Dive Brief:
- An Illinois congressman on Thursday pressed the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Food and Nutrition Administration to provide a state-by-state assessment of the impact the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are having on students’ access to free school meals nationwide.
- The Republican-led OBBBA, which went into effect in July 2025, made historic cuts to SNAP and imposed new eligibility and work requirements for the federal program, said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., in a letter to USDA leadership. Illinois in particular has felt the impact of those changes, he said, as the state has seen a 16% drop in SNAP enrollment since OBBBA was enacted.
- The federal SNAP cuts are also directly tied to students’ access to free meals, Krishnamoorthi said. In Illinois, for instance, between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years 47 fewer schools and 15 fewer districts participated in the Community Eligibility Provision, a federal program that helps high-poverty schools provide universal access to free school meals.
Dive Insight:
Students participating in SNAP are “directly certified” — or automatically enrolled — to receive free school meals without being required to fill out an application.
This policy can also extend to broader free meal programs, such as CEP, which allows a school or district to serve free meals to every student if at least 25% of students are directly certified through their participation in federal assistance programs like SNAP or Medicaid.
“As families lose SNAP because of new paperwork requirements rather than changes in household income, schools can fall below this threshold and lose CEP eligibility entirely, putting free meals at risk for every student who relies on them,” Krishnamoorthi said in his letter to USDA.
While citing recent data from the Food Research & Action Center, Krishnamoorthi said that Illinois was one of three states to see the largest decline nationwide in the number of schools participating in CEP during the 2025-26 school year compared to the prior year.
As schools and districts become more at risk of losing access to free meals for their students at scale, Krishnamoorthi said that the looming issue “raises serious questions about FNA’s readiness to protect children’s access to school meals as the OBBBA’s SNAP changes take full effect.”
Krishnamoorthi asked for the USDA to send a state-by-state assessment of OBBBA’s impact on school meals, among other requests, to his office by Sept. 10. He also asked the agency to assess:
- How many children have lost direct certification for free meals because of the OBBBA’s SNAP cuts.
- The steps USDA and FNA are taking to help children who are no longer directly certified to still receive free school meals.
- How it plans to help preserve schools’ CEP eligibility.
Survey results released last week by ParentsTogether Action, a national parent-led advocacy organization, found that 2 in 3 families who depend on SNAP saw their benefits shrink within the past year. The group polled over 500 respondents.
Early signs are already emerging with the start of the new school year that SNAP cuts are hindering schools and districts ability to offer free meals.
For instance, Miami-Dade County Public Schools reported in July that the large Florida district will no longer be able to participate in CEP districtwide after doing so for the past four years. Miami-Dade said it could not participate in districtwide CEP for the 2026-27 school year because it failed to meet the federal threshold to qualify for the program.
USDA did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
