The Library Media — Editorial · Opinion & Investigations — Punching Down
The Government Counted 6.3 Million People. Then It Filed the Rule Anyway.
By Catalina Clarke
First, a distinction, because this week it matters. Last week’s column was about the fall of 2025 — a government shutdown, a contingency fund, and a fight over whether food benefits would go out at all. This week’s column is about something else entirely, and it is happening now: a rulemaking, published in the Federal Register on November 10, 2026, in which the United States Department of Agriculture proposes to end the way most states currently qualify working households for food assistance. No shutdown. No standoff. Just a document, a signature, and a thirty-day window to answer it.
The document is “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Reforming Categorical Eligibility” (FR Doc. 2026-22936), signed by Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden. To understand what it does, you have to understand the door it closes.
Since the late 1980s, federal law has allowed a household that already qualifies for one means-tested program to be categorically eligible for SNAP — one determination of need instead of two, so a family does not have to prove the same poverty twice to two different offices. After welfare reform in 1996, states used services funded by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — often as modest as a brochure or a hotline — to extend that door: this is broad-based categorical eligibility, BBCE. Forty-six of the fifty-three state agencies that run SNAP use it. It lets states qualify households up to 200 percent of the federal poverty line and waive the asset test, so a parent does not have to spend down the savings that stand between her family and a transmission repair in order to eat.
The proposed rule narrows the door to households receiving TANF cash assistance — the smallest and hardest-to-get slice of the program. Everyone carried in by the broader door would have to qualify the old way, or not at all.
Here is what that means, and the numbers are not ours. They are USDA’s, from the rule’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis. At full effect in fiscal 2029, 3.2 million households — 6.3 million people, 17.6 percent of everyone on SNAP — would no longer receive benefits. Federal spending falls by about $44.6 billion across fiscal 2027–2031. In the same analysis, the department concedes that state administrative costs rise by roughly $928.5 million, because every household the broad door carried in with one determination must now be processed the slow way, and that the burden shifted onto households themselves comes to about $71.7 million more. The rule’s Civil Rights Impact Analysis concedes potential effects on households headed by Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial heads of household, and on households with children and elderly members.
The door does not close on SNAP alone. Because school meals are tied to SNAP eligibility by direct certification, USDA estimates 1.78 million children would lose their automatic qualification for free school meals. Most — 1.66 million — could get back in by filing a separate application; 93,000 would drop to reduced-price meals, 28,000 to full price, and school districts would inherit roughly 197,000 additional meal applications to process by hand. About 42,000 children stand to lose Summer EBT benefits, and USDA counts 5,500 people who would lose WIC eligibility on the same turn of the key.
Now the administration’s case, made as strongly as it can be made — because it deserves to be answered at its strongest, not its weakest. Categorical eligibility, USDA argues, was created in 1985–88 for one purpose: to spare households and caseworkers a duplicate determination. It was not created to expand who qualifies. What states did with it after 1996 — raising the effective gross income limit to 200 percent of poverty, eliminating asset tests altogether — is, in the rule’s words, “a de facto increase in the SNAP gross income and resource statutory limits” that “goes beyond flexibility to reduce administrative burdens.” If Congress wants the limits at 200 percent, the administration says, Congress can vote for that; an agency should not arrive there by brochure. The rule would restore the statutory test and aim benefits at households that “have sufficiently demonstrated need by qualifying for TANF assistance.” And the department has invited comment on alternative approaches to the same goal. That invitation is in the document. Hold onto it; we will come back to it.
The answer, from the people who work the other side of this counter, came the same day. Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, called the proposal another attack on hungry Americans and pointed out what BBCE is for the states that use it: a tool, maintained across more than twenty years and numerous Farm Bills, that streamlines applications, cuts state administrative costs and red tape, and reaches working parents on low wages, older adults on fixed incomes, and families in high-cost areas. FRAC’s count is starker than the department’s: since the tax law was enacted in July 2025, more than 5.5 million people have already lost access to SNAP, and this rule would take it from 6.3 million more. Congress, FRAC notes, considered these same cuts during budget reconciliation and rejected them; the last time this rule was attempted, in 2019, more than 183,000 people wrote in opposition. FRAC objects to the process as much as the substance — thirty days to comment on a change of this size — and asks the administration to rescind the rule outright.
Filed the same day, and not to be confused with it, is a companion proposal (FR Doc. 2026-22944) codifying the 2025 law’s changes to the work-requirement clock for able-bodied adults without dependents. If the first rule decides who gets in the door, this one decides how long the clock runs once you are in. Coverage of the document (the National Association of Counties’ summary, November 10) describes the time limit applying at ages 18 through 64, exceptions for parents only where a child under 14 is in the home, and area waivers tightened to places with unemployment above 10 percent. Its comment window closes the same day: December 10, 2026.
So what can be done — because this column does not only count costs. Five things, in order of the calendar.
First, comment. The window is open now and closes December 10. The docket is FNA-2026-0661. USDA has expressly invited alternative approaches, and a specific, documented comment record is not a gesture: it is what the agency must answer in a final rule, and what a court reads later. The 183,000 who wrote in 2019 are part of why that attempt was withdrawn in 2021.
Second, legislate. Congress built categorical eligibility in the 1980s to kill duplicate paperwork. If that purpose still commands a majority, Congress can write BBCE’s parameters into the statute and end the pendulum — proposed in 2019, withdrawn in 2021, re-proposed in 2026 — that leaves 6.3 million people’s groceries riding on which administration holds the pen.
Third, protect the children separately. A child’s free lunch should not depend on which eligibility pathway a TANF definition happens to leave standing. Direct certification for school meals can be decoupled or grandfathered on its own terms, so 1.78 million children’s lunch status is not collateral to a paperwork definition.
Fourth, count honestly. The rule’s savings are real, and so are its costs: $928.5 million in new state administrative spending and $71.7 million in new household burden, by the department’s own arithmetic. A serious version of the administration’s own targeting goal would publish the net figure, not the gross one.
Fifth, make the soft landing automatic. USDA itself says roughly 97 percent of the affected school-meals children could re-qualify through income. If eligibility narrows, re-certification by data match — automatic, notice-based, no family re-proving its life on paper — should be the default, not an application-by-application scramble.
There is a contrast inside this record worth sitting with. The forty-six state agencies that adopted BBCE were not cheating. They used a flexibility Congress built, for exactly the purpose a 1988 Senate report described: one determination, no duplicate paperwork, food reaching working households just above the federal line. And at the top of this publication’s own Report Card, the design philosophy runs the other way entirely — MacKenzie Scott gives to hunger organizations unrestricted and at speed, aid built around the recipient’s reality rather than the administrator’s categories. Two philosophies of help: one starts with the person and designs backward; the other starts with the category and counts who falls out.
USDA’s document, to its credit, does the counting. Six million three hundred thousand people. Three point two million households. One point seven eight million children’s lunches. The department priced the exits, published the price, and opened a thirty-day door for the public to answer. The comment window is the story now. It closes December 10.
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Follow-ups from earlier columns. Southaven, Mississippi: On November 4, the state environmental agency MDEQ — whose July 2025 letter had told xAI its 27 turbines needed no permit — responded to the federal court’s October 30 order holding the turbines were never exempt by stating, as reported by Mississippi Today, that the agency “is not a party to that case and the order is not binding upon the agency.” The Mississippi Permit Board then heard the appeal of the permanent plant permit on November 9–10; its decision has not yet been posted. The regulator and the court now disagree about whether a permit was ever required, and the turbines are running while they disagree. Alaska: The premise of the Justice Department’s suit to block certification — that Sen. Dan S. Sullivan might lose by fewer votes than the namesake candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. received — is dissolving in the count. As of the Alaska Division of Elections release of Tuesday night, November 10, Mary Peltola leads Sullivan by 4,250 votes while Sullivan Jr. holds 4,027: the margin now exceeds the namesake’s entire total. Ranked-choice tabulation is scheduled November 18.
Catalina Clarke
Punching Down, The Library Media
From The Library — the estate of our family.
