Federal changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could cost New Hampshire an additional $14 million over the course of the next two years.
President Donald Trump’s budget reconciliation bill shifted the responsibility to fund of a portion of SNAP, also known food stamps, to individual states, a cost hunger relief advocates in New Hampshire say the state is not prepared to shoulder.
“It will not be insignificant for New Hampshire to be able to implement these changes,” said Laura Milliken, executive director of the advocacy group New Hampshire Hunger Solutions. “New Hampshire simply cannot afford this kind of financial downshifting.”
States were previously on the hook for half of the administrative costs associated with operating SNAP. Now, not only will states see these contributions increase by 25% but they’ll pay an additional cost based on their error rate, which is a measure of how accurate their eligibility and benefit determinations are.
Under the new reconciliation law, states with error rates above 6% will have to pay a portion of the cost of the program, ranging from 5% to 15% depending on particular error rates. New Hampshire’s error rate in 2024 was 7.57%., and the only U.S. state to have fallen under the 6% error rate is South Dakota.
According to a recent report from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, these costs could total for New Hampshire could total $14 million: $6 million for administrative costs, which will begin on Oct. 1 of 2026, and a minimum of $8 million of its share of benefits the following year.
Federally, SNAP is a program housed within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but in New Hampshire, benefits are administered through the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. While DHHS is one of the state’s most highly funded agencies, with a budget of $7 billion, Milliken and other advocates expressed concern about the state’s capacity to take on new costs.
“If we can’t run the program, then we can’t have SNAP in New Hampshire,” Milliken said.
The budget reconciliation bill also redefined who is elibile to receive SNAP benefits. SNAP will not be offered to non-U.S. citizens, and work requirements will extend to able-bodied adults up until the age of 65, a 10 year increase from the previous requirement.
Elsy Cipriani, executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank, said she knows these changes will affect the population the food bank serves — the challenge is not knowing when.
“Right now, we have a little bit of budget that we are putting on the side because we are totally expecting that, once these eligibility requirements actually take place, we are going to have to buy more food and make the food available for our partner agencies,” Cipriani said. “There are going to be a lot of adjustments, and we will have to cut some other programs to be able to accommodate this demand for more food.”
For Milliken, the federal government’s claim that only a minority of able-bodied adults on SNAP work don’t ring factual, nor do its motivations to change the work requirement.
“It’s not true that the work requirements create opportunities for people to work. There’s a ton of evidence that shows that it just throws people off the program,” she said. “People who are working get thrown off the program, and people who can’t work because of caregiver roles or because they’re disabled get thrown off the program because it requires a ton of reporting that is really complex.”
“People are scared,” said Cipriani. “There is a lot of misinformation. One of the things that our team has found in the field is that people are now very hesitant to apply because they think that the program is going to end. We are trying to tell people that if you’re still eligible, you should apply.”
Milliken said Hunger Solutions hopes to work with the DHHS to make the new SNAP changes as apparent as possible to eligible recipients, and that the organization will be advocating to ensure that New Hampshire can come up with the dollars that are needed to continue running the program.
For Cipriani, who sees the food bank as part of a broader at-risk food security network, the stakes are high.
“The work of the New Hampshire Food Bank and our food pantries are just part of the solution,” she said. “We really need programs like SNAP to provide a long term financial disability for the people that we serve.”