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US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins bragged on Tuesday that the Trump administration has now “moved 5 million people off food stamps,” an outcome that she hailed as a significant victory even amid mounting reports of families with children struggling to afford groceries after losing federal assistance.
“For those of us that love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win,” Rollins said during an event in Minnesota, referring to the massive reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) enrollment since passage of the 2025 Republican budget law, which enacted the largest food aid cuts in US history and expanded SNAP work requirements.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal think tank, has estimated that more than 4.5 million people have lost SNAP benefits since President Donald Trump signed the GOP budget package into law last summer. That total includes at least 1.5 million children.
Contrary to Rollins’ claim that people are moving off SNAP because they found strong employment, CBPP noted in a recent analysis that “unemployment nationwide has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025.”
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“At best, it’s down in 13 states and the District of Columbia by less than 1 percentage point,” the think tank observed. “It’s very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline in SNAP participation.”
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, responded to Rollins’ latest boast about large-scale loss of SNAP benefits by pointing to a July New York Times story featuring Dee McDonald, a cancer survivor and caregiver of three kids who recently lost federal assistance.
“The immense hardship these families are now facing is not, in fact, ‘a pretty big win,’” Bergh wrote on social media.
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