WASHINGTON — Republicans are arguing the elimination of food benefits for more than 4 million people, including up to 1.5 million children, won’t hurt them in November, downplaying the decline as a positive outcome of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” the party nearly unanimously passed into law last year.

The legislation imposed new “work requirements” and shifted costs onto states, leading to an unprecedented enrollment drop, with more than 4 million fewer individuals and 2 million fewer households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, according to the latest federal data. As of April, 37 million Americans in 20 million households still received benefits.

Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) was one of several House Republicans who hesitated to vote for the bill because of its cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. More than 27% of households in his district receive SNAP benefits, compared to 17% nationally. The district is a toss-up in November’s election, but Valadao said he’s not sweating the SNAP decline because it was driven partly by an expanded limit on benefits for unemployed adults without young children.

“When you look at work requirements and you drive across the Central Valley, I represent a lot of very hardworking people that are out there picking grapes, working on farms, working oil fields in the hot sun, and the idea that there are people out there that have the ability to work and choose not to, have no dependents, no disabilities, is something I agree is what the average voter would expect from their neighbors and their fellow countrymen,” Valadao told HuffPost.

Randy Villegas, Valadao’s Democratic opponent, said voters in their district rely on food assistance while the cost of housing, gas and groceries keeps going up.

“Working people in the Central Valley are struggling to feed their families because David Valadao voted to cut SNAP in order to give tax breaks to billionaires,” Villegas said in an emailed statement. “Unlike Valadao, my focus in Congress will be to give working people a break, not billionaires.”

The Big Beautiful Bill, which used cuts to SNAP and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts that disproportionately benefit wealthy households, is so unpopular that Republicans now refer to it as the Working Families Tax Cut. But Republicans have sought to shield themselves from criticism by branding their cuts as work requirements and fraud reduction. Polls going back years have shown most voters favor the idea of requiring able-bodied adults to work or volunteer at least part-time as a condition of benefits eligibility.

Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees nutrition programs, said the enrollment decline merely validates the policy Republicans enacted.

“I think it just indicates that there are a lot of people on there that weren’t working. The states are working very hard now to enroll people in a proper way, and it is what it is,” Boozman told HuffPost.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal D.C. think tank, has estimated more than 1.5 million children have been purged from the program, meaning the cuts haven’t solely targeted adult loafers, as Republicans have claimed. (Children are counted as receiving benefits because their parent or guardian’s SNAP allotment is adjusted based on how many people are in the household.) The impact on child enrollment likely reflects states trimming their rolls to avoid the coming cost burden that will take effect next year in states with high rates of erroneous payments.

“Without immediate congressional action to delay this cost shift for all states, the unfolding emergency will only worsen as more children are cut off from the food assistance their families need to afford nutritious food,” CBPP’s Joseph Llobrera wrote last week.

Rep Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) is one of 13 Democrats representing a House district that voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. He highlighted the SNAP cuts last year in a tour of his district, where 22% of households are enrolled in the program.

“We have about 18,000 less New Mexicans on SNAP over the last year or so. Ten thousand of them are children, 70% of them are seniors or children,” Vasquez told HuffPost. “As a result of this big nasty bill and the work requirements that have been imposed and the red tape, we’re seeing more kids and more seniors go hungry in New Mexico.”

Vasquez’s Republican challenger, Greg Cunningham, lamented in a June radio interview that New Mexico is a net taker of federal revenue and that New Mexicans have lost their work ethic.

“When you accept government acceptance, I mean assistance as a way of life, you’re enslaved,” Cunningham said. “Your ceiling is capped. Other people are making decisions for you, and as a human being, I think that that is fundamentally wrong. We have got to open up that spirit, that American spirit again.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the first name of Vasquez’s Republican challenger. It is Greg Cunningham.

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