While the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have taken a backseat after Elon Musk’s departure, the slow and steady work of cleaning up government continues to advance one agency decision at a time. New data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are down 10% since President Trump took office, declining 4.3 million from January 2025 (42.8 million) to January 2026 (38.5 million), the most recent month for which data are available.

Many commentators connect this decline directly to expanded work requirements for SNAP, which Congress passed last summer as part of the Big Beautiful Bill (H.R. 1). Previously, to qualify for SNAP, able-bodied adults ages 18-54 without children under 18 were required to work, volunteer, or participate in work training programs for 80 hours a month, but the system was also rife with exceptions. H.R. 1 cut back on exceptions and expanded the work requirement to able-bodied adults ages 18-64 without children under 14.

This policy change is consistent with biblical wisdom. Paul counseled the church in Thessalonica, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). The principle does not condemn those who are too poor or disabled to perpetual hunger. But it does recognize that the prospect of hunger is a powerful motivator to those who can work and provide for themselves, but who are lazy and would mooch a living off of others if given the chance.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated these policy changes would result in approximately 2.4 million fewer SNAP beneficiaries and save $68.6 billion over a decade.

Strikingly, as states (who administer SNAP) began to implement the new federal requirements, the number of enrollees dropped nearly twice as far as the CBO estimated.

The magnitude of the decline has provoked alarm among the expert class. Syracuse University professor Colleen Heflin predicted, “We should expect to see a surge in food insecurity and its related negative consequences at new levels.”

Such a comment reflects the assumption that the people no longer receiving SNAP benefits have no other means of providing food for themselves. As University of Chicago professor Bruce Meyer said, “most of the people who are getting food stamps are needy. When you’re cutting that many people, you’re probably cutting into some people who really do need the benefits.”

But the reality is that most (90%) of the people who were getting food stamps … are still getting food stamps. And the closer the decline in food stamp enrollment is connected to expanding work requirements to able-bodied adults without young children at home, the more ridiculous it is to suggest that the people losing SNAP benefits have no other means to provide for themselves.

For her part, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has contended that the decline in SNAP enrollment is due both to the department’s efforts to eliminate fraud and to improving economic conditions that help people rise out of poverty.

Neither contention is a slam-dunk argument. University of Connecticut professor Caitlin Caspi responded, “I don’t see any evidence supporting a significant reduction in fraud as a driver of what we’re seeing as far as declining SNAP participation,” pointing to the fact that only 41,476 people (just under 1%) were disqualified from SNAP for fraud in 2023, the latest year for which data are available. Of course, the Trump administration would retort that fraud was far more widespread but went unchecked until now; that is a reasonable position but one that would take significant documentation to verify.

The other contention is far more suspect. Amid persistently high food prices and poor job growth, the contention that millions of Americans got off of food stamps by becoming upwardly mobile sounds like a description of another decade’s economy.

The raw data show a far more complicated story than either the Trump administration or its critics suggest. Over the past few years, the number of SNAP beneficiaries has fluctuated between 39 million and 43 million, without major policy changes to explain the swings. In August 2024, there were 42.2 million SNAP beneficiaries. The next month, in September 2024, that number had declined 7% to 39.2 million. Two months later, in November 2024, SNAP beneficiaries were back up to 43.0 million.

Think back to the late summer and fall of 2024 (the Trump vs. Harris electoral sprint). Was anyone sounding the alarm about a sudden decline in SNAP beneficiaries? Was anyone using the figure to take credit for a better economy? Was there even a remote policy explanation — either for the decline in recipients or sudden rebound? Perhaps readers have a surer memory, but the mental query of yours truly is returning a blank page of results.

The simplest inference, then, is that any number of factors can cause the number of SNAP beneficiaries to fluctuate by several million people without necessarily having a pressing policy explanation. The variation over 2025 was slightly larger than that in late 2024, but it was in the same ballpark. If the changes in 2024 were not worthy of a grand narrative, the changes from January 2025 from January 2026 are not much worthier.

For the sake of argument, however, let us grant that there might be some government-related explanation for at least part of the recent 10% decline in the number of SNAP beneficiaries. If there were such an explanation, what would it be?

An analysis published last week by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) exhorts us to look further back to gain greater perspective.

SNAP “has grown substantially over the past 25 years, with participation rising from about 17 million people in 2000 to roughly 40 million today,” writes AEI senior fellow Angela Rachidi. “Even accounting for population growth, SNAP reaches far more people under current conditions than past years — from approximately 6 percent of the US population in 2000 to roughly 12 percent in 2025.”

The most important change came about during COVID. “When the pandemic began in early 2020, the SNAP caseload rose from about 37 million people to 43 million, reflecting increased unemployment, temporary policy changes, and administrative disruptions,” Rachidi continued. “However, the SNAP caseload never returned to pre-pandemic levels even after the unemployment rate returned to low levels and pandemic disruptions had largely ended.”

“The sustained SNAP increase coincided with several policy decisions,” she added, “including waiving work requirements, temporarily increasing benefits through September 2021, and a permanent increase in the maximum benefit in October 2021.”

Last summer, H.R. 1 repealed some of these COVID-era policies, but “the number of SNAP recipients remains above pre-pandemic levels,” Rachidi wrote.

Her conclusion then, is that the SNAP program is still running on an inflated, COVID-era benchmark, and the recent declines in the program are merely an attempt to squeeze out the COVID-related government largesse.

Those who decry this decline as a way to starve poor people either have not thought backward more than six years, or they happily accept COVID-era levels of stimulus spending as a “new-normal” baseline — and they expect you to happily accept it, too.

Of course, many Americans understand that the COVID-era spending spree was both entirely unsustainable and the cause of much of the inflation from which Americans have suffered since. Before COVID hit, the U.S. economy was chugging along nicely, with growing wages and jobs but low unemployment and inflation. Economically speaking, an honest effort to return American government to pre-COVID policies should be welcomed by all.