New Orleans        In the United States the war is coming home to your state, city, and community and in many cases, it is already in full force.  This is the Trump administration’s war on the poor where the bombs detonated in Trump’s Big Bad Budget bill are now exploding as recipients of food support through the SNAP program are being pushed out of the program and denied food stamps not by the tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands.

Preparing for a meeting, I asked Elliott Anderson, ACORN’s research director, for an update on the research and monitoring he has been doing on implementation of the act.  Reading it, the undeniable conclusion, even on preliminary numbers, has to be that the impact will be as terrible as expected, and likely much worse.

Take these early indicators as a glance at the face of this horror:

• Arizona reports that 31% of recipients have already been removed from benefits.
• Texas does not have up-to-date numbers, but as of January there are already 137,000 fewer recipients compared to the same time a year earlier.

These are just the first waves of the tsunami that is coming.  Remember that the BBB requires the following:

• States were ordered to implement new rules in October 2025.
• The three-month compliance countdown began for recipients in 2025 for states like Arizona, Texas, and others, which is why these numbers are now rolling out.
• In May, there will be another major wave of SNAP benefit losses for recipients failing to meet work requirements or seeing their three-month grace period expire.
• In October, SNAP immigrant eligibility restrictions hit full force, and states assume 75% of the SNAP administrative costs.
• On January 1, 2027, Medicaid work requirements and reduced retroactive coverage hit hard.

We are a member of the BRAVO coalition, so we looked at some of the states where they are developing programs to support benefit recipients to organize and to continue accessing benefits.  Predictions of the impact are devastating:

• Arkansas: outside experts estimate that 25,000 of 244,000 SNAP beneficiaries will be pushed out.
• Texas: there is already a decrease of 8.3% coupled with 324,760 fewer eligible individuals for another expected 9% decrease from the January 2025 SNAP eligibility of 3.6 million people.
• Louisiana: in February people started losing benefits with 28,000 older adults and 40,000 adults with children are at risk of losing benefits.
• Pennsylvania: the state expects 143,968 people will lose food stamps and 310,000 will lose Medicaid.
• Maryland: officials estimate 80,000 or 12% of 680,000 SNAP recipients are at risk from work requirements with 119,000 Maryland households losing excess shelter reductions dues to utility changes.
• Ohio: benefits will be lost in May with Cleveland initially estimating 25,000 being impacted and Akron reporting that more than 15,000 will have to meet new requirements.

This is just a snapshot, not the whole picture.  Multiple these six states by almost ten and there will be millions upon millions pushed off the program.  If there was ever a call for organization, action, and resistance for lower income and working families, it is now.