Several US senators who formerly served as their states’ governors on Tuesday warned that the cuts to food aid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are a “ticking time bomb” for millions of Americans.

In a joint statement, Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Angus King (I-Maine) drew on their experiences as governors to outline how the changes made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the GOP’s 2025 budget law would soon handcuff state governments’ ability to deliver essential assistance.

“Starting October 2027, most states will be required to pay 5% to 15% of SNAP benefit costs for the first time,” the senators said. “The Congressional Budget Office projects this will shift more than $35 billion from the federal government to states between 2028 and 2034, with states expected to respond by cutting another $7 billion in food assistance.”

The senators said that the GOP’s SNAP cuts mean states “will be forced to raise taxes, cut education, healthcare, or transportation, or restrict access to SNAP itself,” with some being “forced to drop the program entirely.”

They then pointed to numbers showing that “SNAP participation is already declining at alarming rates, with over 3.5 million people leaving” the program since the passage of the GOP budget law.

The senators’ warnings about the impact of the SNAP cuts came shortly after a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showing food insecurity in the US reaching its highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The New York Fed researchers said their study found “a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children,” as well as “a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.”

Despite this, Trump-appointed US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins last month described millions of people losing their access to SNAP as a positive sign that “America is back in business.”

When confronted by Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) about this during a House Agriculture Committee hearing last week, Rollins baselessly claimed that all of the people who had been removed from SNAP had been added to the program fraudulently, including “200,000 dead people.”

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