“Food and housing are absolutely related,” NYC Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park tells City Limits. “When people are in a choice between paying for food or paying rent, people are going to naturally choose food. That’s going to put enormous pressure on the affordable housing sector.”
(Photo by Adi Talwar)
This Fourth of July, nearly 3 million New York City residents could find out if they’ll lose access to—or see fewer of—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that keep food on their tables.
Republicans in the U.S. Senate have been trading notes and edits on Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a budget reconciliation measure targeting, among other things, the nation’s largest food assistance program. The president has pressed lawmakers to pass it before Independence Day.
Food stamps have always been primarily funded by the federal government through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But for the first time in history, Republicans want to shift those costs onto states. If approved, the bill would force New York to shoulder $2.1 billion in SNAP-related costs.
Along with substantial cuts, Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” would impose stricter work requirements on many individuals receiving benefits. For some recipients, failure to record 80 hours of work a month could result in their benefits being revoked, and prohibit them from receiving SNAP for three years. The bill also seeks to lower the age threshold for dependents when it comes to exempting their caregivers from work requirements.
“The One Big Beautiful Bill promotes work, responsibility, and restores SNAP to serve the truly needy,” the White House said this week in defense of the plans.
But the stricter requirements overlook individuals in the gig economy, parents who have caregiving responsibilities, or people living with disabilities, advocates say.
To find out more on the potential impact of the proposal locally, City Limits hopped on a call with the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services, Molly Wasow Park.
With 1.8 million New Yorkers relying on SNAP—including over 560,000 children and 530,000 older adults—what is the realistic impact of $30 billion in cuts over 10 years on our city’s hunger, health, and housing systems?
Commissioner Molly Wasow Park: I’m deeply worried about what’s going on with SNAP. Both the House and the Senate are looking at very substantial push downs of costs from the federal to the state level. While that doesn’t officially change SNAP eligibility, and SNAP remains an entitlement program, $2 billion could be pushed down to the state. We are going to have to be looking at, what are the major discretionary programs? Where can we move dollars around? And frankly there are terrible options when you’re talking about that.
Food and housing are absolutely related. When people are in a choice between paying for food or paying rent, people are going to naturally choose food. That’s going to put enormous pressure on the affordable housing sector. We’re absolutely looking at the possibility of increased homelessness and housing instability.
The other major SNAP change under consideration that is concerning is the changes to the rules for able-bodied adults without dependents. This is a universe of people for whom the most stringent version of work requirements apply—they must be working or they can’t get SNAP. And if they aren’t working, there’s a three month grace period, and they’re locked out for 36 months.
One of the things that’s really important to understand is that it isn’t sufficient to be working to meet work requirements. You have to have consistent and well-documented work hours to meet work requirements. If you work in the gig economy or you work shifts, that is very difficult to do.
I was down in Washington, we were at a Senate hearing on SNAP, and one of the people testifying was a health attendant. Her client went into the hospital for a week and she didn’t have any hours that week. So all of a sudden she’s at risk of losing her SNAP benefits. And it’s not just for her, she also had a child.
I think many people hear work requirements and say, ‘Okay, that’s reasonable, we want to encourage employment,’ but it’s actually designed to be punitive. Both the House and the Senate are scoring reductions based on work requirements, which means they don’t anticipate that people are going to be able to meet them.
Given the high cost of living in New York City, do you believe the current SNAP maximum of $32 a day for a family of four is sufficient? How would further cuts impact lower income families, who seem to be struggling to get by already?
$32 a day actually sounds much higher than what it actually is. SNAP is a baseline funding program. It’s right there in the name, “supplemental,” it’s not intended to take care of everybody’s nutrition needs. It’s a critically important program, but nobody’s riding high off of SNAP. It’s really important to put the cuts that are being contemplated in the context of other topics on the table.
If we think about food, healthcare and housing as people’s baseline needs, all three of those are under assault. There are enormous changes proposed to Medicaid. What is being contemplated is adding work requirements, certification requirements and limiting access to the Affordable Care Act for legal immigrants. Really significant changes that will take primary health care away from people and drive people towards the emergency rooms.
A shopper uses their EBT benefits at a grocery store. (Flickr/USDA)
They’re also talking about more than 40 percent cuts to Section 8 and to public housing. If you think about a low income household where food, shelter and health care are probably major expenses, and you’re squeezing all of those at one time, you’re going to see enormous ripple effects.
Would these work requirements be putting older adults or people with disabilities to work?
There is language around exemptions for people with disabilities. There’s going to be regulation about how to interpret all of this. It is easy to think about disability using a relatively static criterion. If somebody’s bedridden, they are disabled and they’re going to get disability exemption. But for the person who struggles with something that is episodic or somebody who has surgery and can’t work for three months and maybe loses their job or loses hours, how do you document that? And when you were in that moment of crisis, how do you also deal with the documentation?
There are people who are going to lose benefits because of the challenges of being able to meet the compliance standards. In New York City we’ve really tried to do a lot to make our programs as user friendly as possible. You apply, recertify and interview online. 90 percent of what we’re doing is done remotely. We try, but there are standards that we must adhere to around what counts as documentation of that disability, and I do worry that people are going to fall off because of the extra barriers that have been put in place.
The bill lowers the age limit for dependent children when considering work exemptions for caregivers. What do you think would be the potential effects of a parent having to leave their school-aged child to go to work, or that parent losing SNAP benefits because they don’t comply with the new work requirements due to caregiving responsibilities?
It’s a huge issue. This is a place where the House and the Senate are in different places, so we’ll have to see how that plays out. You can’t leave your 8-year-old home alone, and childcare is expensive. A school-age child is actually not in school all that much, there’s long stretches of summer vacation, and school ends at 2:30. So I do think there will absolutely be people who lose benefits because of their caregiving responsibilities. And the person who’s really going to suffer in that instance is the child.
How would removing benefits from lawfully present immigrants affect NYC’s status as a sanctuary city, and its ability to protect vulnerable immigrant populations (survivors of domestic violence, sex trafficking and forced labor)?
You have to have been in the country legally for five years before you’re eligible for SNAP under current regulation—so this idea that immigrants are costing millions of dollars in emergency food aid is not true. Speaking as the Department of Social Services, we take our responsibility to serve all of those in need very seriously, and that includes immigrants. If all of this goes through, we’re going to see a real strain on other parts of the social safety net. Whether that means emergency food pantries who are already over capacity or the shelter system.
Why do you think these cuts are being proposed? Where does the GOP want to allocate this money?
I think it’s pretty transparent that there’s a desire to do extensive tax cuts that primarily benefit the most wealthy, and in order to make those cuts possible there’s an attack on the social safety nets. There’s concerns that the social safety net is too expansive.
How is the DSS preparing to handle these cuts if they’re approved?
We’re thinking very hard about contingency planning. We’re really focusing on our core values as a city and as an agency. The scale of the cuts are so large that we certainly can’t expect the city or the state to fill them, so there’s going to be really tough choices ahead of us.
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