Could Project 2025 Leave Families Hungry? The Truth About SNAP and Government Shutdowns
As talk of a government shutdown grows louder, many Americans are asking how programs like SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—could be affected. Some have connected these funding threats to Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda that calls for major changes to federal safety-net programs.
While the project doesn’t explicitly promote shutting down the government, it does outline plans to restrict SNAP eligibility and reduce benefits. In this post, we’ll unpack what Project 2025 actually says about food assistance, what’s happening with SNAP funding right now, and what these developments could mean for families across the country.
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| Food is essential to everyone. |
✅ What Project 2025 proposes regarding SNAP and welfare
According to multiple analyses:
• Project 2025 (a policy roadmap put forward by some conservative groups) calls for making it harder to qualify for SNAP — for example by tightening eligibility, increasing work-requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, reducing state flexibility, and rolling back updates to benefit levels.
• Some specific proposals include eliminating “categorical eligibility” (which currently allows states to extend eligibility beyond a narrower federal baseline) for SNAP.
• It also suggests rolling back the 2021 update to the “Thrifty Food Plan” (which increased SNAP benefit amounts) so that benefit levels don’t keep pace with food costs.
• The agenda also links these reforms to broader goals of shrinking or restructuring the federal safety net, and shifting more responsibility and cost to states.
So yes — the plan includes major changes and reductions in SNAP eligibility, benefit levels, and federal structure.
What it doesn’t explicitly say
• Project 2025 does not, in its published documents that I found, explicitly call for a government shutdown as a strategy for cutting SNAP. The idea of shutting down federal government agencies to force cuts is a different tactic than what the agenda outlines.
• The proposals are more about policy reform (eligibility, work-requirements, benefit formulas, shifting cost) rather than simply “shut everything down and stop food aid.”
• While government shutdowns naturally affect SNAP funding (because when Congress fails to appropriate funds, SNAP benefits may be delayed) — a shutdown is more an operational outcome of funding failure, not a stated policy objective in the Project 2025 agenda as described in the sources.
🔍 Why this matters
• Cutting SNAP eligibility or benefits can affect millions of low-income individuals and families; analyses warn of increased food insecurity and poverty if such policies are implemented.
• If a government shutdown (or failure to pass appropriations) occurs alongside these policy changes, the result could be abrupt disruptions to benefits rather than gradual policy implementation — which poses additional risks and uncertainty.
Chicken stew isn't looking so bad. It's better than no stew!
