[Letter by Jen Kirk, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Reclaim, Snoqualmie, WA Views expressed are those of the author, not the Living Snoqualmie website. You may submit letters to info@livingsnoqualmie.com.]
Food is not a privilege. It is not a reward for good behavior. It is not something you earn by proving your worth to a government committee. Food is the most basic of all human needs. You cannot hold a job, keep a roof over your head, raise a child, or contribute to your community when you are starving. This is not a political opinion. It is biology.
And yet, with the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, our federal government has chosen to use hunger as leverage, a mechanism of control and punishment aimed squarely at the people in our communities who have the least.
I am the Executive Director and co-founder of Reclaim, a nonprofit based in downtown Snoqualmie that has served over 1,500 humans in the Snoqualmie Valley since 2012. Every day, our team walks alongside people navigating housing instability, poverty, domestic violence, and behavioral health challenges. We know who receives SNAP benefits, we know their names and their children, and I need our community to understand how these new rules will actually impact real people in real ways.
What the New Rules Actually Say
More SNAP participants than ever before will now need to work or volunteer at least 20 hours per week (80 hours per month) or participate in training programs to keep their food benefits. The age range for mandatory work requirements has been raised from 54 to 64 (yes, 64 YEARS OLD), meaning many older adults who were previously exempt must now document compliance or lose access to food. Exemptions that once existed for veterans, caregivers of teenagers, and people experiencing homelessness have been eliminated.
The People We Are Actually Talking About
Imagine a woman in her early sixties. She has spent her adult life in poverty, working jobs that left her with chronic pain that doesn’t qualify as a legal disability but makes a 20-hour workweek genuinely impossible on many days. She comes to a place like Reclaim’s Front Door community service center to access resources, get help with benefits paperwork, and use a computer to navigate the systems that increasingly demand she prove her worth online. She is not lazy. She is not faking. She is exhausted in a way that only decades of surviving with too little can produce. Under these new rules, she must now document 80 hours of work or volunteering every month or lose her food assistance. No exceptions. No nuance. No acknowledgment that her body and her history make that requirement a near-impossibility.
She is not one person; she is one of the 2.9 million Americans the Congressional Budget Office estimates will lose SNAP benefits under these new rules. That’s nearly one in eight Americans who depend on SNAP assistance to eat.
The Reality Behind the Requirement
In 2025, 903,000 people in Washington State received SNAP benefits. If we conservatively estimate that 75 percent of those recipients (roughly 677,250 people) are now subject to these new work requirements, the math becomes staggering: that’s over 54 million hours of required work or volunteering every single month, just in our state alone.
Where are those hours supposed to come from? What businesses and organizations in our rural community, already stretched to their absolute limit, are prepared to absorb a massive influx of new volunteers, many of whom may struggle with transportation, social barriers, limited education, mental health challenges, childcare coverage, or physical limitations that don’t rise to the legal threshold of exemption but make steady, documented employment and volunteering genuinely out of reach?
At Reclaim, we named our community service center The Front Door deliberately because, historically, people in poverty have been forced to access resources through back doors and hidden pathways, both literally and figuratively. Every day, we open our front door to everyone as an act of intentional dignity. We are now being asked to somehow absorb the fallout of a federal policy that offers no additional funding, no new capacity, and no new infrastructure. Just the mandate and the quiet threat of major food instability behind it.
No new job training programs have been created. No increased transportation assistance, no additional childcare support, no social skills programs, no expanded mental health resources have been carved out to bridge the gap. There’s nothing in place to make compliance achievable; it’s a bureaucratic obstacle course that sets people up to fail.
This Cruelty Has a History
This is not new. The practice of withholding basic resources from the poor while simultaneously shaming them for their poverty is as old as this country. Call them lazy. Call them dirty. Call them ignorant. Say they’re gaming the system. Make the system so complicated that compliance itself becomes a full-time job…and then blame them when they fail.
The same voices that cut food assistance have never adequately funded job training, low-cost childcare, mental health services, addiction treatment, transportation, or affordable housing. They have not created the infrastructure that would make work requirements anything other than a trap. They have simply removed the food and walked away.
Think about the person living in their vehicle on the edge of town. How do they hold down a 20-hour-a-week job without an address, a phone charger, clean clothes, a place to sleep that actually allows them to rest? How do they navigate an online compliance portal without reliable internet? How does their nervous system escape from a constant state of fight-or-flight, allowing them to focus at work or learn new skills? These are not rhetorical questions.
Research is clear on what actually happens when work requirements are imposed: they do not meaningfully increase employment. Most SNAP participants who are able to work already do. What work requirements DO reliably produce is paperwork failure resulting in people losing benefits not because they aren’t working, but because they missed a deadline, couldn’t get to the office, didn’t have a printer, or couldn’t navigate a system that was never designed to be navigated by someone living in crisis.
Our Local Food Banks and Nonprofits Cannot Fill This Gap
The food banks and human services agencies in our region are not operating with capacity to spare. They are operating in a state of constant, grinding over-extension, serving more people every month with the same resources, the same volunteers, the same square footage. There is no slack in the system. There is no reserve. When SNAP cuts push more Washingtonians toward emergency food providers, those providers will be forced to ration. Our most vulnerable neighbors and their children will go hungry, and our staff will lose sleep at night.
Our local farmers cannot bridge this gap either. Rural food production is limited by land, labor, weather, and markets. You cannot harvest your way out of a federal food crisis.
The Truth About Refugees and Immigrants
Let us be honest, because the misinformation has been constant and cruel: undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for SNAP. Not now. Not ever. Every story you have heard about undocumented immigrants draining these resources is false. It has always been false.
And yet, under the new law, people who are here legally, people who fled war and persecution and came through proper channels seeking safety, are now cut off. Refugees and asylees are all now ineligible for federal food assistance unless and until they can navigate the lengthy and expensive process of becoming lawful permanent residents. On average, most straightforward cases take 2–5 years and cost thousands of dollars. How are people expected to eat in the meantime?
These are people who left war zones, who survived violence most of us cannot imagine, who arrived in this country, often with nothing, and were told that they were welcome. And now our federal government is telling them they cannot eat. Shame on them.
What We Can Do
None of this is inevitable. Every cut, every eliminated exemption, every tightened restriction is a policy choice made by elected officials who are accountable to us.
If you are outraged, let that outrage be useful. Demand that our congressional delegates go on record about where they stand. Support your local food banks and nonprofits, with money, time and advocacy, knowing that we are being asked to do far more with less resources. Show up. Check in on your neighbors and share what you have. Write letters. Make noise.
And the next time someone tells you that poor people deserve what they get, think about the woman I described, the one with the broken-down body, the paperwork she can barely navigate, the computer she uses at our Front Door because she doesn’t have one of her own. Think about the veteran sleeping in his truck. The teenager who aged out of foster care with nothing behind them and nothing ahead.
We built the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and our federal government has chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge of the consequences, to let people in it go hungry.
That is not fiscal responsibility. It is not strength. It is not values.
It is cruelty. And we should be willing to call it by its name.
Jen Kirk is the Executive Director and co-founder of Reclaim, a nonprofit organization in downtown Snoqualmie providing pathways to stability, opportunity, and connection for people experiencing homelessness and housing instability in the Snoqualmie Valley. Learn more at reclaimstability.org.
Sources
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (full text) congress.gov — https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1
SNAP work requirement provisions & eliminated exemptions Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/many-low-income-people-will-soon-begin-to-lose-food-assistance-under
CBO estimates on SNAP losses Congressional Budget Office — https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61420 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/by-the-numbers-harmful-republican-megabill-takes-food-assistance-away-from
Washington State SNAP enrollment Washington State DSHS — https://www.dshs.wa.gov
SNAP eligibility for immigrants & refugees ASTHO One Big Beautiful Bill Summary — https://www.astho.org/advocacy/federal-government-affairs/leg-alerts/2025/one-big-beautiful-bill-law-summary/
Work requirements don’t increase employment Commonwealth Fund — https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/jun/how-medicaid-snap-cutbacks-one-big-beautiful-bill-trigger-job-losses-states
US Citizenship – https://www.usa.gov/become-us-citizen
