Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has fallen by more than four million people since last summer, about 10 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-of-center policy institute that tracks the program closely. The decline is larger than the Congressional Budget Office projected when the law passed.

The question that determines what this means is whether those four million people stopped qualifying, or stopped completing paperwork.

What changed

The tax and spending law signed in July 2025 expanded work requirements for adults aged 18 to 64 without dependent children, who must now document at least 20 hours of work a week, or 80 hours a month, to keep benefits. The requirement took effect on November 1.

The policy rationale is straightforward and has a real constituency. The Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative group that pushed for the change, argues that work requirements move people toward employment and that verifying eligibility protects taxpayers. Administration officials make the same case.

The number that complicates it

Children are not subject to work requirements. They cannot be: they are children.

Yet CBPP's analysis finds roughly a million children have lost SNAP across 17 states since July 2025. A child loses benefits when the household's case closes, and a household's case closes when an adult fails to complete a redetermination, misses a deadline, or cannot produce documents in the window allowed.

That is the distinction at the center of this story. Losing benefits because you were found ineligible is the policy working as designed. Losing them because the paperwork defeated you is something else, and the second category appears to be large.

Why the paperwork is defeating people

State agencies are administering a substantially more demanding verification regime with staff levels set for the old one. Federal News Network reported caseworkers handling hundreds of applications at once and states struggling with the volume of documentation now required.

Consider what compliance actually asks of someone working 22 hours a week across two jobs with variable shifts: obtain and submit pay stubs from both employers, on time, in a format the agency accepts, every reporting period, while the hours that prove eligibility fluctuate week to week. The people most likely to fail that test are the ones with the least stable employment, which is the population the program exists for.

Arizona has seen among the sharpest declines in the country, and recipients there have described being unable to prove eligibility they actually have.

The pressure will increase. The federal share of state administrative costs is scheduled to drop from 50 percent to 25 percent in fiscal 2027, leaving states to fund the rest of the work of processing this paperwork or to do less of it.

California and Los Angeles County

CalFresh, the state program, has been through two changes. Certain noncitizens lost eligibility on April 1, affecting tens of thousands. The expanded work requirements followed, and state estimates cited in local reporting suggested several hundred thousand Californians might not meet them or qualify for an exemption. The Herald has not been able to confirm those state figures against a primary source and reports them as estimates.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank puts county participation at roughly 500,000 households, about 1.1 million people, before the changes.

There is a longstanding local wrinkle worth knowing. Los Angeles County has historically enrolled a smaller share of eligible residents than the country as a whole. The county's problem has never been people improperly on the rolls; it has been people entitled to help who never got on them. A policy that adds procedural hurdles lands on a system already leaving eligible people out.

The fair summary

Both things in this story can be true. A government may legitimately require proof of eligibility for a benefit, and reasonable people support work requirements.

It is also true that when verification is made more demanding faster than the capacity to process it, the people removed are sorted not by whether they qualify but by whether they can navigate a bureaucracy. A million children losing food assistance under rules that do not apply to them is the clearest available evidence of which is happening here.