One of America’s most acute moral failures is the manufactured panic about a “retreat from work” used to justify starving the hungry into submission. So it is a catastrophe that four million Americans have been kicked off food stamps over the past year, as the press has accurately reported, despite the administration’s spin about fraud and a strengthening economy.
The Trump Administration’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins boasted recently that “we now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program,” known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The press correctly named the cause: Republicans in their big budget bill last year imposed cruel work mandates and are depriving the most vulnerable of grocery help. And the press is right.
The food-stamp program is now being hacked back to the levels of 2019, when millions already went hungry. Some 42.8 million Americans were enrolled in the program in January 2025—more than 12% of the U.S. population, a measure of the deep need the pandemic exposed. The figure in January 2026 was 38.5 million, a decline driven by policy brutality, not recovery. The AEI-affiliated scholar Angela Rachidi, who has spent her career arguing for less help for the poor, says the program was “due for a decline” after elevated enrollment during the pandemic. But the emergency ended for Wall Street years ago; for the working poor, wages never caught up, and the Trump Administration is now forcing them off the rolls anyway.
The Trump Administration also holds the punitive and stigmatizing belief that those who need help must prove their worth by working, training, or volunteering at least 20 hours a week. That’s the work mandate for able-bodied adults without children, which Republicans in Congress extended to adults up to age 64 and to parents of teenagers—people already stretched thin by caregiving and low wages. The requirement includes a meager 90-day reprieve before the food is cut off.
In other words, those who are purged because of the expanded work mandate are cut off for one of two reasons that the administration spins as virtue. One: They manage to find scraps of income, and the administration takes credit for their struggle. Two: They are too sick, too old, too burdened, or living in a job desert to navigate the bureaucratic maze—and the administration punishes them by taking away their food. In that case, the morally bankrupt policy is to starve them into submission. That is not reform; it is sadism dressed as work ethic.
The Foundation for Government Accountability, a right-wing advocacy group that lobbies to gut the safety net, crows about a 12% decrease in Virginia, 6% in North Carolina, and 10% in Kansas—numbers that represent thousands of families going hungry. The purge is especially alarming because progressive states have been trying to shield their residents from the mandates through every legal avenue available, which Republicans sneer at as “gimmicks.” California’s legal shields hold—until this month, when Republican mandates override them and hunger spikes predictably, exposing the cruelty of a one-size-fits-all purge.
The administration’s so-called crackdown on “fraud and waste” is a transparent effort to manufacture consent for the purge, leveraging audit threats to force states into hyper-enforcement and mass disenrollment. The Agriculture Department combed through data from 28 states and claims it found nearly 186,000 dead recipients—a tiny fraction that mostly reflects administrative lag, not fraud—and 355,000 duplicate enrollments, many from people who moved between states while hungry, tracking mobile households and families fleeing hardship. States historically have lacked the resources to administer the program, but the GOP budget bill will now punish states with high error rates by forcing them to shoulder federal costs, setting off a race to the bottom in which the poorest states will shed the most hungry people.
These are senseless and destructive changes that two decades ago would have been condemned by both parties. The press, for once, is treating the mass expulsion from food aid as the human tragedy it is. The real outrage is that Republicans have turned a program that feeds children, seniors, and the disabled into a political weapon, demonizing the hungry as “dependent” while the donor class pillages the country. Mark the food-stamp purge as a Trump-inflicted wound on the nation that never would have happened if today’s GOP had not abandoned every shred of decency.