This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Natalie Kitroeff. This is “The Daily.” The United States is undergoing one of the biggest changes to its social safety net in recent history, with huge numbers of people dropping out of the government’s food assistance program. Nowhere has it been more dramatic than in Arizona.

Today, my colleague Jason DeParle explains why so many people there are suddenly losing access to this key benefit and the implications all this could have for the rest of the country.

It’s Wednesday, August 5.

Jason, we want to talk to you today about these drastic changes that have been made to the food stamp program known as SNAP. When Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill passed about a year ago, we understood that Republicans were planning to pay for it by making cuts to the government’s welfare programs. You have been following that story all the way to Arizona. So just walk me through why you went there.

Arizona is the place in the country that’s had the largest reduction in food stamps since the passage of the Big, Beautiful Bill. The rolls there have fallen in half. 450,000 people have lost nutrition aid there.

That’s just a huge number.

Yes, it includes more than 100,000 children as well.

And why is that? Why has the drop off been so steep?

The law imposed dramatic changes in the SNAP program, but mostly deferred those changes until after the midterm elections. Arizona was the state that moved most aggressively to make changes.

And Jason, just remind us what those changes actually were and the argument that Republicans made for why they needed to implement them.

Republicans saw SNAP as a bloated program. It had more than doubled in size since 2000. About 1 in 8 Americans get snap. And its annual cost had exceeded $100 billion. They thought it needed reining in. They thought it served as a work disincentive. They thought that offering people nutrition aid persuaded some not to work or not to work as much as they could. They were concerned that some people committed fraud to get on it.

But those were all long-standing concerns. What really drove the changes last year in Congress was the need for money to finance President Trump’s tax cuts, which I think it’s worth remembering, largely went to the wealthy. The reason they did what they did, when they did it was because they wanted money for President Trump’s tax cuts.

And how do they go about shrinking the program? What do they actually do?

The thing that’s gotten the most attention, and is probably the easiest to understand is that they expanded work requirements. More people have to work in order to qualify for benefits. It used to be that people 55 and older were exempt. Now, they’ve expanded that up to age 65. So you’ve got people in their late 50s and early 60s who, for the first time, face work requirements in order to get SNAP benefits.

Got it.

But that’s not really the main factor in what’s driving the caseload declines in Arizona. The thing that’s really driving this is a change in how SNAP is funded. Historically, the federal government had paid all the benefits. States paid part of the administrative costs of running a SNAP program. But all the food stamp money came from the federal government.

But now, this new law says that if a state makes too many mistakes — and we’re mostly talking small administrative errors — they’ll have to pay up to 15 percent percent of the benefits. And in some states, that could cost more than $1 billion a year.

Basically, what the federal government is doing, if I understand this correctly, is telling the states that if they mess up their payments, they’re going to end up shouldering part of the cost of this program. And it could be a lot of money.

Yes. They’re basically saying if you can’t keep what’s known as your error rate down, you’ll lose access to a bunch of federal money, so much money that some states may not be able to keep running the program at all. I think it’s worth stopping to consider for a moment. I mean, can you imagine a state without a food stamp program?

So in order to avoid a $300 million penalty and potentially losing the program altogether, Arizona officials made dramatic changes to the program. And the rolls instantly began falling. They fell much farther and much faster than Arizona officials imagined.

And what we found in our reporting was that these are people who, by and large, remain eligible for aid but simply can’t get it because they’re stuck in webs of red tape.

One of the people caught in that red tape is a woman my colleague Olivia Natt and I met outside a food stamp office in Phoenix. Her name is Alejandro Casillas.

She’s 28 years old. She’s a mother of two. And she’s working. But she doesn’t make enough to feed her family. She gave us a version of a story we had heard in other places, of notices that were impossible to comply with.

Why was it so hard for her to get her benefits, Jason? Did she explain that?

Once you apply for SNAP benefits, you have to have an interview with a special caseworker. And it has to happen within two weeks of the application.

She couldn’t get through on the phone to have the interview. So she left her home, came into the SNAP office on her day off. And they told her can’t do the interview here. You have to call.

We listened to her make the call.

That call, like others, went nowhere. They told her she’d just have to wait for a call back. So now, here she is in limbo, unable to get access to food stamps. But what really struck me about her was just how angry and defeated she seemed. She told us she’d been going to food banks, that she’d stopped breastfeeding her child because she feared she lacked nutrients.

Oh, no.

And then, she said something really remarkable. She said she’d been having fantasies about stealing food.

You know, she wasn’t apologetic. She wasn’t defiant. She wasn’t justifying it. She was just saying —

Here it is. This is the way I’m living right now.

She was really desperate, obviously.

Yes, and part of what was remarkable about Alejandro’s story was that there was nothing remarkable about it. We heard echoes of that with almost everybody we talked to. I mean, if one or two people tells you a story like that, you can always think, well, maybe it’s an extraordinary circumstance. But it was the norm, not the exception in Arizona.

I have to say, Jason, hearing that and hearing how common it sounds like Alejandro’s experience is, it sounds like the system completely broke down in a sense. How did that happen?

It did. It completely broke down. It was a perfect storm. But a lot of it can be traced back to the decision Arizona made to change the paperwork requirements. It used to be that applicants could just walk in the office and tell a caseworker how many people lived in the household and who they were.

Now, applicants had to go to neighbors or friends and get a written declaration of who lived in the household. And if the neighbor or friend failed to sign the letter or failed to put their phone number on the letter, you’d have to start all over again. It used to be if you had panhandling income, you gave the office your best guess of how much you made. Now, they asked applicants with panhandling income to go back and get written documentation of the money people had dropped in the jars.

What?

They knew that there was no way that people could go get that. They said that to us. When we talked to them, they rolled their eyes and said, yes, this is absurd. But this is what we have to do. And in the end, if they can’t get the written documentation, we’ll take their word for it. But we have to make them go out and try. And of course, if you make people go out and try, a lot of them just don’t come back.

And another thing that made things worse is that Arizona just happened to make deep cuts in caseworkers at the same time the federal government was passing this bill. So it lost 1/3 of its caseworkers at the very time it was asking people to submit more paperwork.

Meaning there were way fewer people working in these offices processing these claims. The staff was just reduced.

More paperwork, fewer people to look at it. Yes.

Right. And so, it’s that combination of factors in Arizona that then leads to half a million people suddenly losing their benefits.

Yes. And, boy, did it affect them in profound ways. People were skipping meals. People were having household quarrels over food. They were selling blood plasma to get money to buy food. They were falling behind on the rent. And remember, these are people who, by and large, remain eligible for SNAP. That was definitely the case with a woman we met named Dee McDonald.

[SOMBER MUSIC]

We’ll be right back.

Dee’s a 65-year-old grandmother in Mesa, Arizona, can’t be more than 5-feet tall. She was wearing a knit beret.

I can’t swear that she hugged me when I walked in. But it felt like she did. I think she did.

We were there to talk to her about food stamps and food insecurity. And she’d spent the previous day baking biscuits and assembling a fruit platter for us.

I’ve never had a churro donut. They were fantastic.

The last thing I wanted to do was to impose on her like that. But that’s an expression of who she is. She’s a very warm, welcoming, grandmotherly woman.

And what’s Dee’s story? What did she tell you about her experience with SNAP?

So we sat around her table. And she told us about her life. It’d been a pretty exciting life at one point.

She was a kind of roadie. She was a wardrobe technician for traveling rock bands.

She went on tour with Britney Spears and Jimmy Buffett.

Awesome.

The dream of a lifetime.

But when she was in her early 40s, her son fell into some trouble.

And she wound up taking care of five grandsons.

For a while, after taking in the grandkids, she worked. She had a job at a racetrack, among other things. But eventually, she needed to spend full-time taking care of the grandkids. And she turned to SNAP for help.

About 15 years ago, she started receiving SNAP and has been on it since.

She was receiving about $700 a month in SNAP aid. That’s about 1/3 of her income. The rest mostly comes from Social Security.

And then last fall, all of a sudden, the benefits stopped.

And why? Why did they stop? What happened?

Last fall, Dee’s benefits were up for renewal. Once a year, people on SNAP have to go through this.

It had always been matter of fact for her. You submit your income. Her income hadn’t changed. You submit your address. Her address hadn’t changed.

She filed her paperwork in October in the middle of the government shutdown. The food stamp program was in disarray nationwide. She didn’t get an answer. And she wasn’t particularly worried at that time.

And then, the next month, she didn’t get an answer again.

The next month, she goes down to the office itself.

Thanksgiving comes and goes. Christmas comes and goes. At the start of the new year —

She makes 100 calls in a single month, still can’t get through.

When she finally does in February, they tell her case has been closed.

Why? Why is her case closed?

The case worker tells her that she submitted the wrong form.

Dee gets a little bit of income from the child welfare system. She submitted an income form from 2024, when she should have submitted an income form from 2025. She’d never done that before. But this time, she made a mistake.

And with the new changes to SNAP, that mistake was enough to disenroll her from the program. It’s worth saying that denying eligible people doesn’t actually count as a mistake under the new system.

She realizes she has two choices. She can appeal and try to get that decision overturned. If she does that, she might be able to get all the back benefits from the months of aid she’s owed. Or she can start all over again and file a new application, in which case she wouldn’t get the back benefits. The very nice caseworker she reached on the phone and tried very hard to be helpful, told her that she should appeal. So she did.

And how did that go?

She never heard anything back. It’s been five months. She’s still waiting.

Do I think members of Congress in writing the new laws intended to take SNAP away from 65-year-old grandmothers because of a casual mistake? No, but the critics said at the time that this kind of bureaucratic gridlock was a foreseeable element of the new rules that they put in place. And in fact, many people warned that these new administrative rules would throw the program into disarray.

Jason, it sounds like this is how the federal changes to SNAP actually can end up forcing people off the program. Because now, states are so incentivized to reduce their errors that they do so, perhaps, at the cost of actually providing this benefit.

Exactly. If the state had sent Dee her payment with that incorrect form in its files, it would have counted it as an error. So you can see it becomes much more risky for the state to provide benefits than to simply close the case altogether. So the net effect of all this is that it’s become much more difficult for eligible families like Dee’s to get access to the program, even though they’re entitled to it.

And for the Republicans who advocated for these changes, does a story like Dee’s give them pause? Or do they see the system working as they intended? Are they actually encouraged, maybe, by the notion that the state is taking this seriously and trying to take more accountability for how it spends taxpayer money?

I don’t think anybody’s in favor of administrative errors. It’s important to keep error rates down in order to make the best use of public resources, to save money, to keep public support for the program. The question is, at what cost?

For the most part, I think Republicans have celebrated the caseload declines without looking too closely at what’s behind them. The top Republican in the Arizona State Senate said there’s massive caseload decline because there was massive fraud. Nationally, the rolls are down about 4 and 1/2 million people, or maybe 10 percent percent of the people getting SNAP have left the rolls.

The White House has celebrated this as proof that President Trump’s program is working, so has the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins. Between them, they’ve argued that the rolls are falling because they’re rooting out fraud or barring undocumented immigrants from accessing the program. Certainly, in a program as large as SNAP, there’s always going to be individual fraud. But I haven’t seen anything that would suggest wide-scale, systemic fraud that could explain this kind of caseload decline. Certainly, that’s not what we saw in Arizona. And I don’t think there’s evidence of it in other states either.

You said that Arizona has been the first to see this kind of impact because it moved so fast to make these changes to comply with the Big, Beautiful Bill. Are we expecting to see this dramatic of an effect in other states?

I think most people would guess that Arizona is an extreme example. But we don’t really. Nationwide, the rules haven’t taken place yet. If you recall, Congress delayed the changes they made until after the midterm elections. So for the most part, we haven’t seen the impact of these changes yet. But there are reasons to suspect that other states may respond in similar ways to Arizona.

Starting in November, the federal government’s going to cut in half the amount of administrative money it gives states to run the program. That could cause states to lay off caseworkers, just as Arizona did. Some other states have already had caseload declines of 15 percent to 20 percent. Some states have very low error rates and don’t need to change much.

Some states have extremely high error rates and have to make radical changes to avoid big federal penalties. We don’t enough about how they’ll respond, how good their computer systems are, or how many caseworkers they have to predict with much confidence how these changes will affect the caseload nationwide. But if you look at Arizona, there’s reason to be concerned.

Jason, you’ve been covering poverty for four decades. What are you thinking about this moment about how significant it is?

I’m thinking about what an important program SNAP is. SNAP is the closest thing the United States has to a universal income. It serves such a wide variety of people. It serves the working poor. It serves children. It serves the elderly. It serves veterans. And it provides a basic commodity, food. It was clear from the moment the law passed that this was landmark legislation. But I don’t think anybody expected the degree of caseload decline that we’ve seen in Arizona.

I’ve thought about a smaller SNAP program. I’ve imagined a SNAP program with more work requirements. I’ve imagined a SNAP program with lower benefits. I don’t think I’ve ever imagined a landscape in which a SNAP program simply didn’t exist.

And it’s just mind boggling to think that these penalties, these costs could be so steep some states might choose to end the program altogether. That’s a real possibility.

Well, Jason, thanks for being here.

Thank you, Natalie.

[SOMBER MUSIC]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the party’s primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan, defeating his moderate opponent Haley Stevens in a closely watched race that remained too close to call until Wednesday morning. His win marked a milestone for the progressive wing of the Democratic party in a swing state … because showed that the movement’s appeal has reached beyond traditionally liberal states, like New York. El-Sayed, who campaigned on universal health care and cutting off military aid to Israel, was massively outspent in the race by Stevens, who received $60 million dollars in outside money.

And —

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are making progress. Under the framework being considered, ships entering the Persian Gulf would have to travel through a channel controlled by Iran, while outbound ships would travel through a channel near Oman.

[FAST MUSIC]

Today’s episode was produced by Olivia Natt, Anna Foley, and Carlos Prieto with help from Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Marc Georges with help from Patricia Willens, and contains music by Pat McCusker, Elisheba Ittoop, Dan Powell, and Marion Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.