Updated as of 3:15 on July 3 to include the U.S. House of Representatives passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
U.S. Senate and House Republicans have passed President Trump’s tax and spending cuts package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that could cut food assistance benefits from 1.4 million North Carolinians in time for President Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.
The domestic policy bill contains a number of tax breaks and spending cuts including cuts in Medicaid, food assistance and clean energy programs. The bill offsets the costs of tax cuts by cutting spending to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. According to a report from the Congressional Budget Office, 11 million people nationwide would be left uninsured by the bill and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis claimed that 600,000 North Carolinians would lose insurance. The bill also increases spending for border security and ICE, includes changes to the federal student loan program and lifts the debt ceiling by adding at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade.
SNAP is a food assistance program for Americans as it provided food benefits to 42 million people last year and over 1.4 million North Carolinians rely on SNAP, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Additionally, four in five families participating in SNAP in North Carolina have either a child, a senior, or an adult with a disability.
SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is a federal assistance program that helps people buy food if they cannot afford it by providing a monthly stipend that can be used at places like grocery stores and convenience stores.
The bill changes the requirements of qualifying for the program by raising the age that users must remain in the workforce in order to qualify from 54 to 64. Most importantly, the bill has the states pay for some of the cost instead of the federal government — who has always paid for the benefits while the state just had to pay for the cost of managing the program. It is the biggest cut to SNAP since it was founded in 1939.
The bill is part of a wider cost-cutting plan by Trump with other governmental entities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump said that he “wants to give out less money” to FEMA and plans to phase out FEMA and put more responsibility on the states.
SNAP cuts have been a key concern for North Carolina politicians. Tillis was one of three GOP senators who voted against the bill and he announced his intention to not seek reelection shortly after. Gov. Josh Stein also denounced the bill by writing to Congressional leadership, along with the 22 other Democratic governors, asking them to not cut SNAP.
“Recent U.S. House and Senate proposals would effectively gut this critical food assistance that helps families with children, older adults and working people afford the rising cost of groceries and put food on the table,” Stein and the other governors wrote.
The NCDHHS said that if the bill is passed, one of three things will happen: North Carolina will assume some of the cost for SNAP which will cost anywhere about $420 million per year, they will set up barriers to SNAP enrollment in order to have decreased costs or they will withdraw from the program completely.
This $420 million annually would take up a chunk of North Carolina’s budget, which will be about $33 billion, but North Carolina lawmakers failed to agree on a finalized state budget before entering the new fiscal year on July 1.
Emily Kraft, the Director of Community Outreach at the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina, said that losing the program is the worst case scenario.
“North Carolina can opt out of providing SNAP and that'll leave about 1.4 million people who receive SNAP benefits to rely on the charitable food system,” Kraft said. “We can't absorb nine times of what we're already distributing. We just don't have that capability.”
Kraft said this will also wreck the economy in rural communities that have a lack of hospitals and grocery stores.
“Every dollar that people receive in SNAP, they're spending about $1.50 so they're actually boosting the economy,” Kraft said. “If their SNAP dollars and all of that is pulled away, grocery stores will feel it. If Medicaid is pulled away, hospitals will feel it, and we will be left with rural communities that have no food, no health and no existing infrastructure to be able to meet those individuals' needs.”
North Carolina is a state that relies on programs such as SNAP as more than a million North Carolinians and one in six children are food insecure.
Logan Rockefeller Harris, Director of Research at the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, a statewide nonprofit that analyzes fiscal and economic conditions in NC, said the bill will result in more people going hungry by slashing food assistance to pay for tax cuts that will primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans.
“SNAP ensures that kids get healthy food when they're growing up, and provides more financial stability for families,” Rockefeller Harris said. “These have positive long term impacts on kids’ well-being as they're growing up, their health, their educational attainment. So when we take that support away from families, we're likely to see long-term impacts in terms of people's economic stability and their health.”
Rockefeller Harris said North Carolina will find it difficult to find ways to pay for SNAP to continue.
“Certainly something that could result is the state making cuts in other areas of the budget in order to try to come up with these funds,” Rockefeller Harris said. “But because of the scheduled tax cuts in our state, we're already facing a revenue shortfall. So, there aren't a lot of good options in terms of things to cut.”
Rockefeller Harris thinks the passage of the bill will put more pressure on food banks and Kraft said that it will prevent people from receiving the amount of food from the food bank that they are now.
“When we look at the meals per person that we're able to distribute, it's going to decrease because we're not going to be able to access the same amount of food to meet the increased need if it's going by times nine, that's just a need we cannot meet,” Kraft said.
Trump will sign the bill into law on July 4 at 5 p.m. during a ceremony at the White House, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced.