Trump Touts Record Number Of Children Removed From Food Stamps, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Poorest Kids Were Still Receiving Food

WASHINGTON. The White House this week pointed to a new ProPublica investigation as evidence of a historic accomplishment, noting that at least 776,134 children have been removed from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the single year since President Trump signed his signature domestic policy law, a development the administration characterized not as a hardship but as confirmation that the federal government is at last operating the way it should.

The children account for nearly half of everyone dropped from the program in the twelve states that report participation by age. The law, which carved roughly 186 billion dollars from food assistance over the next decade in the largest such reduction in the program's history, imposed new work requirements on older adults and on parents of teenagers and shifted billions in costs onto the states. In Arizona, the hardest hit, 205,223 children have lost the benefit since July, a decline of 55 percent, leaving state agencies free to redirect their attention toward the smaller number of residents still receiving food.

President Trump has folded the shrinking rolls into his standard remarks, telling Congress during his State of the Union address in February that "in one year we have lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps." By May the figure had grown in his retelling to nearly 5 million, an increase that independent analysts were unable to match to any underlying data, the same analysts who note that the decline is driven by new paperwork and work rules rather than by families rising out of poverty.

"The system is finally doing exactly what it was built to do," said one source within the administration, declining to specify which system or what it had been built to do. Officials have characterized the bulk of those removed as fraudulent, a description that does not appear to account for applicants such as the Phoenix single mother of five who has been waiting on a determination since December, or for the residents of one state where the share of callers unable to reach a caseworker climbed from 61 percent to nearly 81 percent, a benchmark the department did not dispute.

Hunger researchers have described the trend as a public health crisis in the making, with one comparing early childhood hunger to a brain injury and food banks across the country reporting double-digit increases in need, all of which the administration has folded into the broader category of savings. The roughly 186 billion dollars no longer flowing to grocery purchases will help offset the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts, whose largest benefits accrue to the highest earners, a group that does not typically apply for food assistance.

At press time, the President had revised the number of Americans lifted off food stamps upward once more, to a total that no federal agency had yet been able to locate.