacted, just like the rest of the population who are impacted by SNAP,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.
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.
Now, with the passage of the law, able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 64 must either work, participate in job training, or volunteer for at least 80 hours per month. If they do not record participating in these activities over three months, they will not be eligible for SNAP for another three years. States are also restricted in their ability to request waivers for these work requirements, such that only areas with an unemployment rate greater than 10 percent can be exempt from that time limit.
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.
“If you are searching for work for 80 hours a month, you’re penalized. And young people don’t turn 18 and are given a job,” said Bauer. “This is a group that is more likely than others to be subject to sanction, because these are your first job-searching years.”
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.
“Kids aging out of foster care … do lose a lot of the support they’ve had, and in some circumstances don’t have a family to fall back on, or even to help navigate the system,” said Bolen.
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.)
Unlike former foster youth, college students are not explicitly singled out by the legislation. However, the law could just further complicate their ability to obtain food assistance. College students are already subject to additional criteria when participating in SNAP, such as a “work-to-eat” rule requiring them to maintain 20 hours per work of paid work, as well as fulfilling their coursework.
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.
Bolen said that it is a “myth” that college students are uniformly wealthy. In reality, they experience higher rates of food insecurity than other segments of the population. “The people going to college now look different than they did maybe 20 years ago … and the way they go to college is different. They might be going to community college for a year, or they might be juggling classes and work,” he said. “They’re trying to get an education, trying to better themselves to get a job. They are sacrificing and suffering.”
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.
States’ efforts to lower error rates are already resulting in significant consequences, with Arizona as the most drastic example: Since July of last year, nearly 500,000 Arizonans have lost SNAP benefits. Because the amount of benefits that a state contributes will be dependent on its error rates in 2025 and 2026, states may already have an incentive to drop someone from their benefits rather than work with them to ensure they are fulfilling requirements.
“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.”
Although SNAP benefits average to around $6 per day, SNAP is still a hugely consequential social safety net program, attributed with lifting millions of Americans out of poverty and generating economic growth. The impact on young adults will only be a part of the larger economic consequences, particularly given that the tightened work requirements also apply to new populations of older Americans and parents with teenage children.
“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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