The story of food insecurity isn’t just written through black-and-white facts and figures. The story is lived through the people for whom food soon may be harder to reach.
Missouri, like other states across the country, is changing guidelines for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding. The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, 2025, will make it harder for many people to access SNAP.
Under the new legislation, states are responsible for a greater share of the program’s administrative costs, and may soon incur penalties for “error” rates over certain levels. For participants themselves, it includes enhanced work requirements for able-bodied adults and, at least in Missouri, increased verification after decades of self-attestation.
The bottom line: The changes may mean greater barriers to food.
Whatever the reality, the facts make it clear that challenging times are ahead. Nine months of the increased cost share have been funded, according to Jordan Browning, director of communications at Ozarks Food Harvest, southwest Missouri’s Feeding America partner.
“For right now, the program is funded – but you can see how it can change rapidly in a year,” Browning said. “Our legislators may have to make tough choices to keep the program operating.”
And those tough choices may trickle down to Missourians – and others across the country – whose access to food may be changing.
Understanding the Challenges and Increased Verification
It should be said that SNAP is not for everyone who just wants free food. A person must be quite poor to qualify, and there are multiple steps in the application process and to continue receiving funding.
SNAP served 623,099 people in July 2026 across Missouri, with an average monthly payment of $197 per person, according to the state Department of Social Services. Those dollars are distributed on electronic payment cards and allow recipients to purchase food at their local stores.
Currently, a family of four has to earn a gross annual income below $41,796 to qualify for SNAP in Missouri. In addition to the income qualifier, recipients must have a Social Security number, and most must not have more than $3,000 in assets, with some covered exemptions. Successful applicants are typically covered for a year or two – a status that’s achieved after typically completing a 10-page application, an interview, and often a second interview midway through their current period.
“There’s so many different ways to not get on the program or to be booted off the program fairly easily,” Browning noted, giving an example of the interview portion of the process:
“You have to do the interview over the phone, and if you miss that phone call, suddenly you try (to) call back into the call center, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got a two-hour wait,’ and it may hang up on you at some point,” Browning said. “It becomes extremely challenging to get on the program, and then … even once you’re on the program – if you move and your mailing doesn’t get to you – suddenly you’re kicked off of the program because you never got your recertification mail.”
Jordan Browning is director of communications for Ozarks Food Harvest, a Feeding America partner serving southwest Missouri. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
For the first time in 25 years, a part of the process has become more complicated: increased verification to avoid penalties for what the new law considers “errors” in SNAP benefits.
In Missouri, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the state’s penalty would be $150 million with its current 8.67% error rate. That’s on top of the increase in administrative costs from 50% to 75%.
According to Missouri’s Department of Social Services, however, the financial realities are unknown.
“While independent analyses and initial estimates suggest that Missouri could face substantial new financial obligations starting in FY 2028, the exact penalty and cost-share figures cannot be verified at this time,” Baylee Watts, media director for the department, wrote me in an email.
Since 2001, Watts wrote, the state agency has allowed applicants to self-attest certain expenses such as utility costs, housing expenses, and childcare costs to streamline processing of their applications. Now, those applicants have to provide proof.
“To comply with strict program integrity rules in H.R. 1 and reduce administrative errors, [the agency] will once again require applicants to provide physical documentation (such as lease agreements, utility bills, and childcare receipts) to verify these expenses before they can be applied to reduce countable income,” Watts explained.
If Missouri’s error rate – determined through “a statistically valid, random sampling of active SNAP cases throughout the year,” Watts shared – is higher than 6%, the state is fined. With Missouri’s current rate of 8.67%, that’s where the potential $150 million figure factors in.
“They verify every detail of the case to identify if a household was overpaid or underpaid by even a small margin,” Watts wrote, noting the rates are calculated using a federal statistical formula. “The verification changes starting in 2026 are a proactive measure designed to lower Missouri’s administrative error rate before these severe financial penalties are activated in FY 2028.”
That decreasing error rate may eliminate people from SNAP, even if they would have qualified per the guidelines. The New York Times found that to be true in Arizona, which enacted similar changes as Missouri in response to the new law.
I asked Watts if the department expected the changes to push people off the SNAP rolls. She didn’t answer the question, but instead provided a statement from Mandi Adams, director of Missouri Family Support Division:
“Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the SNAP program is essential to supporting Missouri families who rely on these benefits,” Adams said in the statement. “These updated verification guidelines help us make consistent, well-documented eligibility decisions while safeguarding resources for households who truly need them. The goal of the Family Support Division is to strengthen the program in a way that is fair, clear, and supportive for participants across the state.”
Seeing the People in Need
I stopped by Ozarks Food Harvest’s headquarters in late September to visit with Browning and learn more about the realities of hunger across the region. Based in Springfield, Missouri, the organization serves 270 hunger-relief organizations across 28 Ozarks counties that help nearly 90,000 individuals monthly.
Ozarks Food Harvest’s efforts are separate from SNAP, but its leaders know their work could be impacted by the changes, perhaps through more people needing assistance from food banks as SNAP coverage changes.
Ozarks Food Harvest delivers food to communities and partner pantries across 28 southwest Missouri counties. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
The organization has a department dedicated to helping people enroll in SNAP, which is where Browning began his career 14 years ago. That vantage point has shown him some of the misconceptions that persist about those seeking food assistance – most of whom, he says, do not want to be having the conversation in the first place.
“I never encountered someone who really wanted to be on that program,” Brown said. “Most people got into a very bad situation where suddenly they were laid off from a job, or the job just went away, to where suddenly they needed food, and they needed it very quickly.
“A lot of people were very worried that these benefits would take away from someone else,” he said. “Or that they didn’t want to be seen as needing assistance because that stigma is so embedded within our state, especially in the more rural sections of our service area.”
That’s the sense I get from April Haynes at the King’s Pantry in rural Seymour, Missouri, one of Ozarks Food Harvest’s partner pantries. Like the larger organization, the small food pantry is not directly tied to SNAP changes – but is still part of the system and illustrates the need and folks who are seeking this help.
“When SNAP didn’t fund last year for those couple of months, we had families of 12 coming in all of a sudden that we’d never seen before,” Haines said about the 2025 government shutdown. She also noted the fluidity of how things can change.
“I know after the SNAP fiasco when it wasn’t funded, we saw a reduction in our USDA food,” she added. “I asked, ‘Why?’ Nobody tells you why.”
Across the Ozarks, that robust-yet-fragile system is often built by kind-hearted neighbors.
Volunteers come to the pantry and help allocate and distribute items. On a recent Thursday, part of that supply included blocks of cheese. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
In Seymour, everyone except Haynes is a volunteer. Three times each month, they gather to fill shopping carts with items. The food comes from a variety of sources, including Ozarks Food Harvest, donors, and a senior-citizen support tax.
“We have a lot of what I call ‘working poor’ in this area,” she said of the clients they serve. “They’re not people that are just sitting home doing nothing. They’re working. They just don’t have enough money to make ends meet, or they’re seniors.”
Recipients come by at a set time and, once their food is ready, a volunteer calls out an identifier over a local radio frequency, and they drive to the door. It was a process put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic to help people maintain social distancing, and it worked so well that they kept it in place.
And as those folks drive up, Haynes said they aren’t defined by stereotypes of those who seek assistance to take advantage of the system.
“Not here,” she said.
What Comes Next?
All of this brings us back to the core issue – and it’s not just taxpayers’ money.
It’s about fellow Americans who may be faced with fewer food resources in the long run. It’s about rural communities that may see increasing food deserts. It’s about uncertainty.
“That’s incredibly challenging for folks who are accessing food stamps,” Browning said about the potential reductions. “But then that has really challenging widespread effects due to those folks who are spending those dollars. That’s all that money that is not coming into Missouri anymore.”
It means less money in the economy, and impacts other downstream quality-of-life issues, such as healthcare and education.
“SNAP participation is associated with reduced hospital admissions and lower health care costs,” noted the Missouri Budget Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank. “A study of low-income adults estimated SNAP participation reduced health care expenditures by $1,400 annually per person.”
Additionally, the Missouri Budget Project noted SNAP especially benefits children. “Children whose families receive SNAP do better in school, and are more likely to be economically self-sufficient as adults, compared to low-income children who do not receive SNAP benefits,” according to the organization.
Less SNAP funding also could hurt businesses that have counted on SNAP purchases as part of their regular revenue.
“It’s being spent in local grocery stores,” Browning said about SNAP funding, “so that’s incentivizing those grocery stores to stay in those communities, which is even more key in rural areas.”
If cuts in SNAP benefits occur, other social safety nets might be even more stretched than they’ve been before. And we may not even know all of the impacts, as the USDA announced in September 2025 that it was doing away with its Household Food Security Reports, which have helped provide data for where things stand with hunger. According to the press release, “These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger.”
Even though Ozarks Food Harvest does not receive most of its funding from the government, it, too, may be impacted as more people potentially seek its assistance.
Case in point: a dramatic increase in people seeking food assistance during and after the federal government’s shutdown in 2025.
“On average, we’re serving maybe about 90,000 individuals every month, and we saw that jump by about 20,000 just with the government shutdown,” Browning said. “That stayed elevated for about five months afterwards as well.”
Three times a month, people around Seymour, Missouri, come to the King’s Pantry to receive food. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
“Even though a government shutdown happens and it ends, those effects still will continue…as people try to recover from events like that,” he said. “So something like this, depending on how it goes with funding, could have incredibly dramatic effects.”
Those bigger effects aren’t things most nonprofits are equipped to cover.
“How those states will fare just depends on how their budgets are faring at the time and how much their state utilizes that program,” Browning said. “In Missouri, I mean, that’s a billion dollars worth of benefits coming into the state every single year.
“That’s a dramatic effect to see on folks being able to utilize those dollars,” he said. “But then the nonprofits that are simply not going to be able to make it up if a portion of those benefits goes away.”
The post Ozarks Notebook: Changing SNAP appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
Follow