In July 2025, the federal government passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as CalFresh in California) and a shift towards state-based funding. This USDA program serves more than 40 million participants every month and is one of the largest anti-poverty programs in this country. (USDA Economic Research Service, 2025)

I recently had the opportunity to interview Hilary Hoynes, a professor of economics and public policy and a BFI-affiliated faculty, whose research focuses on the impact of social safety nets like SNAP, especially for low income families. I was hoping to understand how safety nets fit into the greater food system, what their impact is, and how SNAP will change in the coming years.

Hoynes’ research highlights both the short term and long term impacts of poverty reduction programs, not just for individual families, but for society as a whole. According to Hoynes, children in low income families with access to SNAP are more likely to go to college, have higher earnings in adulthood, and are less likely to be connected with the criminal justice system.

On March 18th, Hoynes joined a BFI Lunch & Learn webinar for an in-depth discussion on what these recent changes to SNAP mean for families and the future of California safety nets. 

Can you speak about the benefits of social safety nets for low-income families and how your research plays a part in understanding those benefits?

I study the broad range of social safety nets in the United States, particularly for lower income Americans and particularly for families with children. SNAP, our main food assistance program in America, is the second biggest anti-poverty program for Americans. 

SNAP is what I consider to be the fundamental safety net in America. The reason why is that many other safety nets are targeted at specific types of families. For example, the earned income tax credit is really a child-oriented family benefit credit. Social Security is targeted at elderly folks. There’s a lot of elements of SNAP that make it the broadest in terms of who is eligible. 

It’s not universal, but you can still have income up to and over the poverty line and be eligible for SNAP so there’s a lot of ways in which it is just catching a lot of people. Everybody buys food, and you can use your SNAP benefit to essentially buy anything in the grocery store and so what we’ve learned is that it functions much like cash. It’s not technically cash, but the fact that everybody needs to buy food and the fact that you can use it to buy any kind of food, it functions very similarly to cash. That’s really powerful for improving the circumstances and needs for families. 

We know that SNAP has a large impact on reducing food insecurity, which is not surprising, but still very important to demonstrate. It also leads to other kinds of improvements in the household. I’ve got some work that shows that when families get a little bit more generous SNAP, their children are less likely to be absent at school and more likely to keep up with a schedule of checkups with their doctor. It’s a little hard to see exactly how that food voucher leads to those improvements. We don’t think that children are in school more because they’re necessarily healthier because we don’t really see that in the short term.

There’s a lot of research that shows that when families are facing the resource stress of being poor, it’s very difficult to get through the basic activities of the day because your brain is focused on putting out that fire. There’s a lot of work that shows that when households have a bit more resources, things just seem to move more smoothly.

Your research has found that many social safety nets like SNAP have both immediate, short term impacts and long term benefits. Can you speak about how safety nets function to provide lasting welfare to families?

The improvements may not always be enormous in scale, but they’re measurable, statistically significant impacts that are very broad across a wide range of outcomes. And the way that I’m thinking about this is that this is good for these families, but additionally, it’s a way to explain the fact that governments get a return on the investment. The social safety net is an investment that society is making in these families and it pays returns in the long run. 

That is a very new idea that Americans haven’t really accepted yet. I think more European countries tend to think in this way and that’s not really been the mindset in the United States. I think that this work could maybe lead some to see these programs in a different light.

The work that I’ve done basically goes back in time to the beginning of the food stamp or SNAP program, which started in the mid 60s. It took about 15 years for food stamps to go from where it started to being available across the United States. We use that time rollout from the origins of the program to study people today. We are able to relate their economic wellbeing and health wellbeing today to where they grew up, and therefore when in their childhood SNAP became available to them. 

With the context of the Big Beautiful Bill, what does it mean to see a reduction in a lot of these safety net programs and where do you think the greatest impacts will be seen?

I will talk about this more in a BFI webinar I will be participating in, but essentially, the Big Beautiful Bill makes cutbacks to funding and access to SNAP, as well as Medicaid. There’s a couple of different ways that we’re quite concerned about people losing access to SNAP here and across the country. 

One way is that SNAP is expanding work requirements as part of the eligibility criteria.. When people face work requirements, they often end up getting kicked off the program, not necessarily because they’re not working and don’t meet the work requirements, but they can’t surmount the paperwork that is necessary to document that they meet the work requirements. We call these administrative burdens. 

For example, many participants may not be able to go to a meeting at their office at a certain time and bring the right documentation to fill out the right forms to prove they meet the work requirements. Maybe because of the nature of their job, they’re just not able to come into the office to satisfy the requirements. So, we have a lot of concern that folks that are eligible for SNAP, even under the new rules, are going to end up being cut off of the program. The California Department of Social Services is working hard to try to prevent that because we know from previous research that is a real concern.

The second element is that Cal Fresh, or SNAP nationally, is a federal program. It is paid for federally, and the benefits are the same all across America, which is interesting, because in some places, food costs a lot more than others. We live in a state where things tend to be more costly.

That aside, the Big Beautiful Bill also incorporates some cost shifting from the federal government to the state, and that will put pressure on the state to make up that difference. There’s a lot of questions about what that means. There’s both questions about who is going to end up getting cut from the program as well as what’s going to happen to the benefit levels in the program. 

As an economic advisor to Gov. Gavin Newsom, what can the role of state governments play in ensuring the existence of social safety programs? Is this a viable path for the future?

On the ballot is a one time only tax. The motivation for that tax, if you read the position of the folks who got it on the ballot, is this hole that the state is going to be in because of funding loss to CalFresh and Medicaid. 

The Big Beautiful Bill also did a lot of cutting to Medicaid and shifted costs to the state. Even for a big, rich state like California, these costs that the federal government has been paying for are very large from the perspective of a state taking it over. One of the motivations for that wealth tax, in terms of how it’s being marketed, is to raise money to fill the gap for these federal programs that are currently being disinvested by the federal government. But the bottom line is, we need more revenue in the state if we’re going to fill the gap. Right now, we don’t have the revenue to make up that difference. 

What is the real world experience for people who are losing these benefits? 

One of the things that they did in the Big Beautiful Bill was they postponed some of these changes because they didn’t want it to create problems for the midterm elections this fall. So, some of this is going to roll out over a longer period of time.

The federal government has paid the costs of these SNAP benefits, but the state has always been in charge of determining eligibility, implementing, and administering the program.