How proposed federal food benefit cuts could affect Angelenos

The current proposed Budget Reconciliation Bill — what President Donald Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — proposes deep cuts to federal spending on food assistance for low-income families, which could spell big trouble for Southern California.

Proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — known as CalFresh in California — could leave the state scrambling to come up with billions of dollars a year annually to keep its food assistance program running.

If California can’t make up that money, it could be forced to take away CalFresh benefits from more than a million residents who rely on it. Or it could reduce individual daily benefits by 25%. That’s according to two scenarios from the California Budget and Policy Center.

Food assistance advocates say the daily benefit is already too low at about $6 per person a day.

“These benefits are so small. But they can be a bridge in families' budgets, especially with groceries increasing in the way that they are,” Monica Saucedo, a senior policy fellow with the California Budget and Policy Center, told LAist.

On average, there are about 1.5 million people in L.A. County who rely on CalFresh benefits each month, Saucedo said.

Itzúl Gutierrez, a senior policy advocate at the California Association of Food Banks, said if the cuts go through, the state could see an increase of people at food distribution centers.

Gutierrez and her colleagues estimate that nationally SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal a food bank can.

“And food banks just can’t make the promise to be able to fill that gap,” Gutierrez said. “That is going to be enormous.”

Saucedo called the proposed cuts unprecedented and said they would represent a shift away from the foundations of the food assistance program, which say that the country won’t let its citizens face hunger.

Shifting CalFresh costs to the state is just one of several ways the proposal would drastically change the food assistance program, Saucedo said. She pointed to proposed expansions of what she called “very harsh” time limits on when people are eligible to use benefits — which could take away food assistance from hundreds of thousands of families — as well as additional restrictions on immigrant populations.