What It Really Means for a State to Walk Away from SNAP

Four million. That number was sitting in front of me on the morning of the Fourth of July 2026 when I started thinking about what I actually wanted to say about the state of food assistance in this country. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, four million people had already lost food assistance since July 2025, when Congress passed the budget reconciliation law that restructured the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Four million people is not an abstraction. It is 4 million fewer grocery receipts, 4 million fewer meals a day accounted for, 4 million households trying to figure out where the rest of the month goes.

What I want to focus on here is not only the individual losses, though they are the point of all of this. It is the institutional question that stays with me. The American Public Human Services Association surveyed state SNAP administrators earlier this year, and among the 39 states that responded, roughly 11 percent said they may need to withdraw or pause the program entirely if the new costs become too heavy to carry. That figure does not generate the kind of attention it deserves, partly because no state has ever actually done it. But it describes a threshold that has never existed before in the six decades since SNAP began operating as a federal program.

What the New Federal Law Changed, and When

The legislation is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in July 2025 and arrived with two structural changes that affect SNAP on separate timelines.

The first change took effect October 1, 2026. The federal government’s share of SNAP administrative costs dropped from 50 percent to 25 percent. States that had always split those operational expenses equally with the federal government now absorb 75 percent of them. That shift landed immediately on state human services departments that were already managing staffing shortages and technology gaps from years of underfunding.

The second change is structurally larger. Starting October 1, 2027, the opening of federal fiscal year 2028, most states will owe a share of SNAP food benefit costs. This is the first time in the program’s history that states have been asked to pay for any portion of the benefits themselves. The federal government covered 100 percent of food benefit costs from the program’s beginning in 1964. Under the new structure, a state’s share is calculated using its payment error rate. States with error rates below 6 percent owe nothing. Those with rates between 6 and 8 percent pay 5 percent of benefit costs. Between 8 and 10 percent, the share rises to 10 percent. Above 10 percent, states owe 15 percent. The Food Research and Action Center estimates the combined national obligation at roughly $9 billion once the benefit cost structure takes full effect.

The APHSA Survey and What the 11 Percent Actually Represents

When the American Public Human Services Association ran its survey of 39 state administrators, 29 percent said they were considering narrowing eligibility criteria to reduce their error rate exposure and the costs that follow from it. Eleven percent went a step further, identifying withdrawal or temporary suspension as a real risk if the financial pressure becomes unmanageable.

That 11 percent number is not a policy position or a formal announcement. It is a candid answer to a direct question from a professional association asking people who actually run these programs what they are looking at in their budget projections. The APHSA’s director of policy and government relations described the situation publicly as an existential crisis for the program’s future. That is a specific phrase from a professional who works inside the machinery of state human services administration and is not inclined toward dramatic language.

What withdrawal actually looks like mechanically is worth explaining, because withdrawal from SNAP is not a simple procedural step. The Food and Nutrition Act, the legal foundation of the program, allows states to participate; it does not compel them to remain. A state that chose to exit would need its legislature to decline the appropriation of matching funds and would need to formally notify the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration of its intent. No state has done this. The closest parallel is what several states did with the Summer EBT program, a smaller benefit that some states opted out of rather than build new administrative systems to manage it. SNAP is orders of magnitude larger, and a state exit from SNAP would be a categorically different action with consequences that reach through every corner of the food system, not just the program’s caseload.

What the Numbers Mean for Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania’s SNAP payment error rates were 12.5 percent in 2022 and rose to 15 percent in 2023. Both figures place Pennsylvania at the maximum tier of the new benefit cost structure, which would require the state to pay 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs beginning in FY2028. An analysis from the Pennsylvania Policy Center found that a 10 percent match alone would cost the state roughly $427 million annually, equivalent to one and a half times what Pennsylvania spends on community colleges in a given year. At the 15 percent tier, the annual cost approaches $1 billion.

The scale of that obligation lands in a state that already carries a significant structural budget gap. And it lands on a program that covers roughly two million Pennsylvania residents. WHYY has reported that nearly 472,000 of those recipients live in Philadelphia, approximately 30 percent of the city’s population. Across Philadelphia and its collar counties, the number reaches 685,000. Beyond the new benefit cost question, changes to work requirements that took effect in 2025 are already projected to remove up to 45,000 Philadelphians from the program and 144,000 Pennsylvanians statewide. Those are ongoing losses that the new financial obligation would compound, not replace.

SNAP Is Not a Supplement. It Is the Architecture.

The policy conversation around SNAP tends to treat it as a benefit sitting on top of a food system, something that assists people who cannot quite afford to participate in markets that would function without them. That is not how it actually works in the neighborhoods where I do this work.

Grocery stores in Kensington, West Philadelphia, and North Philadelphia calculate their ordering and staffing around SNAP payment cycles. Corner markets price their inventory in part around the customers who come in at the beginning of the month, when benefits reload. Food vendors at neighborhood markets depend on SNAP transactions for a significant portion of their revenue. The distribution architecture of food in those neighborhoods was built to function with SNAP volume running through it. When that volume drops sharply or disappears, the adjustment is not marginal. It affects whether those stores can stay open, and it affects what the people who depend on them actually eat.

Feed Philly Coalition and the broader network of food banks and community organizations were designed to cover what SNAP leaves uncovered: the short weeks at the end of the month, the households that fall just outside eligibility, the emergency situations. They were never designed to absorb the function of SNAP itself. The moment a state limits eligibility sharply or exits the program, no network of coalitions and food banks fills that gap. The math does not scale that way, and the infrastructure was never built for that purpose.

What We Are Watching From Philadelphia

Through my work with Feed Philly Coalition and as a Senior Fellow for Food Economy and Policy at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, I spend time with people who plan food access at the institutional level. The Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force spent much of the past year documenting how interconnected the city’s food systems are, and how quickly the load shifts onto emergency networks when one layer of that system contracts.

I do not think Pennsylvania will exit SNAP. The political and institutional barriers to doing so are substantial, and the human consequences would land in ways that elected officials would have to account for. But I am watching every eligibility decision between now and October 2027, because the path to a lighter program does not require a formal exit. It runs through tightened certification standards, narrowed eligibility categories, and administrative changes that reduce caseloads without announcing them as reductions. That process is already underway in the work requirement changes that took effect last year. The next eighteen months of state budget deliberations will tell a lot about which direction Pennsylvania chooses.

The question is not whether we can replace SNAP if it contracts. The question is which families in which neighborhoods feel it first, and whether the people making those budget decisions understand what they are actually deciding.

Sources and references

• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, SNAP Tracker: People Are Losing Food Assistance
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, States’ First-Ever Bill for SNAP Benefits Could Cost Billions
• American Public Human Services Association
• Food Research and Action Center, Shifting the Burden: How the Reconciliation Package Reshapes SNAP
• Congressional Research Service, SNAP overview in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress.gov
• USDA Food and Nutrition Administration, Federal Register on administrative cost sharing changes
• Pennsylvania Policy Center, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Threat to SNAP in Pennsylvania
• WHYY, SNAP funding delay and Philadelphia impact
• Feed Philly Coalition
• Economy League of Greater Philadelphia