Families Across US Are Suffering From the Fallout of GOP’s 2025 Megabill
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The Republicans’ harmful megabill was enacted on July 4, 2025. As the law’s one-year anniversary approaches, families across the U.S. are beginning to experience the harms many warned that the legislation would inflict.
Already, the law is raising costs for families and taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other essentials from people who are already struggling to afford to meet their basic needs — all while showering more tax breaks on the wealthiest households and funding a violent immigration detention and deportation agenda.
SNAP Tracker: People Are Losing Food Assistance as the Republican Megabill Is Implemented
The law’s harm will only deepen as its more than $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces fully take effect and states fully implement SNAP eligibility restrictions and take drastic measures ahead of the federal government’s significant shift of SNAP costs to states. As a result, tens of millions of people will be less able to meet the growing cost of their basic needs — whether it’s affording groceries, seeing a doctor, keeping the power on, or paying the rent.
While people from all races and ethnicities need assistance at various points during their lifetimes, the law’s cuts will expand the still-deep inequities long experienced by those who face the most economic discrimination and poverty, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and families with people who are immigrants.
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We’ve published many analyses and graphics illustrating the law’s harm. Here are a few of the pieces detailing both the early impacts and those that are still forthcoming:
Taking Away Food Assistance
The Republican reconciliation law poses great harm to families, including higher food costs, poverty, and hunger. It makes deep cuts to federal funding for food assistance through SNAP, making a major structural change to the program by shifting significant new costs to states for the first time. It dramatically expands SNAP’s already harsh and ineffective provision taking away people’s benefits for not meeting a work requirement. And it ended eligibility for many people with a lawful immigration status.
Between the law’s July 2025 enactment and March 2026 (the last month with data on all states):
SNAP participation is down by more than 4 million people, or 10 percent, in USDA data. (It’s down more than 4.7 million people, or 11 percent, over the past year.)
SNAP participation has dropped in every state, including by 5 percent or more in 42 states, and by 10 percent or more in 21 states.
In the 13 states with publicly available data, the number of children receiving SNAP has fallen by about 808,000.
States’ First-Ever Bill for SNAP Benefits Could Cost........
