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Advocates say as many as 13,000 low-income Vermonters could see their federal food benefits reduced or eliminated under the budget reconciliation bill being considered by Congress.

Legislation would cause many Vermonters to lose eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The bill would also force states to pick up 5% of the program's cost, and impose potentially severe penalties for administrative errors.

Ivy Enoch, with Hunger Free Vermont, said the proposal could strip Vermonters annually in federal food benefits.

“The analyses sound really hyperbolic, but they’re not,� Enoch said Wednesday. “These proposals are unprecedented and truly devastating."

More than 65,000 Vermont residents receive SNAP benefits, and most of them, according to Enoch, are children, older Vermonters or people with disabilities. Federal legislation that’s now before the U.S. Senate includes work requirements for SNAP beneficiaries and a freeze on the formula used to calculate benefits. It would also eliminate eligibility for refugees, asylees and people with other immigration statuses.

“The bottom line is that everyone tapping into SNAP right now is at risk of losing some or all of their monthly benefits,� Enoch said.

Vermont has already seen cuts to federal food funding. In March, the Trump administration canceled $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that was supposed to subsidize the sale of locally produced food for schools and organizations that assist low-income Vermonters.

While lawmakers recently adopted a state budget that includes $1.3 million for the Vermont Foodbank, that appropriation falls well short of the $5 million the organization had been seeking.

“It’s just not enough to continue to do the work at the level that we have needed to do it since the pandemic,� said Carrie Baker Stahler, with the Vermont Foodbank.

Stahler said there’s no way that state-funded programs, local food shelves and other charitable organizations will be able to make up for potential losses in SNAP. And she said it’s unclear whether lawmakers and the governor will be willing, or able, to meaningfully offset those losses.

“I think the amount of money we’re talking about will make that difficult,� Stahler said. “Is there a will to spend $25 million to address food security? I don’t know.�

At his weekly media briefing on Wednesday, Scott said proposed cuts to SNAP, Medicaid and other federal programs are the reason that he and lawmakers created such unusually large reserve funds in the fiscal year 2026 budget, which begins on July 1.

The University of Vermont

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State lawmakers have fenced off about $100 million in anticipated revenue surpluses next year, and have about $300 million in other reserve accounts.

“That’s why I wanted to limit the amount of spending this year � to make sure that we had enough funding to backfill in areas that we need to backfill,� Scott said.

Scott, however, cautioned that there would likely be competing demands for that money.

“We’ll have to see what they actually pass and the impact on us to then prioritize from there,� Scott said. “Obviously SNAP benefits are important, but we have to just make sure that we know the full extent of this before we react.�

The federal budget bill also carries risks for Vermont’s farms, according to Maddie Kempner, with the Vermont chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association.

“These drastic cuts to SNAP that are being proposed are obviously going to massively increase food insecurity, but they also are going to harm our farmers here in the state who grow a lot of food that is purchased using SNAP dollars,� Kempner said.

Kempner said many farms are still reeling from two consecutive years of summer flooding that resulted in more than $50 million in crop losses statewide, according to estimates from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.

NOFA-VT and other agricultural organizations asked state lawmakers for $20 million this year for a “farm security fund� that would have helped farmers withstand weather-related losses in the future. Lawmakers did not devote any money to the program this year.

“Unfortunately we, and I think farmers in our state, are bracing for the reality that we’re likely to continue to see pretty extreme weather and growing conditions year after year going forward,� Kempner said. “So we’re very concerned about the lack of a meaningful farm-support safety net at the state level going into this growing season.�

Westminster Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun, who sits on the House Committee on Agriculture and Food Resiliency, said food security and a thriving agriculture sector are key priorities for the Legislature.

“We want our people to be fed. We want our farmers to be able to continue to produce in our state,� Bos-Lun said this week. “And yet at the same time, this year was tough. It was tough in many, many ways. And in terms of funding, I think the will was there to provide funding for a lot of important food and farm programs, but the funding didn’t always follow those.�

Some U.S. Senate Republicans about the proposed spending cuts to SNAP. Vermont Sen. Peter Welch said he and Sen. Bernie Sanders will be working to convince their GOP counterparts not merely to revise the bill, but to spike it altogether.

“My goal is to kill the bill,� Welch said during a remote town hall meeting with Vermont residents Tuesday evening. “This is not an amendable deal. We’re not talking about fussing around on the edges.�