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45 million Americans rely on food stamps. Trump wants to gut the program.

The administration’s budget proposal would cut SNAP spending by a quarter.

By Julia Belluz@juliaoftoronto  Updated May 25, 2017, 10:47am EDT

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One oft-repeated Republicans line is that benefits like SNAP discourage people from working. But according to the researchers who study SNAP, there’s no good evidence of that. Instead, its been shown to improve health outcomes, reduce poverty, and fight hunger.

Trump’s new budget proposal has been panned for its magical thinking on economic growth and sloppy accounting errors.

One of the big cuts proposed would also take a sledgehammer to a safety net program that’s been remarkably effective.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been helping keep Americans from going hungry since the 1960s. Formerly known as food stamps, the program began as a pilot under President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as part of the war on poverty. Today, SNAP is the biggest and most important nutrition assistance program: About 45 million Americans living below the poverty line — nearly half of them children — rely on SNAP to purchase food.

If Trump had his way, though, the number of SNAP recipients would soon be drastically cut. The administration’s first comprehensive budget proposal would trim SNAP spending by $191 billion over the next decade — which is about a quarter of the program’s funding. (The program costs the federal government $80 billion a year, which is a large amount of money — but a relatively small fraction of the budget.)

This move shouldn’t come as a major shock. Republican leaders like Mick Mulvaney and Paul Ryan have long viewed welfare programs like food stamps as ineffective, arguing that they discourage people in need from getting jobs. As Mulvaney said at a White House briefing on Monday, “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” referring to stricter employment requirements the administration wants to add to SNAP.

So is SNAP actually ineffective? It’s a well-explored question. A number of major studies have evaluated the program’s impact, and they consistently show that SNAP delivers results on a range of problems, from improving health outcomes like diabetes to reducing the number of people who go hungry.

In fact, researchers who study poverty and food policy say throwing people off SNAP is a silly idea because it’s one of the government programs that really works. As the Trump Administration’s own Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said earlier this week of SNAP, “You don’t try to fix things that aren’t broken.”

The research on food stamps impact is very positive — and not just on hunger

SNAP is administered by the states, and low-income people who meet the eligibility criteria get access to “Electronic Benefits Transfer” cards (which are essentially debit cards) with money that they can use to purchase food. The lower your income, the more benefit you get (up to a monthly maximum of $194 per month for individuals and $771 for a family of five).

SNAP benefits by household size

So let’s start with the low-hanging fruit: Does this system actually help people buy food and reduce the chances that they’ll go hungry?

When researchers have looked at SNAP’s effects on food insecurity (having too little or uncertain access to food), they’ve found consistently positive effects. In a 2012 paper, researchers found SNAP cut the prevalence of food insecurity by at least 13 percentage points. In another 2013 study, researchers found exactly the same reduction in food insecurity when they studied variation in state-level policies that affect access to SNAP. Other studies have found the same association between SNAP participation and a decreased risk of food insecurity, albeit by varying amounts.

SNAP has proven health benefits throughout life:

But the program’s effects have been shown to be broader than simply helping people buy food when they can’t afford it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, food stamps were rolled out in different counties at different times — and researchers have used this variation as a natural experiment to examine the health impacts of SNAP. From improving birth weight to reducing obesity, food stamps were associated with a number of positive health effects.

Exposure to Food Stamps and Long-Term Health

In one paper, published in 2011 in the Review of Economics and Statistics, researchers found that SNAP decreased the risk of having babies who weigh too little — a health outcome that’s associated with a slew of complications, from breathing and neurological problems to infection. Specifically, the researchers found that pregnant moms who began getting food stamps three months before their deliveries had babies with healthier weights compared to the children of moms who didn’t get SNAP. (The effect was particularly pronounced among black moms living in high-poverty areas.)

In a 2016 paper, in the American Economic Review, researchers used the same county-level roll-out variation to see if they could find a link between access to food stamps early in life and health outcomes later. Here too they found SNAP was effective: “Access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood.” (There’s a growing body of evidence linking food insecurity to obesity — particularly among women — which helps explain this finding.)

SNAP lifts families out of poverty:

In 2012 SNAP lifted 10 million people out of poverty, an impact equivalent to the combined EITC and child tax credit.