By Leah Douglas and Erica Stapleton
WASHINGTON/PHOENIX, Arizona, June 24 (Reuters) – When Angelica Garcia tried to renew her food stamps this spring, she said she thought she knew the drill.
The single mother of three in Tucson filled out the application. She repeatedly called Arizona’s Department of Economic Security, the state agency administering the federal aid, often staying on hold until the line dropped. She visited a thinly staffed DES office and waited hours for a caseworker.
By the time Garcia was reapproved in June, she’d missed two months of benefits while her family got by on food-pantry donations and cheap staples like beans, rice and tortillas.
“There’s hoops to jump through — always,” said Garcia, who has used food stamps in the state for three years. But now the government is “adding more hoops.”
More than 4.7 million people nationwide have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as food stamps, since President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending law took effect last July, according to data through March from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — about 11% of participants.
Nowhere have the changes to America’s second-largest social safety-net program taken hold as rapidly as in Arizona, where the number of SNAP recipients has fallen by about half, the steepest drop in the country.
That means lost benefits for more than 457,000 Arizonans, including nearly 196,000 children, according to DES data as of the end of May.
The law reduces SNAP funding by $187 billion, or about 17%, over the next 10 years, in part by expanding work requirements and barring some immigrants from receiving benefits.
It also imposes penalties on states that fail to meet certain performance standards beginning in October next year. And it shifts more administrative costs onto states.
Among the reasons enrollment has fallen so steeply in Arizona is that the state has moved to implement the federal changes more quickly than other states, according to two SNAP experts and the DES spokesperson, Brett Bezio.
“Arizona has no choice but to meet these requirements,” Liliana Soto, press secretary for Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, said in an email. “If we don’t comply, we will be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and more vulnerable Arizonans will lose their food assistance.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the SNAP overhaul “prioritizes American citizens, and implements reasonable cost-sharing measures with states to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse,” without offering examples.
The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration, which administers SNAP, attributed the decline in enrollment in part to the work requirement changes.
RECORD FOOD-PANTRY DEMAND
The SNAP cuts have driven a record number of people to food banks in Arizona, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network, a statewide organization that works with local pantries.
About 843,000 Arizonans sought support from a food pantry in April, about an 8% increase over 779,000 in April 2025 — and surpassing the number of people receiving SNAP, according to AFBN data. Food bank users fell in May to about 790,000, the data show.
Even so, food pantries are scrambling to fill “a massive gap,” said Terri Shoemaker, executive vice president of the AFBN.
DES and the USDA did not comment on the increase in food-bank use.
Myriam Flores, a mother of seven in Phoenix, said in a May interview she was unable to renew her access to SNAP and lost $1,100 a month in benefits in January.
She said she spent hours on hold with Arizona’s DES, only for calls to drop.
At the time of her interview, she said she visits the St. Vincent de Paul pantry in Phoenix nearly every day so she can feed her children.
“There are nights of crying, nights of not sleeping, when I lose sleep at 2 a.m. doing the math, deciding what to pay for and what to put off,” she said.
Reuters could not determine whether Flores has resumed her efforts to get benefits or whether she’s currently eligible.
‘FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS’
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the longer wait times are partly the result of stricter processes for vetting applicants, introduced by Arizona’s state agency to meet the new performance standards and avoid financial penalties.
“They can’t get through on the overloaded phone line, or they’re being asked for more and more paperwork that they can’t provide, or they do provide it but the state doesn’t have capacity to process it,” she said.
Those standards grew out of the state’s SNAP error rate — a measure of overpayments and underpayments of food stamp benefits.
Arizona’s error rate in 2024 was 8.84%, below the national average of 10.9%, but still above the 6% threshold that — under the new law — would require states to cover up to 15% of the cost of SNAP benefits. Historically, the federal government has paid the full cost of benefits.
That could cost Arizona about $201.5 million next year, according to the DES 2027 budget request.
To avoid the threat of “significant financial penalties,” DES has tightened its application process by requiring documentation like pay stubs or leases, Bezio said.
Cindy Bernardo, a program manager at the St. Vincent de Paul pantry, said many of the organization’s clients have faced delays or lost their SNAP benefits as the state enacts the federal changes.
“So many of them have lost their benefits,” she said. “And they have reapplied, and most of them can’t even get an answer to their questions.”
The federal law also expanded work requirements to areas that previously had waivers because of high unemployment or insufficient jobs.
Fourteen of Arizona’s 15 counties are now subject to work requirements, compared to just one last year, said Joseph Palomino, director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress.
Those changes, as well as the new demands for documentation, are making it harder for people to get timely access to benefits, he said, and they’re “falling through the cracks.”
Bezio said the agency is hiring more staff and contracting with a third-party call center to improve wait times.
SNAP CUTS ROLL OUT NATIONWIDE
Other states are recording steep drops in SNAP enrollment: 17.4% in Louisiana, 11.6% in Wyoming and 13.7% in Virginia, USDA data show.
The USDA’s FNA said states are responsible for accurately implementing the federal changes, and that it has issued guidance to help them meet new requirements.
The Louisiana Department of Health did not respond to a request for comment.
The Wyoming Department of Family Services said “a large portion” of the state’s decline was due to the federal changes.
In Virginia, SNAP enrollment fell 12% in the year ending in March, according to the Department of Social Services.
“The primary impact of this law on the Commonwealth is that now more families are going hungry when nobody should have to go hungry,” said spokesperson Michael Pulley.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington and Erica Stapleton in Phoenix; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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