When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was last in office, his administration repeatedly attempted to gut the country’s social safety net, proposing cuts to nutrition assistance, Medicaid and other government programs that one in four Americans rely on.
If he wins in November, experts say it’s likely that Trump would once again target those programs, spelling financial peril for the most vulnerable Americans.
With about two weeks until the election, Kathleen Hurd has already cast her absentee ballot in Michigan for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who she hopes will do more to directly address the needs of Americans living in poverty. Hurd, 64, scrapes by on $1,060 in monthly Social Security Disability Insurance benefits and $500 in food stamps — now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — to feed her grandchildren.
If Trump wins, she fears what it could mean for families like hers who already struggle to make it to the end of the month on Social Security and other antipoverty benefits.
“If he cuts it out, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Hurd, who noted that even a slight reduction could spell devastation for families living on the edge. “That’s going to be really, really very difficult.”
A Second Trump Term
Trump’s platform contains little mention of benefits programs other than promises to protect older people’s Medicare and Social Security benefits. But the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which Trump has repeatedly disavowed but whose authors include many former Trump officials — explicitly details potential cuts to social services in a future Trump administration.
Among them are plans to cancel summer lunch programs, to sharply decrease the number of Americans who qualify for SNAP benefits and to slash funding for Medicaid, Social Security and low-income housing programs.
“The proposed cuts would reduce nondefense discretionary programs to their lowest level as a share of the economy since Herbert Hoover” was president, said Robert Greenstein, founder and president emeritus of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In her platform, Harris has disavowed the types of cuts proposed in Project 2025 while outlining plans to invest in affordable housing and child care, as well as to expand Medicare to cover long-term health care at home. She has also endorsed restoring and expanding the popular child tax credit for low- and middle-income families, an idea also floated by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the Harris campaign responded to requests for comment from Capital & Main for this story.
Trump has largely insulated Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare from his attack on public benefits and has also proposed that Medicare cover in-home care. He said that his comments in March that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting” would not apply to those programs. But as The Washington Post reported, Trump unsuccessfully tried to cut spending for Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration.
Some voters would like to see Harris make clearer commitments to vulnerable Americans. “Every time I hear them say, ‘the middle class,’ I say, ‘What about those of us on Social Security?’” Hurd said. “What about those of us who are not ‘middle class?’”
During his administration, Trump attempted to enact numerous cuts that were ultimately foiled by Congress or eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Others languished in court.
At the time, among his Democratic foils was then-Sen. Harris, who introduced the bill that expanded SNAP benefits for families in need during the pandemic and championed several other pieces of legislation aimed at reducing food insecurity. Those bills passed and supported emergency food deliveries during the pandemic and encouraged food donations to hunger charities.
This time, Greenstein said, Trump would likely enter office with a friendlier Congress, more attention on the national debt and pressure to enact the trillion-dollar tax cuts he’s promised on the campaign trail. This could lead to even deeper cuts than those he proposed in his first term.
If that happens, “a lot of people who are not well off, who are struggling, but are somewhat above the poverty line, would likely be pushed below the poverty line,” Greenstein said. “And many people, probably millions of people, who are below the poverty line would be pushed deeper into poverty.”
Echoes of Prior Policies
Antihunger advocates still wince at the memory of the Department of Agriculture’s America’s Harvest Box proposal, which aimed to replace a significant portion of SNAP benefits with parcels of government-selected shelf-stable food.
The proposal formed part of a drastic push by the Trump administration to slash the SNAP budget by almost 30%, or $213 billion, over 10 years.
If they had been implemented, the proposals would have kicked more than 2 million Americans off SNAP benefits by limiting states’ leeway to determine eligibility and tightening work requirements for the program, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute.
During the Trump administration, “we were constantly having to beg public officials to pay attention to reality, pay attention to the science and pay attention to people’s lived experience,” said Mariana Chilton, author of The Painful Truth About Hunger in America and founder of Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities.
“There was just this sort of tyranny of not caring — a tyranny of indifference,” said Chilton, who added that Trump’s proposed harvest boxes typified the fact that “underneath food insecurity and poverty in the United States is a culture of disrespect.”
Threadbare Safety Nets
As of 2022, more than a quarter of working-age adults — and around half of children — used public benefits to help pay for necessities such as food, diapers, health care and housing. They are single mothers and older people, adjunct professors and caregivers.
“We barely make it to the end of the month” as it is, said Jessica Aguilar, 42, a single mother in Charlotte, North Carolina, who lives “day by day,” cobbling together income from part-time gigs while caring full time for her 12-year-old twins, both of whom have disabilities.
Even with food assistance, Medicaid and disability benefits, she said she often struggles to afford the specialized foods and therapies that her sons need.
To have politicians “tell us that they’re going to take away even more for what it’s costing us to fight for them?” Aguilar said. “It’ll affect countless families in an incalculable way.”
Beyond Party Lines
In the end, despite Trump’s hard line against public benefits during his presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic led Congress to deliver an emergency boost to many of the programs he consistently fought against.
Many people subsequently felt the loss of their enhanced SNAP allotments, continuous Medicaid enrollment and expanded child tax credits when those emergency measures expired in recent years. Though the administration of President Joe Biden attempted to extend some of the temporary relief, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress stymied those efforts, arguing that the pandemic’s threat had long passed.
As pandemic relief expired, the number of Americans living in poverty shot up by 14.5 million in 2022 — the sharpest single-year increase on record — after plummeting to a record low of 8% the year before.
Antipoverty advocates point to the statistics as proof that a stronger social safety net is possible — and potentially life-changing. They also argue that the fact that so many Americans lost their enhanced benefits under the Biden administration is evidence that both parties are failing their most vulnerable constituents, even if Republicans in Congress played a primary role in blocking their extension.
Tammy Rosing, 47, a mental health adviser and advocate who relies on Medicaid and who experienced homelessness earlier this year, lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Trump hosted a town hall this weekend. As she geared up for what was sure to be a contentious lead-up to the election, she saw a disconnect between his political rhetoric and the nonpartisan reality faced by millions of Americans.
“Contrary to what [Republicans] may think, their base is poor, too,” Rosing said. “Their base has been cut from Medicaid, too. Their base is struggling.”
