Students could face more difficulty accessing free school meals and school-based health services—and schools and states could have a harder time providing them—under Congress’ sweeping budget bill passed last week, experts say.
Congress’ sprawling, megabill that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 slashes federal Medicaid spending by 15% over the next decade, affecting the fourth-largest federal funding stream for schools. It also shifts a greater share of the cost of providing food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to states.
About a third of the budget cuts to Medicaid and SNAP come from imposing work requirements on a greater portion of recipients, according to the Congressional Budget Office—including some parents of school-age children for the first time in the history of those programs.
Less federal help for those programs will likely lead states to limit low-income residents’ eligibility for those benefits, experts say. States and schools, in turn, use students’ enrollment in those benefit programs to automatically provide them with free lunches—and to trigger additional federal reimbursement that makes the math work for funding free meals.
Some governors have already said their states won’t be able to replace the funding on their own.
“That’s a huge funding cut for schools,” said Lynn Nelson, president of the National Association of School Nurses. “My biggest concern, though, is the direct impact on kids and families. That’s just going to feed an already broken health care system. It’s going to make it worse.”
Most Medicaid and SNAP funding changes in the law take effect in 2028, though work requirements take effect sooner; for Medicaid, states would have to have them in place by Dec. 31, 2026.
Changes will shift the burden of federal funding to the states, cutting into bottom lines
Under the new law, federal funding for SNAP will fall by $186 billion between now and 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill shifts costs to the states, requiring them to pay 5-15% of the cost of food benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research and advocacy group. Currently, the federal government pays for the full cost of SNAP benefits, and splits the cost of administering the benefits with states.
The federal government is poised to slash more than $1 trillion from Medicaid spending over 10 years, accounting in part for the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the budget bill will leave up to 11.8 million more people uninsured by 2034. Roughly half of American kids are on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program for children from lower-income families. While the budget bill doesn’t directly make fewer children eligible for Medicaid coverage, researchers have found that children are less likely to be insured when their parents lack coverage and less likely to receive regular medical care even when they are covered but their parents aren’t.
With food assistance, shifting more of the cost to states will force governors and legislatures to “make really tough decisions about both who is eligible for SNAP, and how they’re going to pay for that cost,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for the School Nutrition Association.
Many states participate in Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility, through which states automatically enroll low-income families that qualify for other federal assistance from programs into SNAP, which then allows students to receive free school meals automatically.
“That’s such a benefit, because you don’t lose children in the application process,” said Pratt-Heavner.
In addition, the Community Eligibility Provision allows schools where at least 25% of students receive SNAP, Medicaid, or other federal benefits to offer free school meals to all their students and receive federal reimbursement for it. Schools shoulder some of the cost if they don’t have enough students automatically enrolled in those programs.
“That’s where the domino effect really kicks in,” Pratt-Heavner said. “These provisions will force states to make really tough decisions about eligibility for SNAP that will impact how many kids are eligible and who are directly certified for free meals. That will then impact the number of schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision, and that will reduce the number of students who have access to free meals.”
It’s a departure from the pandemic era, when the federal government issued a waiver allowing all schools to serve free meals to all students. After the waiver expired in 2022, some states passed laws providing free school meals to all students.
That’s another initiative that could be ensnared in the ripple effect from the bill, Pratt-Heavner said.
States will have less funding available to support universal meal programs as they assume a greater share of the cost of providing food benefits, and lower participation in the Community Eligibility Provision would translate into less federal reimbursement for sustaining universal meal programs, she said.
Ultimately, the changes will result in fewer people receiving food assistance, said Anna Gassman-Pines, a professor of public policy at Duke University who has studied the effect of SNAP on education outcomes.
Her research found that students who took end-of-year exams closer to the beginning of their families’ SNAP benefit cycle, when their families had more money on hand to buy food, performed better in reading and math.
“Losing access to SNAP and losing access to food assistance really has the potential to harm children’s education,” she said.
Work requirements will lead to fewer parents eligible for Medicaid, SNAP
One mechanism in which people will lose access to SNAP and Medicaid is through work requirements. Some beneficiaries will have to report working or other activities such as education for 80 hours per month to remain eligible for benefits.
Those requirements were limited to able-bodied adults without dependent children, ages 18-54, enrolled in SNAP. The new law broadens SNAP work requirements and extends them to Medicaid. Parents with kids 14 and older will now be subject to those work requirements to remain eligible for both programs.
The requirements often don’t actually promote work, but instead create onerous paperwork requirements for recipients who have to regularly demonstrate they’re meeting the 80-hour-a-month requirements, Gassman-Pines said.
It leads to people losing benefits not because they’re not working or enrolled in training or education but because the paperwork proves too much of a hassle, she said. Work requirements for Medicaid will also be a new administrative responsibility for states.
“It seems pretty clear that low-income families with teens are going to lose SNAP benefits,” Gassman-Pines said.
Republican supporters of the bill in Congress have touted the work requirements in the new law as providing more people with an incentive to work and have disputed that they’ll result in steep coverage losses.
Less Medicaid coverage could translate to delayed medical care and fewer school-based services
The cuts will have two other major effects, said Nelson, president of the National Association of School Nurses.
First, if students and their families lose their coverage, they’ll likely seek medical care for problems much later than they would have otherwise.
There’s also an impact on schools.
Medicaid is the fourth largest federal funding stream for schools, and the services it pays for—nurses, physical therapy, occupational therapy, psychology—support children with disabilities. They’re also part of the math that allows schools to have clinics on site where students can receive care without leaving the building.
“I think [the cuts are] going to be huge, and I think states aren’t going to be able to make up the difference,” Nelson said. “Maybe some will, but for the most part, I don’t think they’ll be able to make up the difference.”
