As director of the Palestine Senior Citizen Activity Center in Kansas City, Yolanda Robinson tries to keep an ear to the ground so she’ll know when one of her seniors is suffering in silence.

If she hadn’t sat down for lunch recently and heard people talking, Robinson said, she probably wouldn’t have learned about the ones who just lost access to food stamps — their only means of buying groceries.

“They don’t talk about it,” Robinson said. “They just figure it out.”

But figuring it out gets harder every day as food costs increase, rent and utilities climb and, now, the price of gasoline skyrockets amid the war in Iran. To lose federal food assistance on top of that may be too much, Robinson worries.

“I do my best to refer them to a food pantry or something like that,” she said. “But then what?”

The same question is coming up across Kansas City as changes made last year to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, take effect. 

Food pantries and meal programs that offer free food were already seeing high demand. Now, the organizations said, they are bracing for the situation to become far worse as more people lose food assistance.

“I don’t see it getting better,” said Lauren Allen, outreach program manager with Jackson County Public Health. “I’m hoping that it doesn’t get worse. … We know that access to food is a fundamental part of community health and people’s lives.”

A cautionary tale

People in the fight against food insecurity warn that structural changes to how SNAP is funded and new rules that make it harder for people to get and keep the food benefit are threatening the safety-net program.

Due to changes passed last summer under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states are facing paying more for the program while they also absorb costs associated with tracking new restrictions.

For the first time, able-bodied adults who are 55 to 64 years old have to prove they’re working, volunteering or in school. The requirement is also new for parents with children 14-18 years old and for veterans, people experiencing homelessness and youth aging out of foster care. In addition, the new law bans refugees and asylees from receiving food assistance.

Eligibility requirement changes, many of which took effect in December, are likely beginning to show up in SNAP enrollment numbers.

In February, seven months after Trump signed the SNAP changes into law, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said the country had already seen enrollment drop 8.62% to 38 million people from 41.6 million last July. 

Meanwhile, in Missouri, the number of households receiving SNAP in March declined 5.7% from the previous year to 302,581, while the number of individuals receiving the benefits dipped 6.1% to 654,108. Kansas reported that its average monthly participation from July to April was 178,821 people, a 5% drop from the previous year’s monthly average.

But in Arizona, where work requirements took effect earlier and the state has moved more quickly to shore up payment error rates, the decline in SNAP enrollment has been far more dramatic. By March, Arizona’s SNAP participation had declined by half. 

Ed Bolen, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of SNAP state strategies, said Arizona’s experience, which left 200,000 children among others without food assistance, should be a cautionary tale for the rest of the country.

“There’s something seriously wrong with that outcome,” he said. “Those are eligible kids who are not getting food. And there are lots of adults who would fall in that category.”

Costs shifting to states

The work requirements are not the only reason people will lose SNAP under the program’s new legal framework. In order to cut $187 billion from federal SNAP spending, the new law shifts more of the cost to states.

SNAP, which has always been a federal program, relied on states to pay half of the administrative costs, while federal taxpayers picked up everything else. Beginning in fiscal year 2027, which starts in October, states will have to pay three-quarters of the administrative costs. And the following year, most states will be on the line for some of the benefit costs, too.

How much they’ll be responsible for depends on a state’s payment error rate, the portion of over- or underpayments made to beneficiaries. States with an error rate of less than 6% will continue to pay nothing for benefits. But states with higher error rates — including Missouri, Kansas and most others — will have to start paying between 5% and 15% of benefits, depending on their 2025 and 2026 track records.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about half of states would face new costs of more than $100 million per year if error rates stay where they were in 2024, while 11 are on the brink of owing significantly more if error rates get worse. 

Assuming 2024 rates hold, Kansas and Missouri would each be on the hook for 10% — about $41 million in Kansas and $150 million in Missouri. 

All of that gives states every incentive to get error rates down and, some advocates fear, a good reason to deny applications.

“They’re going to cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s,” said Dustin Hare, economic security policy adviser with Kansas Action for Children. “And if there’s any doubt whatsoever, that person is not going to get services.”

Both Missouri and Kansas told The Beacon the states are actively working to reduce error rates. 

Missouri legislators this year passed a $29.3 million increase in funding to cover higher administrative costs in fiscal year 2027. And Kansas lawmakers have appropriated $12.1 million to cover added administrative costs in that state, but so far have denied funding requests for increased work requirement tracking.

In the meantime, states, including Kansas, are passing laws that put even more restrictions and requirements on SNAP recipients in an effort to reduce error rates. (Missouri legislators tried to but did not pass a similar bill this year.) Those restrictions also could serve as obstacles that effectively force more people to lose benefits. 

Set up to fail

Christine Woody, food security policy manager with Empower Missouri, said she doesn’t think the situation in Missouri will end up being as serious as Arizona’s. But she does worry about the Missouri Department of Social Services’ ability to keep up with the regulatory burden that comes with tracking new eligibility requirements.

Just two years ago, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the state agency had violated Missourians’ rights by unfairly denying benefits due to its “dysfunctional” call center.

“Our biggest concern is (about) people who are not going to be able to access the program because of call center challenges,” Woody said.

Jessica Kejr, nutrition access specialist with Kansas Appleseed, said one of her concerns is that all the changes and confusion may have a chilling effect, keeping people who are eligible and in need from asking for help.

“I might not apply at all, because it’s confusing, or I don’t want to put my name on a piece of paper for lots of different reasons,” Kejr said.

Hunger policy organizations have called on Congress to slow down implementation of the new requirements in federal law. States need more time, they argue, to fairly and effectively implement changes and reduce error rates. 

Since the law passed, the organizations said, states have received unclear and inconsistent guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency that administers SNAP. And last fall, in the middle of when changes were supposed to begin, a federal shutdown caused chaos across the program.

“The states are set up to fail,” Bolen said. “They have to get their error rates down now … but they don’t have time to do (that) successfully. Unfortunately, what does failure mean? Failure means people don’t get benefits.”

A history of stigma

The earliest food stamp program began after the Great Depression, when farms had large surpluses of food and hunger was at a record high. The government distributed actual stamps, which people could use to buy surplus food from the Department of Agriculture.

But that program only lasted a few years, and a nationwide system like the one that exists today didn’t come about until 1974. That Food Stamp Program, championed by Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Democratic Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, addressed growing food insecurity and quickly reached 12.9 million people — 6% of the country’s population at the time.

As political winds shifted in the 1980s under President Ronald Regan, the food stamp program came under attack. Opponents portrayed food stamp recipients as lazy and tried to imply they were ripping off taxpayers.

By 2008, the program was renamed SNAP — emphasizing nutrition — but the attacks did not subside. And lawmakers who opposed it began piling more requirements and restrictions on recipients, making the benefits harder to get.

Unfortunately, said Teon Hayes, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Law and Social Poverty, that narrative has gained new life just as people who rely on SNAP face increasing affordability challenges. 

In addition to food assistance contracting under the Trump administration, Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans, is also in line for major funding cuts, which will leave more people with higher medical costs along with the other high costs of living. 

“We are experiencing an affordability crisis,” Hayes said, “and, unfortunately, people who are relying on public benefits are hit even harder. We’re no longer talking about just the price of eggs and milk. We’re talking about families struggling to afford basic living expenses.”

As the latest food assistance overhaul takes hold, some policy experts worry that SNAP could go away altogether in states that decide they can’t absorb the growing price.

“There’s no obligation for a state to offer the SNAP program,” Kejr said. “It would be devastating if it went away. We know the reach of what it can do. It’s the most effective anti-hunger program that we have.”

More desperation

In 2025, SNAP benefits amounted to a little over $6 a day per person, money that can be spent on certain qualifying foods. Candy and soda were recently made ineligible for SNAP in Missouri and Kansas. The benefit goes a long way toward helping solve hunger, advocates said. For every one meal a food pantry provides, SNAP can provide nine.

Participants, who must meet strict requirements and provide detailed financial information to qualify, receive the funding monthly through an EBT card, which can be used at grocery stores and other retail locations just like a debit card. That means SNAP also has an economic impact. Grocery stores rely on SNAP dollars, especially in rural and urban areas that could become food deserts without those SNAP purchases. 

Mike Miller, a supervising attorney who runs Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s public benefit team, said he hasn’t seen an influx of clients losing SNAP because of the expanded work requirements. In part that’s because the people he represents typically have a disability that makes them exempt from the requirements. 

But Miller has seen an uptick in clients getting overpayment notices from the state — meaning they are being told they must pay back benefits already received. And he has noticed a growing level of concern when clients’ SNAP benefits are threatened in some way. Increasingly, he said, they are telling him that missing even a month of benefits because of a paperwork snafu or something else can be a financial blow that’s hard to absorb. 

“I feel more desperation from our clients,” he said. 

It became clear last November, when SNAP benefits temporarily went unpaid during the federal government shutdown, how much people rely on food aid. People poured into food pantries across the country.

But that hasn’t substantially dropped off since the shutdown, area agencies said. Even people with SNAP are coming to Seton Center’s food pantry because the SNAP dollars don’t stretch far enough, said Stacy Mayer, the organization’s CEO. 

“Fuel costs are going to continue to affect the need for pantries like ours,” Mayer said. “Even folks that keep SNAP, those dollars get garbled up faster and they’re going to need more support externally.”

Seton Center’s food pantry traffic has remained consistently higher in recent months. The same is true for the Jackson County Health Department’s food pantry, Bishop Sullivan Center pantry and meal site and Vernell’s Pantry at Mount Sinai Baptist Church.

“Anyone can come — anyone in the community,” said Roger Heggie, a deacon at Mount Sinai church. “So many people are on hard times right now, with the gas prices eating into the economy.” 

A higher cost

Those who work to reduce food insecurity are holding out hope that the federal farm bill will put the brakes on the cost shift coming to states. But the version that passed the House this spring didn’t make any changes — or restore any federal funding — to what the One Big Beautiful Bill stripped out.

Policymakers need to remember that keeping people healthy ultimately leads to lower costs overall, said Dr. Sameed Khatana, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has shown that people who live in states that make SNAP easier to access have higher SNAP participation, lower food insecurity rates and, as a result, a lower prevalence of diabetes and cardiovascular mortality. 

“When you’re trying to balance a budget in a given year, perhaps the focus is on whatever is in front of you,” Khatana said, “but the downstream effects could be much more.”

Other studies have estimated that expanded work requirements for older adults and parents with older children will lead to 69,600 premature deaths by 2040. And even more could result from additional work requirements.

If states leave the SNAP program altogether because they can’t afford added costs being shifted from the federal government, the number of premature deaths would grow even more. A March report from the Center for American Progress said that Kansas could see 3,000 avoidable deaths by 2041 if the state left the program, while Missouri could see 10,600.

“We’re going to feel this for generations to come, and that’s what really, really scares me,” Hayes said. “Right now, we’re still good. States haven’t really experienced the cost shift yet. But in 2027, 2028 when it is in full effect, I think we’re going to be having a different conversation.”