By Matthew Yglesias / Bloomberg Opinion
There are a lot of known unknowns about exactly how Republicans will approach the major tax and spending issues facing the new Congress. But one thing is clear: Low-income Americans are going to be in the crosshairs.
A “menu” of potential cuts developed by House Republicans proposes somewhere north of $5 trillion in spending reductions, the vast majority coming out of the pockets of the most vulnerable.
The biggest item on the list is $2.3 trillion in proposed Medicaid cuts. But the most egregious is a $274 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that would reverse one of President Joe Biden’s best but least-heralded initiatives; an update to what’s known as the Thrifty Food Plan.
Here’s how it works. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends four bundles of groceries that represent a “nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet prepared at home” for a family of two middle-aged adults and two children. There’s the thrifty plan (the cheap one), a low-cost plan, a moderate-cost plan and a liberal plan. SNAP benefits are paid according to a formula that is based on the price of the thrifty plan, scaled to the size of the household receiving the benefits.
For years, the list of foods in the thrifty plan was updated only sporadically. But in the 2018 farm bill, Congress directed the Department of Agriculture to update it by 2022, and then to do so every five years to take into account new prices and information about nutrition.
The Biden administration did this in 2021, making the maximum SNAP benefit about 25 percent more generous. The details are complicated, but the main thing is that it allows for a larger budget for meat, seafood and eggs rather than assuming families will drink enormous quantities of milk and orange juice to meet their caloric needs.
Republicans have hated this change since it was enacted; but struggle to articulate exactly why.
One major concern they raise is that by making benefits more generous, Biden has reduced low-income people’s incentive to participate in the labor market.
But in a previous budget deal, Biden already agreed to establish work requirements for able-bodied prime-age SNAP recipients. And while prime age labor force participation is about 1 percentage point lower than it was in 1998, it’s considerably higher today than it was at any point during Donald Trump’s first term. So it’s hard to understand how Biden is supposed to be to blame.
Of course, Republicans are correct that doing more to help the poor costs more money. On the other hand, studies show SNAP has widespread benefits for low-income households — notably, less food insecurity and better long-term health outcomes — as well as community-level benefits like less theft.
Beyond SNAP, Republicans are also contemplating cutbacks to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, social services block grants and the Affordable Care Act.
And then there’s that huge cut to Medicaid. Republicans want to consider “per capita caps” on Medicaid spending, so that the program’s budget would no longer account for the actual cost of providing health-care services.
They also want to “equalize Medicaid payments for able-bodied adults,” according to the memo, and set a “lower FMAP floor” — that is, reduce federal payments to states that accepted Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion funds and to higher-income states.
They are so eager for these cuts that they count them twice: The menu includes $918 billion from the per capita caps, $690 billion from payment equalization and $387 billion from the FMAP floor. Yet if you institute per-capita caps, then the value of the additional cuts is much lower.
At any rate, the menu raises a larger question: Why cut so much spending on the poor?
On the one hand, it’s obvious. Republicans are committed to enacting very large tax cuts, but bond markets are worried about the budget deficit. Running the playbook from 2017, when they just put the cost of Trump’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act on the national credit card, may not work very well. At the same time, Trump has promised higher spending on the military and to hold harmless the two largest domestic programs, Social Security and Medicare.
With those constraints in place, it’s hardly surprising that Republicans are going after the poor: That’s where the money is. Most of the federal budget goes toward interest payments, the military, the elderly and the poor. Interest payments aren’t really negotiable, and when you take the military and the elderly off the table, only the poor are left.
Is this “populism”? Does it make moral sense to cut taxes for the richest and offset them with cuts to programs for the poorest? Does it even make political sense not to try to address fiscal issues in a more balanced and bipartisan way?
Far be it from me to second-guess the guy who just won an election. But Trump didn’t talk about these ideas during the race, much less campaign on them. Maybe Republicans hope that if they move fast enough, they can get this done without anyone noticing. But attention deserves to be paid.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is the author of “One Billion Americans.” ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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