The families going hungry because of Trump's food stamp cuts

The families going hungry because of Trump’s food stamp cuts

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/families-going-hungry-because-trump-090040479.html

PHOENIX — The line outside a suburban office building was already 15 people long when Tiffany Hudson showed up with her 7-year-old son cradling his blanket. It was 7 a.m. At the front of the line was a woman hooked up to an oxygen tank who had arrived 90 minutes before the building opened.

Like others there, Husdon had come to the Arizona Department of Economic Security office in Surprise, a Phoenix suburb, to find out why the food stamp benefits for her and her two children were cut off after the state began implementing new eligibility requirements under President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson said. She’s a single mom who had received about $600 a month in food assistance to supplement her income as a part-time caretaker. Her benefits stopped without warning three months ago. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

Hudson and her children have been swept up in a wave of new restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles that have begun to ripple across the country as a result of Trump’s marquee legislation, which he signed into law with great fanfare nearly a year ago during a Fourth of July celebration. The law extends tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while cutting $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often referred to as food stamps, over the next decade. Now, the consequences of those cuts are showing up on Americans’ kitchen tables.