‘Trying to do the best we can’: Va. lawmakers, beneficiaries brace for SNAP changes

Richmond resident Asia Broadie is juggling being a single parent, a restaurant worker and a nursing assistant student whose apartment rent absorbs much of her income. On Monday in Capitol Square, alongside U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, and state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Richmond, Brody said the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is essential for keeping food on her family’s plates. 

Broadie shared her insights as the lawmakers vowed to shoulder forthcoming federal changes to SNAP  — which critics say could result in people getting less food assistance or dropping off the program entirely —as best they can.

After a Republican majority in Congress passed a major reconciliation bill this summer, states are expected to potentially absorb additional costs for SNAP, and will likely impose additional verification requirements for recipients. 

A recent analysis from Voices for Virginia’s Children estimates nearly 447,000 families are at risk of losing at least some of their SNAP benefits.  

“They frame us as lazy people, mooching off the government,” Broadie said of Republicans in Congress and others who support the SNAP rollback. “But I work full time plus I go to school.”

Ensuring her children are well-fed helps them focus better in school, Broadie added. She would like for them to be on track to pursue their dream careers someday. As for her own future, she hopes she can someday buy a house that she can pass down to them. 

Another speaker at Monday’s event, The Market at 25th CEO Derek Houston, emphasized how SNAP doesn’t just enable income-challenged families’ access to healthy foods, but also boosts the grocery stores that serve them. 

Church Hill, eastern and southern parts of Richmond had been identified as “food deserts.” The term describes an area where there are no grocery stores nearby and residents have to travel further to shop or rely on less nutritious and highly processed foods most often found in bodegas or gas stations. The lack of a local grocery store often correlates with some combination of either low density, low-income residents or the lingering effects of racial redlining — a historic practice that excluded or prevented Black families from living in certain areas. 

So, The Market at 25th opened a few years ago in Church Hill, aware that many of its patrons would be SNAP recipients, with the mission of bringing more food to the area. 

“Big chains weren’t willing to invest in putting a store in a largely lower-income neighborhood,” Houston said. 

He and McClellan noted that SNAP also benefits grocers by helping their clients be able to buy better food. The state  has a program called Virginia Fresh Match that helps SNAP recipients stretch their value with purchases of fruits and vegetables. 

It gives Broadie peace of mind and helps create healthy habits for her children, she said. Houston suggested state lawmakers work to protect the program and strengthen it. 

As chair of the Education and Health Committee, and a current lieutenant governor candidate, Hashmi is keeping a watchful eye of how federal impacts can shift state actions. 

“Cutting food assistance funds will not make hunger go away,” Hashmi said. 

As a former state lawmaker and now a federal one, McClellan said her former colleagues like Hashmi and whoever becomes the next governor will need to deal with the effects of the reconciliation bill Congress passed this summer, which she and Democrats at the state and congressional levels opposed.

She said that the state legislature is going to have to “fill this hole that could be going to our public schools” or to “lowering the cost of childcare.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Glenn Youngkin has directed the state to find ways to avoid taking on extra costs. An executive order he issued this month aims to help reduce error rates — a measure of overpayments and underpayments of SNAP benefits. This is because the reconciliation bill will require states with higher error rates to pay a portion of SNAP benefits to recipients, a check that the federal government has historically written. 

Virginia’s 12% error rate, outlined by Youngkin in the directive, must drop to 6% by 2027 to avoid paying $270 million annually. 

The work is expected to be complicated for local governments, which administer food assistance and which will now need to use their staffs to more tightly scrutinize recipients’ expenses and household compositions. The extra work to catch errors could be costly or burdensome in itself, but Youngkin’s directive also suggests exploring public-private partnerships “to free up capacity at local social service agencies so that more efforts can be directed toward reducing Virginia’s SNAP error rate.”

He added in a presentation to the state legislature’s finance committees this month that he will address the recent changes to Medicaid and SNAP in his December submission to the biennium budget. As the outgoing governor, he can present a budget that the next one can use as a starting point in 2026. 

In the meantime, McClellan stressed that Democrats in Congress are gearing up efforts to walk back public health and nutrition components of the reconciliation bill, which she said could be devastating. 

Missouri Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley recently introduced a bill to prevent further Medicaid cuts, McClellan noted. He’d cautioned his party about the reconciliation bill before ultimately siding with them to pass it. 

“The more pressure you put on my colleagues, the more likely they are to reverse these damaging cuts before they do too much damage for us to fix,” McClellan said. “Your advocacy is working, keep it up.”

Broadie, the Richmond resident, made a call to action for lawmakers to act with empathy.

“No one knows where life is going to take them or whether they might one day need SNAP,” she said. “Someone could have been in an accident and can’t work. Someone could have fallen on tough times — we’re all just trying to do the best we can.”

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