According to the Oregon Department of Human Services, more than 60,000 Oregonians have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits since the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” last July that cut spending on SNAP, Medicare and other programs to offset tax cuts championed by President Trump and Republicans in Congress.
The law made changes to SNAP, including eligibility restrictions and work requirements for able-bodied adults 64 and younger without children under the age of 14 in their SNAP household. SNAP recipients who don’t qualify for an exemption can meet the 80-hour monthly work rules in several ways, including paid work, volunteering or participating in a SNAP Training & Employment Program. The program helps SNAP recipients with job placement, career coaching, pre-apprenticeship training, tuition assistance and other support provided by WorkSource Oregon and community-based organizations.
This month, ODHS began requiring interviews to check eligibility for households applying for SNAP or renewing their benefits. Nate Singer, Oregon Eligibility Partnership Director at ODHS, shares how Oregonians are being impacted by federal changes to SNAP, along with Matt Newell-Ching, Senior Policy Manager at Oregon Food Bank, and Jesse Aronson, WorkSource Program Manager at Worksystems, the Portland metro workforce development board serving Portland, Multnomah and Washington counties.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. More than 60,000 Oregonians have lost their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits over the last year. That’s since the Republican passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cuts spending on SNAP, as well as Medicare and other programs, to offset tax cuts. The law added new eligibility restrictions and work requirements, which together have reduced the number of SNAP recipients.
We’re gonna get a couple of perspectives on this today. Nate Singer is the Oregon Eligibility Partnership Director for the state’s Department of Human Services, Matt Newell-Ching is a Senior Policy Manager at the Oregon Food Bank, and Jesse Aronson is the Workforce Program Manager at Worksystems, which helps job seekers in Multnomah and Washington County. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Matt Newell-Ching: Thanks for having us, Dave.
Nate Singer: Yeah, thanks.
Jesse Aronson: Thank you.
Miller: Thank you. Nate, I wanna start with you. What did you expect would happen to SNAP recipients in Oregon almost a year ago, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed?
Singer: The moment I read it, and going through it, it was going to have a major impact to the amount of people that we serve. We knew that we would literally see thousands of individuals stop receiving benefits. Because the bill increases process. It increases paperwork, and it decreases funding; our ability to really navigate and help individuals. So we expected individuals that hadn’t seen a change in their own life circumstances would no longer be eligible and would have to be looking for supports in other places in the community.
Miller: That’s what you were expecting. How much has that come to pass?
Singer: I wish I was this good at guessing on other things as we look at it. Unfortunately, we have seen this. As you just shared, just over 62,000 less individuals are actively receiving benefits from us today. This isn’t because they are less hungry or have had major changes in their own economic circumstances.
Miller: That’s an important point. How do you know that? How can you say that this is not because they’re getting jobs or their income is way up or they don’t need the support?
Singer: That’s a great question. As we look at it, when we close someone’s benefits, there’s a reason we close them. We track these areas to look at it. So we can see whether an individual just didn’t provide paperwork to us, whether or not their income changed and they went from just being at the threshold of where you’re eligible to just being right above it or have a significant increase. For most individuals, it hasn’t been a significant increase to income of why they’re no longer receiving benefits.
Miller: OK, so of these 62,000 fewer Oregonians getting SNAP benefits now than a year ago, what are the different actual reasons for that loss of eligibility?
Singer: It’s a mix of reasons around it. One of the biggest areas is an expansion around work requirements for individuals. This has been a program that’s been around for 30+ years, but in many states like Oregon, only a few counties or people had to actually participate in it. The bill changed that. We had to have more people. So over 25,000 individuals lost eligibility just because they were not providing documentation to us to verify they were meeting the work requirements. For some individuals, it was that their income increased around it. For other individuals, it was changes to other documentations in their household where they were living, other circumstantial changes.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for those 25,000 who didn’t even submit … and am I right that this is the rule change for able-bodied adults without dependents?
Singer: You’re right.
Miller: Meaning not over the age of 65. That’s a particular population here. And you said 25,000 of them who had been getting SNAP didn’t even send in the paperwork. What would they have had to do to maintain this benefit?
Singer: For Oregon, there’s around 267,000 individuals that we serve today that have to provide us some sort of information. However, the majority of them are working at least 30 hours a week. We can verify that. They may meet an exemption like being pregnant or being a full-time student for an undergraduate [degree]. So around 221,000 of those individuals, we can already exempt.
Miller: They’re exempt from this particular, fill out the paperwork and show that you deserve this benefit, rule?
Singer: Correct. Yes. And so for the other individuals, what they have to do is turn in a pay stub to us every single month for the program to prove that they’re working at least 80 hours a month, or meeting a certain threshold around that, or doing other unpaid work to show that, or a letter from their employer. So those have to come into us every single month for an individual.
Miller: Matt Newell-Ching, Senior Public Policy Manager at the Oregon Food Bank, how do you make sense of this number that Nate just said, that 25,000 Oregonians didn’t even go through this process? Is it your assumption that the paperwork is too onerous, that people didn’t know they had to do it, that they knew that if they did do it, they wouldn’t be eligible … 25,000, it’s a lot of people to not even try?
Newell-Ching: It’s a lot of people, Dave. There are many reasons why people don’t go through that. We’ve heard anecdotally from many of our partner agencies that navigating these new rules is very challenging, because you’re going from never having to have gone through these steps before to having to really jump through a lot of hoops just to keep benefits. We’re even seeing challenges from people who are able to maintain benefits, saying this is confusing or there’s misinformation, or I got some confusing information from our friends.
A lot of times people see the envelopes that are coming from the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Human Services does a good job of providing notices to people. But those are scary notices often to open sometimes because, what does this mean? There can be many multiple traumas in folks’ lives. We encourage and want people to make sure that they’re opening the mail, calling their caseworker, and calling the Department of Human Services to get that accurate information. Because we want as many people to keep those benefits as possible.
Miller: How do you think about the philosophy behind this requirement? As I said again, the real change that we’re talking about here so far – and there are other ones that we’ll get to, that are more about these benefits not being available to you as a population – it’s able-bodied adults without dependents. To the extent that I understand the reasoning here, these are people who can work.
I think the Republican lawmakers who voted for this said (A), we only have so much money that we can spend if we want to have these tax cuts, and (B), if we’re gonna spend this money on food assistance, we want to make sure that the people who are getting it are most deserving of it. And if you can work, we wanna make sure that you really are working. What do you say to that lawmaker?
Newell-Ching: At Oregon Food Bank, one of our core values is that we believe that food is a human right. Full stop. We deserve food because we are alive and because everyone is better off when everyone has enough to eat. Now we also recognize that not everyone holds that value. Some might say, “well, does having these new requirements drive people to find full-time work?” Maybe that’s the most defensible argument for something like this.
We’ve tracked the evidence over several decades. In states and in counties where these new work requirements have been implemented in the past, we see no evidence that this moves people to actually achieving full-time work. We talked to a food pantry in Waldport and one of their clients was saying that he was struggling to find full-time work. It’s not that this person wanted to have not enough hours to qualify, but that seasonal work, there’s all kinds of reasons why people have problems piecing together 20 hours of full-time work consistently, month over month.
In this new policy, you have to meet these requirements. It’s three months out of every 36 months, three months out of every three years. If you don’t meet that, you can go, literally, years without receiving food. Everyone knows that kids can’t perform well on tests while they’re hungry. I struggle to see how somebody that’s hungry is going to perform well on a job interview. It just doesn’t add up, if the incentives don’t match the policy, in our view.
Miller: Jesse, have you seen any increase in people seeking job help as a result of this rule change?
Aronson: I would say we have not seen an increase in people seeking help through our programs. We actually have seen a little bit of a dip. When you look at immigrant populations that our providers serve, one of the things H.R.1 did was it removed SNAP benefits for refugees and asylum seekers. So certain populations could no longer get SNAP benefits. To participate in our SNAP employment and training program, you need to be a SNAP recipient. Also, there were some exemptions that were removed for people experiencing homelessness and that made a lot fewer people exempt as well.
Miller: In other words, to the extent that one of the theories behind these changes is to increase workforce participation, you’re saying you’ve actually seen the opposite happening?
Aronson: Yeah. I’d say the folks who are participating in our program, it stayed pretty consistent between this year and the past several years, as far as the number of people we’re supporting and serving. We’re definitely seeing people who are designated as able-bodied adults without dependents that do need to meet the work requirements. So our programs are doing that, to some extent. Either through helping people get exemptions or working closely to just document their work activities and help them kind of understand reporting requirements.
Miller: How much work does it take to prove that you’re working or trying to work?
Aronson: It’s 80 hours a month. They need to submit a weekly report to the Oregon Employment Department of their activities. Certain things like job search and going to interviews, job fairs, submitting resumes can only count towards 40 of the 80 hours. So you need to meet it with either working or some other way than just actively looking for work. So it seems like it is somewhat challenging or can be.
Miller: Nate, do you want to jump in here?
Singer: Yeah. As we look at this, I just really appreciate the work that our community partners do around this. You heard about the Oregon Employment Department. One of the things we’re always trying to do is simplify our processes for people reporting. So when someone provides information to the Oregon Employment Department, it actually automatically comes over to us so we can update their benefits and information. So we try to shrink these down.
But to your question, that’s one of the things I just talked to someone last week, who was describing their situation. This is a dad, he’s running his own lawn care business. Because it’s all on paper, it’s a lot each week for him to go through his papers to provide copies of receipts and proof. He doesn’t have a nice payroll system that can just produce it out there. So that’s where the time comes, as he’s feeling like he’s spending hours each month to prove he’s eligible, versus actually working or taking care of his family,
Miller: That’s on the recipient or potential recipient end. But then all those pieces of paper and documents have to be reviewed. Not at the federal level, even though these are new federal requirements, but at the state level. How much more Oregonian taxpayer money is being spent now by agencies like yours to do this processing?
Singer: In this last legislative session, our department went forward with a request for H.R.1 as the whole. So this is not just for food benefits, but also some of those Medicaid changes.
Miller: Those are huge, and obviously we’re going to spend a lot of time in the coming years talking about that, but SNAP went first?
Singer: SNAP went first. That’s the way the law was written. But we had to request over 392 new positions and $111 million in the General Fund to be able to implement these areas. Part of that is the federal government is cutting the amount of funds they send us. At the same time, they’re requesting that we do more as we do this work.
Miller: As we heard from Jesse, one of the places he has seen a drop in job seeking help requests is from asylum seekers or refugees. Do you have a sense for how many asyl-ees, refugees or other non-citizens in Oregon, who were granted some kind of legal status, have lost SNAP benefits as a result of other aspects of these rule changes?
Singer: In Oregon, we’ve had between 2,500 to 3,000 individuals stop receiving benefits because of those changes around, again, lawfully present individuals, that the rules just no longer allow us to serve them.
Miller: Matt, I want to turn to the bigger picture here now of hunger, which is what we’re talking about here. So first of all, can you just give us a sense for the scale of your organization; how many community-based agencies you partner with, and how much food you’re providing to pantries and meal sites?
Newell-Ching: To put it in perspective, Oregon Food Bank, I think most folks when they think of what we do, it’s big warehouses full of food. We then, in turn, distribute to regional food banks who, in turn, distribute to a network of 1,200 community agencies across Oregon and Southwest Washington. What we’ve seen in the last two years is over a 50% increase in the number of visits to our food pantries. Last year, we saw a record – since we’ve been keeping records since the 1980s – that we’ve had over 2.9 million visits to community-based agencies that are part of our network. So the scale of this is really significant.
And yet, despite the size of what we do, it is only about 10% of what SNAP does. So when you see a 9% cut to SNAP, there are some who say, “well, the charities should be doing this.” What you’re effectively asking us, if you follow that logic, is for groups like Oregon Food Bank and community-based agencies to double what we’re doing, with the snap of a finger, over the course of a year. That is just impossible. We often say hunger is a policy choice. I don’t think there’s any clearer evidence of that than the policies of H.R.1, which created the biggest cut to SNAP in the program’s history.
Miller: I want to make sure I understand the comparisons that you’re making here. My math may be a little bit off, but if I understand you correctly, for the enormous amount of food that you’re collecting and distributing at the Oregon Food Bank yourselves, that SNAP-connected food is eight or nine times more than that?
Newell-Ching: That’s right.
Miller: When you talked about the huge increase though in food that you’ve been giving out over the last two years, I mean, a lot of things have been happening at once. Just in recent months we’ve had a huge increase in gas prices, which is a very huge piece of inflation and is tied to other increases in prices and just household costs, which could lead to more food insecurity. I’m wondering, how can you separate the effects of SNAP cuts from other societal factors that are also happening at the same time?
Newell-Ching: Yeah, that’s a great question. We know that families are being squeezed in every possible direction. You mentioned the cost of gas, the price of food, the price of groceries have gone up 30% since the beginning of the pandemic. We had an influx of Federal aid during the pandemic, which actually stabilized hunger for quite a bit according to the data. But once that tapered off, we saw more people because of that as well.
It’s because we don’t ask as many questions when you come to a food pantry. We do that purposefully because we want to be welcoming. We want to make sure that our 1,200 agencies will never ask for an ID. That’s really important, especially for community members who are immigrants.
So it’s hard to disaggregate what of this is because of the ABAWD (Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents) change, or because of the immigrant change, or because of food inflation. It’s all happening, everything everywhere, all at once, if you will. Our communities are doing all that we can to react, but there are limits to that. We’ve heard stories of food pantries who say, “well, we can only distribute dry goods this week and groceries next week.” We heard a story of a food pantry in Coos Bay that used to be able to give out unlimited fruits and vegetables, but can no longer do that and now caps the amount of food. So we’re doing our best, and yet the scale is just enormous.
Miller: Jesse, we heard from Nate Singer at the Department of Human Services about the ways that they’re trying to streamline the bureaucracy in a sense and having agencies talk to each other, for example, and share information. Do you think there are other things, from your perspective, that state officials could do or should do to make the process easier for SNAP recipients or would-be SNAP recipients?
Aronson: I know that the Department of Human Services is doing a lot, and I think they have a lot of things in the works, as far as community organization toolkits, to help community organization constituents understand the requirements and how to respond. It sounds like people in our programs often don’t even realize, until they lose their benefits, that they haven’t been doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
So I think, just overcommunicate. Try to get this information out in as many ways as possible, so people are aware, and they know what to do and who to go to to document work hours. Our programs are helping people with that now. But I think there’s still some people who are either not opening the mail or not getting the information for some reason. I think just more communication would help.
Miller: Nate, before we say goodbye, we talked briefly about what’s coming, in terms of Medicaid. But can you give us a sense for what you’re expecting, what this is gonna look like?
Singer: As we look at H.R.1 for Medicaid, very similar changes. We’re gonna have changes to some policies around months that we can cover in the back that will affect hospitals. Changes around legally present non-citizens and what benefits they can access in our state. But work requirements for Medicaid are gonna be a big area. As I mentioned, work requirements for our Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was around 200,000. For Medicaid, you’re looking at 600,000 adults. So just a bigger impact, a lot more people to engage with.
Miller: Nate Singer, Jesse Aronson and Matt Newell-Ching, thanks very much.
Newell-Ching: Thanks, Dave.
Aronson: Thank you for having us.
Miller: Nate Singer is a Director of Eligibility Partnerships at the Oregon Department of Human Services. Jesse Aronson is a Workforce Program Manager at Worksystems, which helps job seekers in Multnomah and Washington counties, and Matt Newell-Ching is the Senior Policy Manager at the Oregon Food Bank.
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