Bay Area braces for Trump’s tougher CalFresh rules

Tens of thousands of CalFresh recipients in the Bay Area — including veterans and homeless people — will soon have to comply with federal work requirements to keep their food assistance, as officials project 665,000 Californians will lose eligibility and food banks brace for longer lines.

Along with work requirements for Medi-Cal, the state health insurance plan for low-income people, President Donald Trump’s signature H.R. 1 law tightens rules for families and individuals to receive CalFresh starting June 1. The law expands existing work requirements to include more people, such as veterans, homeless people and parents of teenagers.

CalFresh is the state version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which sends an average $189 per month to low-income and impoverished Californians for food. About 5 million California residents receive the help. Immigrants without legal status are not eligible.

Republicans have defended the policy as a cost-saving measure that will promote self-sufficiency. But county officials and anti-hunger advocates said the new requirements will force more people to food banks in the Bay Area, where food insecurity spiked during the pandemic and has never returned to pre-pandemic levels. Grocery prices are also rising fast.

“Month by month, it will be a growing wave of people who are cut off,” said Jared Call, public policy director at California Food Banks, a nonprofit representing 43 food banks statewide. “People will turn to food banks.”

National research has found that earlier work requirements for SNAP did not increase employment, led to surges in demand at food banks and drove worse health outcomes.

Sara Bleich, professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former nutrition official under President Joe Biden, said SNAP reduces hunger. Food insecurity is linked to “a whole host” of poor health outcomes, such as heart disease and obesity, she said

“And those are all expensive,” Bleich said.

Starting in June, certain enrollees will have to prove they spend at least 20 hours a week working, taking classes or doing community service when they sign up or reapply for benefits.

Homeless people, veterans and young adults who aged out of the foster care system will have to comply or receive no more than three months of assistance in a three-year period. So will adults between 55 and 64 years old and parents of children older than 14.

In California’s estimates, the requirements will disproportionately affect homeless people and older adults.

However, the federal law keeps a slew of exemptions from work requirements, including for people with disabilities and young children, and it makes a new carve-out for Native Americans.

Thousands of people are expected to lose CalFresh coverage in the Bay Area, where about 650,000 people are enrolled. In Santa Clara County, the work requirements will apply to about 40% of the 130,000 residents on CalFresh, a county spokesperson said in an email, putting their benefits “at risk.”

“H.R. 1 threatens access to essential food assistance at a time when many families are already struggling to put food on the table, food pantries are operating at capacity and food insecurity is rising nationwide,” Santa Clara County executive James Williams said in a statement.

The exact impact will depend on whether county officials and social service providers can make good on their vows to identify exemptions for as many recipients as possible, and help them find work and volunteering opportunities.

State officials are planning to automatically flag health exemptions in the files of CalFresh recipients who are also on Medi-Cal — a program reaching much of the same population. Locally, Santa Clara County, Alameda County and others are directing their eligibility workers to help enrollees submit paperwork to prove their incomes and connect them to opportunities.

“As a county organization, we are doing everything we can to keep eligible residents enrolled in CalFresh,” Williams said.

Food bank officials throughout the state told reporters Wednesday they expect food distribution lines to grow. In Silicon Valley, Jamie Winslow said she depends on bags of groceries distributed by Sunnyvale Community Services for her and her 11-year-old son. Lines can already stretch through the parking lot and down the street, she said.

Winslow, a single mother who has been unemployed since the fall, said she has navigated reams of red tape to collect $24 a month from CalFresh. Before losing her job, she was the wellness director at a local community center, she said.

“There’s a conception that people can kind of just live off these services,” she said of CalFresh. “And it’s actually a lot of paperwork. It’s a lot of steps. I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’ve had to make. And for seemingly very little.”

Winslow will be exempt from the new work requirements because her son is younger than 14.

Along with those new rules, H.R. 1 shifts administrative costs for CalFresh from the federal government to the states. As with cuts to health programs, those costs will flow to counties. In Alameda County, officials said those will add up to about $9 million more per year. The entire H.R. 1 law will cost counties nearly $10 billion a year, according to the California State Association of Counties.

County officials are pressuring Gov. Gavin Newsom to dole out more state funding to help cover CalFresh administrative costs. But so far, the governor has offered far less than what county officials say they need. Budget negotiations are ongoing in Sacramento between Newsom and Democrats who lead the state legislature.