More than a year after Congress passed the largest-ever cuts to food assistance, our most vulnerable neighbors are feeling the consequences.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed in July 2025, made major cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), preventing people from receiving the support they need.
Amid this devastating rise in hunger, FCNL’s Advocacy Corps organizers are raising their voices in local media to educate their communities about this emerging moral crisis.
“If you aren’t currently on SNAP, it can be easy to view this as an abstract political debate,” New York Advocacy Corps organizer Lex Colleen wrote in an op-ed in City Limits. “But food insecurity isn’t abstract—it’s your neighbors, your coworkers, and the kids in your neighborhood school going to bed hungry.”
Worse still, one of the most damaging provisions of the OBBA has yet to come into effect. Starting in October 2027, states will be forced to take on a share of total SNAP costs based on their “error rates.”
With that deadline looming, many states are already “just kicking people off SNAP to reduce the error rate,” Pennsylvania Advocacy Corps organizer Sarah Weill-Jones told WHYY in Philadelphia. People with disabilities, elderly people, children, and others struggling to get by are all losing the benefits they need as a result.
Proponents claim these policies are needed to eliminate fraud and waste. “But the reality on the ground is clear,” Colleen wrote. “People are not scamming the system; they are desperately trying to survive in an economy that has priced them out of basic human dignity.”
As Oklahoma Advocacy Corps organizer Carrigan Jobin put it in a letter to the editor, “families should not have to lose grocery assistance because the state was not given enough time to implement a major federal change.”
Lawmakers can and must intervene– the Farm Bill before Congress now is their opportunity to delay the cost shift by two years.
Tell Congress: Put food for families over more militarism and greed!
Elsewhere
What are Data Centers Doing in Our Communities?
FCNL staff joined a tour of data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia and learned about the impact of these installations in our communities. In this month’s edition of Inside the Greenhouse, FCNL’s Lila Smith broke down how they require massive amounts of energy and water and could pollute watersheds.
Congress’ Power of the Purse Undermined
In the final days of the fiscal year, Trump administration rushed billions of dollars in foreign assistance funding out the door. Yet, the administration’s failure to manage the funds that Congress appropriated responsibly raises serious questions.
Gabi Selmonosky, FCNL’s program assistant for peacebuilding, pointed out that this inefficient process “hurt vulnerable communities and undermine[d] Congress’ power of the purse, shaking the very foundations of our democracy.”
Our Government Shouldn’t Kill
We are sickened that the U.S. military planned to broadcast an execution. Although the reversal of this plan is welcome, this horrifying story is another reminder of the need for our country to abolish the death penalty entirely. This follows the botched execution of Crista Pike in Tennessee, who suffered immensely from a failed attempt at lethal injection.
Violence harms all those who partake in it, and we are dismayed by all the ways that life is cheapened and discarded by state violence carried out in all of our names — from police killings of Black people, to lawless ICE violence in our streets, to the endless wars our government inflicts on people abroad.
