“I agree that every Virginian should have access to healthy and nutritious foods regardless of their income,” says Congressman John McGuire. “Food is medicine, and like I always say, you can’t exercise your way out of bad nutrition.”
McGuire says the tax cuts in HR1, the Republican budget bill he voted for in May 2025, will “help families keep more money in their pockets and food in the pantry.” And he takes credit for voting to “fully fund SNAP,” the federal food aid program, in a recent appropriations bill.
But while HR1 doesn’t technically cut food aid funding, the bill weakens the program in multiple crucial ways. It prevents the already meager reimbursements families received under SNAP from growing with inflation. It shifts a much larger chunk of the costs of food aid from the federal government onto the states. And it aims to drive more people out of the program by expanding work requirements and red tape.
The Virginia Department of Social Services says that in VA-5, 48,237 households received food aid in 2025. By January 2026, when most of HR1’s changes had begun to take effect, that number had fallen 9.8 percent to 43,533. The average SNAP benefit per household in Virginia is $324 per month.
As SNAP enrollments shrink, local agencies say food insecurity is on the rise. “In the past year, we’ve had about a 12 percent growth in the number of individuals coming to us for food,” says Jane Colony Mills, executive director of Charlottesville’s Loaves & Fishes food pantry. In 2025, the pantry provided food for nearly 24,000 people—45 percent greater demand than 2024. “That’s a dramatic increase from prior years, when we were giving out far less food,” Mills says.
“People who come to us already don’t receive enough SNAP benefits to feed themselves for an entire month,” she says. “That’s why food pantries exist. … So we get people who have their SNAP benefits, who spend them the first two weeks of the month, and then come to us for the second two weeks.”
Not cuts, but caps
Only the poor can receive SNAP. To qualify, families must show a gross monthly income at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line. That’s $3,575 for a family of four, or $1,729 for a single person. Applicants’ net income—whatever’s left over after paying their bills—must come in at or below 100 percent of the poverty line ($1,330 a month for individuals, or $2,750 for a family of four).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates the minimum cost of “a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” via its Thrifty Food Plan. It uses a hypothetical family of four—an adult woman and man and two elementary school-aged kids—as its benchmark. As of January 2026, the USDA estimated it would cost $1,000.20 to feed this family for a month. That works out to $2.77 per person, per meal, per day. Even before you factor in HR1’s changes, this number already poses two significant problems.
First, while the Thrifty Food Plan’s dollar amounts have risen over time, they still lag inflation. From June 2021 (when the plan received a major update to account for higher food expenses) to January 2026, the benchmark family cost rose 19.7 percent. But the Consumer Price Index for food increased 24.9 percent over the same period.
Second, the Thrifty Food Plan doesn’t account for local differences in how much food costs. As of December 2024, a “modestly priced meal” cost $3.89 in Albemarle County and $4.71 in Charlottesville, according to data from the Urban Institute. Even using January 2026 SNAP amounts, that still means SNAP payments fall 40 percent and 70 percent short of covering recipients’ bare-bones grocery bills.
HR1 seems set to make these problems even worse. The bill’s text says the agriculture secretary can make annual “cost adjustments” to the Thrifty Food Plan based on inflation. But it then forbids the USDA from increasing the overall cost of the program, in spite of those adjustments. Prices may rise, but food aid will shrink. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2031, food aid will amount to $14 less per person, per month than it did in January 2025.
A lot off the top
Even as it squeezes benefits at the low end, HR1 also places new pressure on the states that help to fund SNAP programs. Since the program began, states and the federal government have split the costs of administering the program 50-50. HR1 shifts that balance, making states pay 75 percent. According to the Virginia Department of Social Services, that means Virginia must add $93 million to its budget just to keep operations at their current level.
The federal government has also traditionally provided all the funds sent to SNAP recipients for food aid. Now, if states guess wrong when deciding who is and isn’t eligible to receive aid, HR1 makes them literally pay for it. The higher a state’s payment error rate, the more the federal share of those SNAP payments gets shifted to states. In 2024, Virginia posted SNAP error rates of 11.5 percent, slightly above the national average of 10.93 percent. VDSS says these costs could amount to another $270,000 annually.
These new expenses, plus the other costs that HR1 shifts to states, will strain Virginia’s ability to improve how it administers the program. VDSS says the cuts mean worse customer service, heavier workloads for agency employees, and a greater struggle to hire and retain social service workers.
And if service deteriorates, and local agencies grow more overwhelmed, more people who would otherwise receive SNAP benefits could face steeper barriers. A 2023 paper on food aid enrollments found that getting the right help from caseworkers played a major role in whether people could successfully sign up for SNAP.
“I think that some of the changes in eligibility and the increased need for verifications, inherently that’s going to make it more difficult to enroll in benefits,” says Leon Henry, Charlottesville’s director of social services. “In the past, my understanding is that it would be acceptable to go off a client’s statement, but now the requirement is that we actually verify documents. … If people aren’t aware of what they need to do, then it’s going to be more likely that they’re not going to be able to meet the deadlines and guidelines for the eligibility purposes.”
Make them work for it
Before HR1, SNAP already enforced strict work requirements. Recipients ages 18-54 had to show they worked 20 hours a week or more, with certain exceptions. Looking for a job doesn’t count as working, though unpaid work and volunteer hours do. Unless they report enough work, people can only receive three months of SNAP food aid within any given three-year period.
HR1 expands the demand for work requirements up to age 64. And it eliminates exceptions for many veterans; people experiencing homelessness; parents or caregivers of kids aged 14 to 18; and children up to age 24 who’ve aged out of the foster system.
During tough economic times, states could sometimes loosen those restrictions to let people who didn’t meet the requirements stay on SNAP longer. According to VDSS, HR1 tightens up those exceptions, meaning more people who don’t or can’t work will get cut off after three months.
CBO projections suggest that HR1’s restrictions could lead to a total of 2.4 million fewer people receiving SNAP aid in a typical month.
McGuire defends the stricter requirements as a way to dissuade laziness. “Only 28 percent of able-bodied adults on SNAP work,” he says, “and SNAP enrollment remains high even in a strong economy.” The congressman didn’t provide a source for that figure, which appears to misrepresent already distorted data. (We invited McGuire and his staff to respond to apparent factual errors or disputed data in his statements, but they declined.)
In 2023, the USDA reported that 28 percent of all households receiving SNAP—whether or not they contained able-bodied, working-age adults—reported earned income. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes a flaw in that information: It comes from a snapshot of SNAP users in a single month, rather than measuring the unstable or seasonal jobs those people might work over an entire year.
Census data provides a clearer look at whether SNAP recipients are working—or trying to. Nationwide, 80.1 percent of households receiving SNAP had at least one adult working in the last 12 months, according to 2024 census data; 35 percent had two or more. In VA-5, where more than 1 in 10 households reported receiving SNAP, 80.4 percent of households reported income.
In addition, “able-bodied” doesn’t always mean “healthy.” A 2025 report from The Hamilton Project notes that many recipients report health challenges and disabilities that make working more difficult, or impossible. “We see people here who are [64] and they are not physically capable of working,” says Mills.
In response, McGuire noted that “if anyone is truly not capable of working, whether because of a disability or medical issue, or because they are a caregiver, they will be exempt from the work requirement.”
The law does include exceptions for caregivers for the disabled, and for those “medically certified as physically or mentally unfit for employment.” But it doesn’t define what “medically certified” means or requires, or say how people are meant to get medically certified if, under the bill’s new restrictions on Medicaid and cuts to ACA subsidies, they can’t afford to see a doctor.
All this leads to a crucial question: Do work requirements spur SNAP recipients to get and keep jobs?
“The best evidence shows they do not increase employment,” the Hamilton Project report states, adding that work requirements don’t seem to make people work harder or earn more. “Moreover, this research finds work requirements cause a large decrease in participation in SNAP.”
To measure how work requirements affected SNAP enrollment, a 2023 paper in the American Journal of Economic Policy looked at data from Virginia between 2007 and 2015. Among able-bodied adults without dependents, work requirements reduced participation in the program by 53 percent; among all recipients, that figure rose to nearly 64 percent.
In contrast, simply being on SNAP appears to help people keep jobs and earn more. A 2023 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, revised in 2025, studied income and employment for SNAP recipients between 2011 and 2016. Though the data came from a single state, its profile of SNAP applicants matched that of the country as a whole. The authors found that SNAP recipients work lower-wage, more precarious jobs, and they have a much harder time working steady hours, even when they want to.
“We find no evidence that receiving SNAP leads to long-term reductions in labor supply or dependency on government benefits,” the authors concluded. “SNAP appears to act as
insurance against negative shocks and reduces earnings temporarily, but increases earnings
and the likelihood of work in the longer-run.”
McGuire does appear to be correct on one point: Food is health care. A 2020 paper found that food stamp recipients made less frequent visits to the doctor.
Food bank fears
Eddie Oliver, executive director of the Virginia Federation of Food Banks, says his agency has seen steady increases in demand for food aid since COVID-era assistance programs ended in 2023. “Last year it was about a 20 percent increase overall across the state,” he says. “We have a lot of folks that are coming to us for the first time. We have a lot of folks who are just not getting enough income to help them make ends meet.”
Oliver and Mills both say that while donations of food from local grocery stores have fallen, financial donations from community members have risen to help them meet demand. “We’re paying more for the food we buy, just like people are at the grocery store, and so that money isn’t going as far as it used to,” Oliver says. “So we have had to rely on greater donations from the community.”
“For every meal that a food bank provides in the United States, SNAP provides nine,” Oliver says. “So any cuts to that program are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for us to compensate for. That was the primary impact of HR1 … either diminishing benefits or cutting people off from the program entirely.”
SNAP recipients have to recertify every six months to keep receiving aid. “As people go through that six- and then 12-month review, I think you’re going to continue to see changes and increases in people losing benefits,” Mills says. HR1 is “unfortunately written the way policy is often written,” she says, “without considering the impact on real human beings.”
When asked about his plan to ensure that Virginians could access the food they need, McGuire says, “I wish I could snap my fingers and solve the problem, but our food system is so interconnected that we must take a methodical, whole-of-government approach to undo the damage. … These issues are always top of mind to me, and we are working many different angles to reduce taxes and make life more affordable for all Americans.”
“Nothing in HR1,” Oliver says, “is going to improve food security in Virginia.”
Next week: The 5th District has the fewest hospitals per square mile of any district in Virginia—and experts say McGuire’s HR1 vote could make care shortages worse.
