One year after Trump signed Juan Ciscomani and Eli Crane’s Big, Ugly Bill into law, Arizonans are reeling from the impacts.
New reporting from the Washington Post details how “the number of Arizonans on food stamps has plummeted by half — a loss of nearly 500,000 people, including about 200,000 children” after Republicans gut SNAP to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Experts interviewed by the Post say many of these Arizonans qualify for help and were wrongfully removed.
Unlike Ciscomani and Crane, Democrats JoAnna Mendoza and Jonathan Nez want to lower costs for families – not make it harder for Arizonans to get by.
DCCC Spokesperson Lindsay Reilly:
“Juan Ciscomani and Eli Crane cast decisive votes to gut food assistance programs at a time when Arizonans are already struggling to make ends meet. Ciscomani and Crane’s decision to rip food off the tables of hardworking families and innocent children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires is disqualifying. Voters will hold them accountable in November.”
Washington Post: Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill has cut food assistance for millions of Americans
- Even people eligible for government help were swept up in the strict implementation, analysts say, as an agency already operating on thinner staff struggled to process cases.
- One year after Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tightened eligibility for food aid and pushed states to do more screening, Arizona is a striking example of how those changes — and the bureaucratic fallout — may have hurt Americans who qualified for aid.
- The number of Arizonans on food stamps has plummeted by half — a loss of nearly 500,000 people, including about 200,000 children, according to the latest available state data.
- Democrats are making the SNAP fallout a campaign issue, saying Americans facing inflation should not lose their benefits, too.
- “SNAP and a lot of these benefits are not handouts — they’re hand-ups to people that are struggling in this tough economy,” said Jonathan Nez, a Democratic House candidate who hopes to flip a red-leaning district in Arizona.
- JoAnna Mendoza, another Arizona Democrat looking to flip a closely contested House seat, said one food bank told her about nurses showing up in their scrubs to stand in line for aid — a sign of the broad range of people who are struggling.
- The issue is personal for Mendoza, who talks about growing up on food stamps.
- “There’s a long laundry list of things that are just making life impossible for folks, and food insecurity is just the top of that,” she said.
- Flowers, the mother of four who struggled to get benefits, said she didn’t vote in 2024, dissatisfied with her options. But this year she plans to cast a ballot and predicted that SNAP “definitely will factor into it.”
- Food banks are now serving more people in Arizona than SNAP, according to data collected by the Arizona Food Bank Network — a first in their decade-plus of tracking, said the group’s executive vice president, Terri Shoemaker.
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