In her 20 years running a food bank in Auxier, a tiny town of several hundred nestled in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, Gail Goble has never seen demand as high as it is now.
The Hand in Hand Ministries food bank serves roughly 150 people in the town and surrounding area of Floyd County who come in once a month for a grocery cart full of canned goods, bread, meat and toiletries.
“They’re here every month, so they depend on it,” Goble said. “And a lot of them come and they’ll say ‘well, I’m completely out of food.’”
The Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky is especially dependent on food assistance. At least a quarter of the population in more than a dozen counties in the region are on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, according to a Kentucky Public Radio analysis of federal data.
The demand is not just spurred by the rising cost of groceries, but a second round of devastating flooding following the historic regional floods of 2022, she said.
“They need everything, because they lost everything,” Goble said. “They lost their medicines, they lost their food, they lost their refrigerators… so there's been a great need for that.”
Goble says many of the people they serve are already enrolled in SNAP, but still need the food bank to supplement their family’s groceries. Others they serve have slipped through the cracks and aren’t eligible for the program.
Eastern Kentucky families who were already struggling under inflationary pressure and repeated natural disasters are now contemplating a new threat — a bill estimated to cut hundreds of billions in SNAP benefits over the next decade and drop millions from enrollment.
Under the reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House last month — dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by President Donald Trump and its supporters — states would now be required to pick up a large part of the tab for SNAP benefits and a larger portion of administrative costs.
As a result, Kentucky would have to fill a $239 million hole in its annual budget to maintain benefits for the 13% of residents enrolled in the program, or nearly 576,000 people, according to progressive think tank Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. An early Senate version of the bill would make a cut of nearly half that amount, but add more stringent work reporting requirements that could drop the state’s enrollment.
If Kentucky lawmakers choose not to fill this SNAP funding hole in future state budgets amid forecasts of declining tax revenue, they would be forced to either drop many Kentuckians from food assistance benefits or reduce benefits for everyone. With the Republican supermajority in Frankfort focused on reducing spending and cutting taxes, that could be a heavy lift.
GOP Rep. Hal Rogers, who has represented most of eastern Kentucky for more than four decades, voted for the House bill and has not publicly addressed its SNAP cuts. In his district, 22% of households are receiving SNAP benefits. Republican supporters argue these measures are needed in order to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the system.
Goble of Hand in Hand said she fears what would happen if a reconciliation bill with major SNAP cuts passes into law and the state doesn’t fill in the large budget hole. The Auxier food bank and others in the region are already stretched near capacity of what they can offer people in need, she said.
“If that bill passes, I think it's going to be very hard to provide for all the families,” Goble said. “It's already bad enough that the economy is so bad and everything is so expensive, but to take away their SNAP benefits, or lower their SNAP benefits? That would just be horrific.”
Demand for food assistance rising in eastern Kentucky
The spiked demand for food that Goble sees in Auxier is seen throughout the Appalachian region by Michael Halligan, the CEO of God’s Pantry Food Bank, which coordinates and distributes food to nonprofits across central and eastern Kentucky, including Hand in Hand.
When pandemic-era stimulus checks, increased SNAP allotments and child tax credits vanished, demand at food banks exploded. God’s Pantry has scaled up their services by more than 30% in the past two years to fill the need, Halligan said.
“Folks who have limited resources have to make difficult choices on whether to put food on the table, whether to pay for housing costs, whether to pay for medical expenses, basically the necessities of life,” he said.
Another round of natural disasters in the region this year has now created the highest demand for food he’s ever seen, as they now provide free meals to nearly 280,000 food insecure people in central and southeastern Kentucky. They recently distributed nearly 100,000 pounds of food to groups impacted by deadly tornadoes in London.
Halligan says the meals are only meant to supplement SNAP benefits — and can in no way be viewed as a feasible or realistic replacement for them.
“For every nine meals someone who's eligible for SNAP receives, we can do one,” Halligan said. “(SNAP) is a critically important piece of the hunger safety net, particularly for folks that don't have the financial resources to go to a grocery store. If those benefits decline, we cannot grow enough in scale or fast enough to replace them.”
Congress seeks to shift SNAP costs onto states
Under the House version of the reconciliation bill, states would for the first time pick up between 5% and 25% of the cost of SNAP benefits based on what’s called their “error rate.” That measures the state’s unintentional under or overpayment of benefits to individuals.
Kentucky’s most recently calculated error rate was 7.27%, meaning the state would have to pick up 15% of the cost of SNAP benefits if the House bill was in effect, totaling $172 million. Combined with the $67 million of newly shifted administrative costs, that would mean the state would have to find $239 million in its state budget to cover the benefits of all its current SNAP enrollees for one year.
In an interview with the Bowling Green Daily News, western Kentucky GOP Congressman Brett Guthrie said they needed state governments to have “investment in” how SNAP is administered in order to prevent abuse.
“There are (…) people that absolutely desperately need food stamps, but there are also people that sell them to do other things with them, and we want states to be more vigorous,” Guthrie said.
The House proposal would punish states based on their unintentional error rates, not necessarily the amount of fraud in SNAP. Spokespersons for Congressmen Rogers and Guthrie did respond to a request for comment on this story.
An early Senate version of the bill proposed in committee this month is still in significant flux, but would significantly lessen the cost shift to Kentucky. Under that version and the state’s latest error rate, Kentucky would pick up 5% of the costs of SNAP benefits, at a total cost of $124 million when combining new administrative costs. It would also add a significant expansion of current work reporting requirements to include older adults and parents of older children, which would likely drop many from coverage even if the state filled the budget hole.
Opponents of the bill in Kentucky question if the state has the funds to cover any proposed federal cuts, arguing it will instead force states to reduce benefits or eligibility. After several years of budget surpluses that were spurred by pandemic era federal stimulus spending — as well as cuts to the individual income tax rate — Kentucky is now forecast to have slightly lower tax revenue in the current fiscal year ending in July. State revenue is then forecast to drop another 2.3% in the first six months of the next fiscal year.
It’s also unclear if the GOP-dominated Kentucky General Assembly is interested in increasing expenditures on SNAP benefits. Last year, the Kentucky House passed a bill that would have dropped thousands of Kentuckians off SNAP benefits by reinstating a financial asset test and making income requirements more restrictive. The bill, however, was voted down in a Senate committee.
One of the top goals of Republican state lawmakers is to keep lowering the income tax via a set of budget triggers that rely on keeping overall spending low and not drawing down from the budget reserve trust fund. With lawmakers set to craft a new two-year state budget in the session that begins in January, increasing spending on SNAP benefits could significantly lower the odds of future tax cuts under the current system.
If Congress does pass SNAP cuts resembling what’s in the House bill, Halligan with God’s Pantry said he hopes Frankfort would step up and fill the massive $240 million hole in the budget, “but it's a pretty daunting number to just have to automatically come up with.”
He believes that SNAP is an overall effective program. While small changes and improvements may be called for, he said cost-shifting to states doesn’t address alleged waste, fraud or abuse.
“I sort of have this fundamental belief that if it ain't broke, don't fix it,” Halligan said.
Advocates fear hunger and economic impact of cuts
Goble of the Auxier food bank says if Congress cuts SNAP and the state can’t fill that budget hole, that will pile onto their already unprecedented demand from hungry Kentuckians.
“A lot of people that don't come are probably drawing SNAP benefits as well, and they would end up here,” Goble said. “So they would probably end up getting less food than what we were able to provide, which is not a whole lot anyway.”
While adding to food insecurity among hungry Kentuckians, rural grocery stores and farmers would also likely feel the loss of federal funds.
Jennifer Weeber, the Northfork local food coordinator with the Community Farm Alliance, said programs that encourage SNAP recipients to spend their benefits at farmers’ markets were just beginning to see success in Perry County, where she’s based.
Weeber said agriculture has become an increasingly important part of the post-coal economy in the region. She fears cutting one of farmers’ revenue streams will be a blow to the rest of the local economy too.
“That's not just $5 in tomatoes, but it's $5 in tomatoes going to someone who is rooted in the community, who is spending their money in the community, who is supporting community events,” Weeber said.
There are also larger economic implications of cutting SNAP. The USDA Economic Research Service estimated that for every $1 the government spends on SNAP benefits, it increases the country’s gross domestic product by $1.54 in an otherwise slowing local economy. That infusion of spending also helped to improve production for rural industry by 1.25%, according to a five year study that ended in 2014.
The Food Industry Association, which represents grocery stores and food wholesalers, says around 5% of all supermarket purchases are made via SNAP, and Halligan suspects that percentage is higher in rural areas that are more dependent on the benefits.
With the Trump administration’s focus on “Make America Healthy Again,” Weeber said she would have thought programs like SNAP would be a priority.
“A lot of the programs that we already have in place that enable people to access fresh produce, lean proteins and all of that are being cut,” Weeber said. “They are the exact same programs that have helped build our local food economy all across the country, but particularly here in southeastern Kentucky.”
SNAP cuts now in hands of the Senate
The reconciliation bill is now in the hands of a Senate committee, where an amended version would create less of a budget hole to fill for Kentucky, but also expand work reporting requirements for SNAP eligibility.
For the past three decades, non-elderly and non-disabled SNAP enrollees were limited to three months of benefits unless they reported 80 hours of work per month, but parents and caregivers of children were exempted. This Senate version of the bill would now add work requirements for those ages 55 to 64, as well as the caregivers of children ages 10 to 17.
The Senate version would also remove benefits from refugees and asylum seekers and restrict states’ ability to waive the work requirements in areas with high unemployment rates. In Kentucky, 117 of its 120 counties currently have this waiver, but the bill would limit waivers to counties where unemployment is at least 10% — a level that only 10 counties in the country, and zero in Kentucky, currently reach.
One major roadblock to Republican SNAP reforms in any bill coming out of the Senate is a ruling by the chamber’s parliamentarian last week, which determined that its provision shifting of costs to states based on their error rates violates a procedural rule and would need 60 votes in the chamber to proceed. As part of the reconciliation process, the bill itself only needs a majority vote in each chamber, with the GOP holding a small majority in each — and little margin for error.
Halligan of God’s Pantry says if a bill ultimately passes with large cuts to SNAP, the state will be left with few good options — forced to either shift hundreds of millions of tax dollars from other key priorities to fill the budget hole, or cut SNAP enrollment and benefits for the many who are desperately in need.
“This is really about nutrition,” Halligan said. “This is really about a pathway forward. This is about better education, better employment, better health.”
Weeber of the Community Farm Alliance in Perry County added that the same House reconciliation bill also makes major cuts to Medicaid that could drop close to 300,000 Kentuckians from the federal health coverage, which would also have an outsized impact on the same Appalachian region that is heavily dependent on the program.
“With Medicaid on the chopping block as well, we're really creating a perfect storm for having a really unhealthy community and really creating the next generation of people who are unhealthy,” Weeber said.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
