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Minnesota could pay additional $86 million annually thanks to SNAP cuts in Trump tax bill • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-07
Minnesota taxpayers could be on the hook for about $86 million per year in additional costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law he signed earlier this month. The federal government is also expected to cut nearly $40 million earmarked for Minnesota to defray administrative costs of the food program.
SNAP provides food assistance to over 400,000 low-income Minnesotans each month. SNAP beneficiaries receive about $6 per person per day; the program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the states, helping more than 42 million people nationwide.
Minnesota has relatively low SNAP participation compared to other states, but the new law forces states to pay out a share of SNAP benefits based on their payment error rates.
Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Department of Children, Youth and Families, said Tuesday that the state’s payment error rate is not a measure of fraud but of the unintentional mistakes made around processing applications. In 2024, Minnesota had an error rate of 8.98% compared to the national average of 10.93%.
Based on the 2024 error rate, Minnesota would pay about $86 million more annually for the SNAP program under the Trump law, DCYF estimates.
Separately, the new law also reduces the federal reimbursement rate states receive for administrative costs; the agency estimates that will cost Minnesota $39 million. The cost-sharing portion of the bill won’t go into effect until fiscal year 2028.
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress scoured SNAP and other safety net programs, including Medicaid, to find money to help finance tax cuts — whose biggest beneficiaries are the wealthiest families — as well as an increase in defense spending and $160 billion for immigration enforcement. (Even with the cuts, however, the bill will add significantly to the national debt.)
Minnesota elected officials — and ultimately the voters — will have to make hard decisions in the coming years about whether to replace the loss of federal funding for safety net programs by raising taxes or cutting state spending in other areas. Unlike the federal government, Minnesota has a constitutional obligation to balance its budget.
In addition to the new state cost-sharing for SNAP, Trump’s tax bill also expands work requirements for adults to those under age 65, up from age 55, and to families with children older than 13. In Minnesota, about 29,000 additional adults will need to meet the work requirements or risk losing their benefits.
The purported goal of the work requirements is to force recipients to get jobs so they won’t need SNAP assistance in the future, but research shows that work requirements don’t increase employment or earnings. The overwhelming outcome is that people lose their benefits.
Trump’s bill also restricts SNAP to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, meaning that the 8,000 SNAP recipients who are refugees, asylees or hold another legal immigration status will not be eligible.
The Trump administration has also asked states to share the information of food aid recipients, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Tuesday joined a federal lawsuit enjoining that request.
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