Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sparred with House Democrats on Thursday over the Trump administration’s deep cuts to federal funding for nutrition assistance programs and the Iran war’s economic squeeze on American farmers, at one point calling a lawmaker “rude.”
The $187 billion in cuts President Donald Trump’s marquee legislation made across the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal food aid program for low-income families, dominated Rollins’ fiery exchanges with lawmakers as her testimony before the House Agriculture Committee got underway.
“You and this administration have failed farmers and working Americans time after time after time,” Rep. Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said in her opening statement. “You’ve also made the largest cut to food assistance in the history of our country, at a time when more and more people are struggling to afford their food.”
Since Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was enacted last July, about 3.5 million SNAP recipients have lost their benefits, according to the latest figures from the Department of Agriculture. The bill imposed stricter eligibility requirements on participants and shifted the majority of the cost responsibilities for administering the program onto the states.
Rollins argued that the cost changes to the program, which will be determined by states’ payment error rates — a measure of underpayments or overpayments of SNAP benefits to recipients — are a way to reduce “fraud” in the program.
But Craig and the committee’s Democrats challenged that argument, pointing out that the department she heads does not consider payment errors a fraud indicator.
“I don’t think you understand the difference between an error rate and a fraud rate. I honestly don’t. It is one of the lowest programs — the lowest fraud rate in any program in America is the SNAP program,” Craig said after Rollins condemned Democrat-led states for rejecting her department’s request for their program data, which she said is necessary to “root out fraud.”
“You can’t be serious,” Rollins responded.
Under the act, states will be required take on between 5% and 15% of the cost of SNAP funding by the beginning of fiscal year 2028.
The percentage that states will need to pay will be decided by their payment error rates from the current fiscal year, which ends in October. That has started a race as states try reconcile their payment errors, often caused by unintentional administrative mistakes, to reduce the cost burden of the program before it’s locked in.
“For many states it will be $100 million or more per year, and states have to balance their budgets, so if they can’t cover those costs by raising taxes or cutting other services, then they’ll need to further restrict access to SNAP and cut enrollment, or they may potentially even withdraw from the program entirely,” said Katie Bergh, a food assistance policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute.