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Welcome to this week’s edition of Receipts. Let’s start with some good news: Last week I wrote about the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the global ocean-monitoring system, which is used by hurricane trackers, climate researchers, fisheries, the military, and so on. Pulling it out of the water, as the Trump administration announced it would do, would be a colossally stupid idea, especially just ahead of hurricane season. Well, on Thursday, the administration backed down, thanks to loud, bipartisan criticism.
Huzzah! It’s important to celebrate the wins, and to remember that public attention and pushback can work.
Now to less good things: Hunger. It’s getting worse. Partly because food is getting more expensive, and partly because the Trump administration is ripping food stamps out of the hands of babes. Seriously.
Finally, it’s almost Father’s Day. And for this Father’s Day, let me make a suggestion: Dad doesn’t need more news; he needs less of the wrong kind of news. The kind where everyone’s yelling and you can’t tell if you’re being informed or just worked up. Well, a Bulwark+ membership is the antidote to all that: clear, honest coverage that tells him what’s actually happening and lets him decide how to feel about it. This Father’s Day, give him that. (Also: Hi, Dad! I know you’re already a loyal member.)
–Catherine
P.S. – Programming note: I’ll be on with JVL today for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern on YouTube or Substack. I hope you’ll tune in!
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Hunger Crisis
His solution to the food affordability crisis is to cut programs that help people afford food.
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AROUND THE COUNTRY, food prices are surging, and Americans are going hungry. They’re about to get hungrier, too, given that we’ve begun the steepest decline in food-stamp enrollment in decades.
Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed almost exactly a year ago, siphoned more than $1 trillion out of federal safety-net programs to offset his regressive tax cuts. The legislation’s Medicaid cuts got the lion’s share of public attention, but the cuts to food assistance were also enormous. Spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. SNAP) will fall by nearly 20 percent over the coming decade. And unlike the Medicaid rollback, much of which was strategically delayed to begin after the midterms, the SNAP purge is already in full swing.
In the eight months following the law’s enactment, SNAP enrollment plummeted by 4.7 million, according to data released this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And so far, children appear to be the biggest victims, despite Republicans’ pledges that their SNAP “reform” would ensure the program works better for the “most vulnerable among us, including children.”
Not all states break out SNAP participation by age, but in the twelve states that do, enrollment of kids fell by at least 776,000, according to calculations from ProPublica.
Some states were especially bad.
In Massachusetts, a state normally associated with maximizing safety-net coverage, children’s food-stamp enrollment has plunged by nearly a fifth. The commonwealth’s benefits office has struggled to meet OBBB’s new bureaucratic requirements for SNAP, and has coped by just . . . not answering applicants’ phone calls. Over in Arizona, which is also struggling with the new OBBB-forced paperwork, less than half as many kids are receiving SNAP today as there were when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed.
One might see needy children getting less food assistance as a horrifying outcome. But the Trump administration has sold all this as a success story.
Those