Parents, your SNAP benefits are at risk – except for stay at home moms

House Republicans’ sprawling domestic policy bill would force parents of children between the ages of 8 and 18 to work for nutritional benefits, but it includes a provision to ensure that married, stay-at-home parents continue to receive them.

The House Agriculture Committee released the legislative text for its part of the “One, Big Beautiful Bill” that Republicans hope to pass by the summer. Speaker Mike Johnson hopes to use the bill to extend the tax cuts President Donald Trump signed in 2017, ramp up spending on oil exploration and for immigration enforcement, particularly along the US-Mexico border.

Republicans in the House of Representativespassed a budget resolution on an almost exclusively-party line vote. The bill requires that they find $1.5 trillion worth of spending cuts to unlock $4.5 billion worth of tax cuts. If Republicans fail to find $2 trillion worth of savings, the amount of money left for tax cuts would be reduced by the difference between $2 trillion and the final number of spending cuts.

Accordingly, the resolution would assign various committees to find a designated number of spending accounts, including requiring the Agriculture Committee to find $230 billion worth of cuts.

Along with managing farms and the nation’s food supply, the Agriculture Committee also governs nutritional programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, known as SNAP, which replaced food stamps in 2008.

Similar to the Energy and Commerce Committee’s legislation that would impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients, the Agriculture Committee’s text expands work requirements for people who receive SNAP.

In particular, the bill increases the age for which able-bodied adults without dependent children must work to receive benefits from 54 to 64 years old, the year before many seniors become eligible for Social Security and Medicare.

In the same token, it also lowers the age for which children can be considered “dependent” from the age of 18 to younger than seven. That provision would mean that parents of children seven years old and older would fit the definition of able-bodied adults without dependents, and therefore require them to work.

But the bill also includes an exception for a person responsible for children older than seven “who is married and resides with an individual who complies with the SNAP work requirements.”

This comes as Trump and other Republicans encourage not only for Americans to have more children, but specifically, to incentivize one parent, usually women, to stay at home and care for children, as The New York Times reported on Monday.

In addition to those provisions, the legislation would also require that all states contribute 5 percent of the cost of SNAP allotments beginning in 2028 and that number increases based on the SNAP error rate.

“States with error rates of between 6 and 8 percent must contribute 15 percent,” a breakdown of the legislation from the committee said. “States with error rates of between 8 and 10 percent must contribute 20 percent; and States with error rates equal to or greater than 10 percent must contribute 25 percent.”

In the same respect, the legislation would force states to increase their share of the cost to administer SNAP from 50 percent to 75 percent.

Advocates argued that the provisions would be draconian.

“SNAP is a lifeline for over 42 million Americans, fueling health and opportunity, as well as the economy in every congressional district,” Crystal FitzSimons, the interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), said in a statement. “Slashing billions from SNAP would deepen hunger, increase poverty, and weaken communities. Instead of shifting costs to states – knowing that states cannot take these added costs on – and cutting SNAP, we must ensure access to the nutrition that everyone needs to thrive.”

The Agriculture Committee will hold its markup of the bill on Tuesday evening. The legislation represents one of the few chances for Republicans to enact major spending changes. But as of right now, Republicans in the House remain split between conservatives who argue the legislation does not cut enough, versus some frontline who fear cuts to Medicaid.