Women and Food Insecurity During the Second Trump Administration

Almost one in three U.S. adults living with children under 18 struggled to afford food in 2025, including one in six adults who had to skip meals or go an entire day without food. The policies of the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress have led to a perfect storm of rising grocery prices while families and individuals have less access to government support. According to recent polling, 68 percent of adults report worrying about being able to afford groceries and food, and women are particularly impacted by food insecurity.

Trump began his second term by increasing tariffs and assaults on immigrant communities, resulting in higher costs for farmers. On July 4, Trump signed into law H.R.1, the federal tax and budget bill, which included the biggest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in its history. Formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, SNAP is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, providing roughly 41 million people a month with benefits to help them buy food and groceries, with women over the age of 18 making up over 60% percent of recipients.

H.R.1 “dramatically expands SNAP’s already harsh and ineffective provision taking away people’s benefits for not meeting” work requirements, according to analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization focused on low-income communities. Parents with children 14 and older now must provide documentation that they worked 20 hours a week or were involved with a qualifying activity, such as job training, or qualify for an exemption, for example because they have a disability. Previously, parents with a child under the age of 18 were exempt from work requirements. H.R.1 expanded SNAP work requirements for people ages 55–64 and substantially limited waivers for recipients living in areas with high rates of unemployment. If SNAP recipients miss work because they’re sick or home with a sick child, or their employer cuts their hours, they risk losing their benefits. “So many working women who receive SNAP have jobs with low pay and poor benefits,” said Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of federal SNAP policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In fact, women overall make up two thirds of workers in low-paid jobs. And although most SNAP recipients are employed in some capacity, the “work requirements are particularly likely to affect women,” said Sara Estep, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a think tank. Women make up 60% of the part-time workforce and they are “more likely to work involuntarily part time than men, which means they would like to work more hours but those hours aren’t available. And the research hypothesizes that a big chunk of that is occupational segregation — women are more likely to work in certain occupations, especially care-giving,” which can mean they don’t get as many hours as they want. These kinds of jobs also come with unpredictable work schedules. “The real fear here is that the paperwork requirements are going to create a lot of problems and unnecessarily kick people off the program,” said Estep, due to documentation issues, not because they aren’t actually working the required hours.

H.R.1 also increased financial burdens on states. Beginning in 2027, for the first time in the history of the program, states will have to cover a portion of food benefit costs, not just the administrative costs. “State contributions will be tied to their SNAP payment error rates — a volatile and often misleading performance metric,” according to analysis by Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty-related hunger in the U.S. “SNAP will be a line item of states’ budgets,” said Plata-Nino. “Now states have to make incredibly difficult decisions as to whether they fund [SNAP] or something has to suffer because there’s not additional money coming in from the [federal] government.”

SNAP participation nationwide fell by more than 3 million people between July, when H.R.1 was enacted, and January. Every state had declines, but some were especially steep, such as Arizona, which now has less than half the number of participants as it did in July. Advocates worry that states will be motivated to reduce those numbers even further. “This is an incredible pressure on state budgets, and unfortunately we are already seeing and are likely to continue to see in many states that they will respond, if they have to pay more for SNAP, by trying to take their own measures to reduce their SNAP rolls,” said Julie Vogtman, senior director of economic justice at the National Women’s Law Center. “They may also need to make cuts to other programs that families with lower incomes rely on in order to shift money that they are now responsible for. Families are going to be facing more pressures on households, on their wallets, on their ability to afford what they need to get by.”

In Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the country, one in five residents receive SNAP; about 60% are women. “These are often single-mother households working low-wage jobs, and they really need SNAP to support their household,” said Tia Fields, safety net policy analyst at Invest in Louisiana, a nonpartisan think tank. The additional administrative burdens on SNAP recipients have meant that “unfortunately, what we see happening is that eligible families lose benefits simply because of processing delays” and other paperwork errors. “What happens when these moms and women who depend on these benefits are reduced or delayed or get cut off, and they can’t feed themselves or their children?”

The Center for American Progress estimates that these cuts could lead to 70,000 avoidable deaths by 2040. People who receive SNAP are more likely to be in good or excellent health, and participation in the program is linked to better access to preventive care, fewer hospitalizations, and reduced rates of mortality. But the converse is true — when people lose SNAP benefits, their overall health suffers. Food insecurity is associated with a lower-quality diet, which then leads to worse health outcomes.

H.R.1 restricts eligibility for many people with lawful immigration status, and the Trump administration has also tried to require states to report SNAP recipients’ personal information, including Social Security numbers and home addresses; most Democratic-led states have refused to comply, but 27 Republican-led states have shared data on millions of SNAP recipients. This has created a “chilling effect,” said Fields. In Louisiana, a 2025 law requires state agencies to verify the immigration status of applicants for public benefits and report those found ineligible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Although undocumented immigrants can’t receive SNAP, their children may be, and can apply. There are “so many hungry families, hungry women who have a U.S. citizen child eligible for those benefits, but they are not applying because of the new restrictions out of fear,” said Fields. This has also impacted the SNAP enrollment numbers in Louisiana, “which have dropped by 15 percent. Some people would say that’s great because [they think] we’re getting more people off welfare. But what it means is that families are still starving.” They are no longer enrolled in SNAP “not because their incomes went up and they don’t need it, but because of the administrative burdens that these new systems have created. It’s a forced decline.”

H.R.1 contained trillions of dollars in tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals and nearly $170 billion in international tax breaks benefiting the nation’s largest multinational companies. “There is no reason that people should be going hungry in this country to pay for billionaires’ tax cuts, but here we are,” said Vogtman.