Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (H.R. 7567). The bill, commonly known as the “Farm Bill,” closely resembles the flawed bill advanced by the House Agriculture Committee last month. It ignores the urgent crisis of food insecurity facing millions of students in higher education by maintaining the onerous and counterproductive student rules in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and does nothing to reverse the historic $187 billion cuts to SNAP enacted last year through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that reduced vital support for families while putting enormous strain on state budgets.
Across the country, students and families are already reeling from the high prices of everyday goods, the rising price of higher education, and the rapid implementation of OBBBA's cuts to safety net and financial aid programs that harm working students, parenting students, part-time students, and more. The Hope Center's most recent Student Basic Needs Survey finds that nearly 3-in-5 students, including 70% of Pell Grant recipients, experience food or housing insecurity. Other surveys, including Trellis Strategies' Fall 2025 Student Financial Wellness Survey, also find that students do not have sufficient cushion to withstand the shock of rising costs of attendance, and that over half of students would struggle to access $500 in cash (or credit) for an unexpected expense. Federal data from the U.S. Department of Education also consistently shows high rates of basic needs insecurity across low-income students, working students, parenting students, and Pell Grant recipients.
For these students, SNAP can be a lifeline and the difference between following their dreams and stopping out. New research released this week indicates that each additional year of receiving public benefits while in school is associated with higher odds of earning a degree. Yet due to outdated rules, confusion, and insufficient outreach, two-thirds of students who are likely eligible for the program do not receive aid.
“By locking in the damage of last year’s SNAP cuts, and failing to update the unfair and arcane student rules, the House is undermining student success while continuing to increase the ranks of families that go hungry,” said Mark Huelsman, The Hope Center’s Director of Policy & Advocacy. “The Farm Bill should include a national, bipartisan commitment to ensuring no one—student or otherwise—goes without food, and yet the House bill falls far short of those goals and values.”
The House bill fails to reverse OBBBA's devastating SNAP cuts.
OBBBA's nearly $187 billion cut to SNAP represented the largest in the program's history, and is already pushing low-income households, including many of the 1.1 million students in higher education who rely on it, off food assistance through new paperwork requirements, expanded time limits, de facto future cuts to the Thrifty Food Plan, and an unprecedented unfunded mandate that will force states to pay a higher portion of administrative costs and cover a share of SNAP benefits for the first time.
Families across the country are also reeling from the disruptions caused by the November 2025 government shutdown, during which the Administration attempted to withhold, halt, and delay SNAP benefits for tens of millions of food-insecure households. Overall, more than 3 million fewer people are accessing SNAP, and new fiscal burdens are causing states to slash higher education budgets and jobs while hiking up costs for the very students who can least afford them.
By locking in the damage of last year’s SNAP cuts, and failing to update the unfair and arcane student rules, the House is undermining student success while continuing to increase the ranks of families that go hungry. The Farm Bill should include a national, bipartisan commitment to ensuring no one—student or otherwise—goes without food, and yet the House bill falls far short of those goals and values.
Mark Huelsman
Director of Policy and Advocacy, The Hope Center
The House bill fails to offer systemic solutions to student hunger.
The bill misses a clear, bipartisan opportunity to fix SNAP's outdated student rules or address student food insecurity in ways that reduce bureaucracy and expand access to low-income students. Currently, federal law generally requires students enrolled half-time or more to work 20 hours per week in addition to their coursework, or to meet one of a series of convoluted exemptions, to qualify for support. This "work-for-food" rule is not aligned with any other federal financial aid or safety net program, and is even in direct conflict with new Medicaid rules also passed last year. It is rooted in incorrect assumptions about who today's students are, and it pushes under-resourced students toward dropping out of school rather than completing a credential. The Hope Center has been proud to lead a coalition urging Congress to modernize these rules in ways that reflect students’ experiences. Unfortunately, H.R. 7567 ignores commonsense reforms and, combined with locking in SNAP cuts, severely undercuts student success.
As the Farm Bill process moves to the Senate, we urge lawmakers to reject this approach and produce a student-centered and family-centered Farm Bill that:
- Repeals the harmful SNAP provisions in OBBBA, including the limitations on re-evaluating the Thrifty Food Plan, the new state administrative and benefit cost-sharing burdens, and the expansions of work requirements that have already begun to take food away from older Americans, parents, and veterans.
- Simplifies and modernizes SNAP's student rules by incorporating provisions from the Enhance Access to SNAP (EATS) Act, the Student Food Security Act, and other proposals that reform the student rules and work toward a system that treats enrollment in higher education as meeting activity, work, and participation requirements for income-eligible students.
- Expands students' access to nutritious meals on campus, including through pilot programs that enable community colleges to participate in nutrition assistance programs.
- Restores and protects federal data infrastructure on hunger and food insecurity—including USDA's annual Household Food Security report that, in combination with U.S. Department of Education data, gives us a better understanding of which students need support and how best to allocate resources so that policymakers, institutions, and the public can continue to respond to need.
We will continue to work alongside our partners—students, institutions of higher education, national and state higher education associations, civil rights organizations, food banks, labor unions, and service providers—to ensure that lawmakers invest in students rather than entrench cuts to the very programs that put food on their tables and credentials within their reach.