WASHINGTON/PHOENIX, Arizona: When Angelica Garcia tried to renew her food stamps this spring, she said she thought she knew the drill.
The single mother of three in Tucson filled out the application. She repeatedly called Arizona’s Department of Economic Security, the state agency administering the federal aid, often staying on hold until the line dropped. She visited a thinly staffed DES office and waited hours for a caseworker.
By the time Garcia was reapproved in June, she’d missed two months of benefits while her family got by on food-pantry donations and cheap staples like beans, rice and tortillas.
“There’s hoops to jump through — always,” said Garcia, who has used food stamps in the state for three years. But now the government is “adding more hoops.” More than 4.7 million people nationwide have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme benefits, also known as food stamps, since President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending law took effect last July, according to data through March from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — about 11 per cent of participants.
Nowhere have the changes to America’s second-largest social safety-net programme taken hold as rapidly as in Arizona, where the number of SNAP recipients has fallen by about half, the steepest drop in the country.
That means lost benefits for more than 457,000 Arizonans, including nearly 196,000 children, according to DES data as of the end of May. The law reduces SNAP funding by $187 billion, or about 17 per cent, over the next 10 years, in part by expanding work requirements and barring some immigrants from receiving benefits. It also imposes penalties on states that fail to meet certain performance standards beginning in October next year. And it shifts more administrative costs onto states. Among the reasons enrollment has fallen so steeply in Arizona is that the state has moved to implement the federal changes more quickly than other states, according to two SNAP experts and the DES spokesperson, Brett Bezio. “Arizona has no choice but to meet these requirements,” Liliana Soto, press secretary for Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, said in an email. “If we don’t comply, we will be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and more vulnerable Arizonans will lose their food assistance.” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the SNAP overhaul “prioritizes American citizens, and implements reasonable cost-sharing measures with states to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse,” without offering examples.
The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration, which administers SNAP, attributed the decline in enrollment in part to the work requirement changes.
The SNAP cuts have driven a record number of people to food banks in Arizona, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network, a statewide organization that works with local pantries.
About 843,000 Arizonans sought support from a food pantry in April, about an 8 per cent increase over 779,000 in April 2025 — and surpassing the number of people receiving SNAP, according to AFBN data. Food bank users fell in May to about 790,000, the data show. Even so, food pantries are scrambling to fill “a massive gap,” said Terri Shoemaker, executive vice president of the AFBN.
DES and the USDA did not comment on the increase in food-bank use. Myriam Flores, a mother of seven in Phoenix, said in a May interview she was unable to renew her access to SNAP and lost $1,100 a month in benefits in January.
She said she spent hours on hold with Arizona’s DES, only for calls to drop. At the time of her interview, she said she visits the St. Vincent de Paul pantry in Phoenix nearly every day so she can feed her children. “There are nights of crying, nights of not sleeping, when I lose sleep at 2 am doing the math, deciding what to pay for and what to put off,” she said.
Reuters could not determine whether Flores has resumed her efforts to get benefits or whether she’s currently eligible. Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the longer wait times are partly the result of stricter processes for vetting applicants, introduced by Arizona’s state agency to meet the new performance standards and avoid financial penalties.
“They can’t get through on the overloaded phone line, or they’re being asked for more and more paperwork that they can’t provide, or they do provide it but the state doesn’t have capacity to process it,” she said. Those standards grew out of the state’s SNAP error rate — a measure of overpayments and underpayments of food stamp benefits.
