They Got a Raise.. Now Washington Wants to Take Their Kids' Groceries

It's a Thursday night at a grocery store in Cleveland. A mom is at the register with a cart full of the basics: milk, bread, peanut butter, a family pack of chicken, bananas her kids will eat in two days. She swipes her EBT card. Declined.

She didn't do anything wrong. She got a raise.

That scene could soon be a lot more common. On Nov. 10, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a proposed rule to end a SNAP policy called broad-based categorical eligibility, or BBCE.^[1] USDA says the change is meant to "preserve benefits for the truly needy."^[1] By the agency's own estimate, about 17.6 percent of SNAP participants would lose benefits in the first year. That's 3.2 million households and 6.3 million people.^[1]

Tennessee only adopted BBCE earlier this year.^[5] It raised the income limit for food assistance to 200 percent of the poverty line and dropped the asset test for most households.^[5] For the first time, a working family here could take a raise or keep a little money in the bank without losing their groceries.

Without BBCE, SNAP has a hard cutoff at 130 percent of the poverty line. Go over it by a dollar and benefits stop. Savings can count against you too.^[6]

This isn't the first try. The first Trump administration proposed nearly the same rule in 2019. USDA later withdrew it.^[2] Now it's back.

Public comments are open until Dec. 10.^[1]

The families below are composites. Each one is built from situations this rule would hit. They are not real names, but they are real lives, and you probably know someone like each of them.

Kayla, the mom who got a raise

Kayla is 29. She's a CNA at a nursing home, raising a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old on her own. Last month her boss gave her a 50-cent raise. She cried in the parking lot because somebody finally noticed how hard she works.

The Tennessee Justice Center has run the numbers on a raise like that. Fifty cents an hour is about $86 more a month. If it pushes her past the old SNAP cutoff, she loses $161 a month in groceries. She ends up $75 a month behind.^[7]

Seventy-five dollars is a week of school lunches and after-school snacks. It's the fresh fruit. It's the difference between dinner and cereal for dinner.

Under BBCE, Kayla keeps a smaller benefit and her raise actually helps her.^[7] Without it, the system punishes her for doing better. So she faces a choice no parent should have to make: turn down extra shifts, or watch her kids eat less.

Her kids, at school the next morning

Kayla's 6-year-old shows up to first grade on an empty stomach. Hungry kids aren't lazy. They're hungry.

Researchers have studied this for decades. Food-insecure kids are almost twice as likely to be in fair or poor health. They're more likely to end up in the hospital.^[8] They miss school more often and are more likely to repeat a grade.^[9][10] Kindergartners in homes with even mild food hardship score lower and learn less over the school year.^[11]

A teacher sees it as a kid who can't sit still, who snaps at a friend, who puts his head down after lunch. It looks like a behavior problem. Often it's a food problem.

And it doesn't stop at the SNAP card. SNAP is a key that opens other doors. Rep. Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, warned this rule would also affect eligibility for WIC and Summer EBT.^[12] Policy analysts have raised the same concern about free school meals.^[13] The kid who loses dinner at home can lose the easy path to breakfast and lunch at school too.^[3]

Ray and Linda, raising their grandkids

Ray is 63 and Linda is 61. Their daughter is out of the picture, so they're raising two grandsons on Ray's disability check and Linda's part-time job at a dollar store.

They have about $4,000 in a savings account. It took them eight years to put that together. It's for the day the Buick dies, or the day one of them doesn't wake up and the other has to bury them.

Under Tennessee's old SNAP rules, savings like that could get a household turned down.^[14] BBCE dropped that test for most families.^[5] If the rule goes away, Ray and Linda may have to spend down the cushion they built before they can get help buying food.

That's when the hard math starts in their kitchen. Ray has high blood pressure. Linda has diabetes. Doctors have a name for what comes next: "treat or eat."^[15] In one national study of adults with chronic illness, about 1 in 3 couldn't afford food, medicine or both. Adults who struggled to afford food were much more likely to skip medicine because of cost.^[15] Some skipped it entirely so they could eat.

So Ray cuts his pills in half to make them last, and Linda skips lunch so the boys can have seconds. Nobody at the store ever sees it.

What happens when people can't afford food

Hunger rarely looks like an empty table. It looks like trade-offs.

Parents eat last, or not at all. They water down milk and stretch a pound of meat across three nights. They buy the cheapest calories they can find, which are usually the worst for you. They pay the light bill late to buy groceries, then pay the late fee. They borrow from a title loan place and spend the next year digging out.

The body keeps score. Adults in households with very low food security are at least 40 percent more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic condition like high blood pressure, heart disease or stroke.^[16] Adults in food-insecure homes are about 50 percent more likely to land in the emergency room or get admitted to the hospital, and to stay longer once they're there.^[17]

That bill doesn't disappear when a family loses SNAP. It shows up in the ER, in the school counselor's office, at the church pantry and the community fridge. One study found people in food-insecure households spend about 45 percent more on medical costs in a year than people in food-secure households.^[18] We all end up paying, just later and at a higher price.

What it means for Bradley County

This summer, about 9,200 people in roughly 4,600 Bradley County households got SNAP, according to state data.^[19] That's close to $1.9 million a month spent at local grocery stores and retailers.^[19] When families lose it, those stores lose it too.

We don't know yet how many local families qualified through Tennessee's new rules. As a rough gauge, if our county lost the same share USDA expects nationally, that would be about 1,600 of our neighbors.^[19][1]

This also lands on top of cuts already in motion. The 2025 federal budget law cut $180 billion from SNAP and added work requirements. Since those changes started, Tennessee has lost more than 100,000 SNAP participants.

There are better ways to save money

USDA says this is about protecting taxpayers. If that's the goal, there are better places to look.

Fix the paperwork, not the families. Tennessee's SNAP payment error rate was 9.44 percent in fiscal 2025.^[20] USDA itself says error rates are not fraud rates. Most errors are mistakes, like a caseworker getting someone's expenses wrong.^[21] Because of that rate, Tennessee could owe about $171 million a year in SNAP costs starting in October 2027, according to the Tennessee Justice Center.^[22] Get the rate under 6 percent and that bill drops to zero.^[22] Training, staffing and better systems save real money, and nobody goes hungry for it.

Don't add more paperwork. BBCE is simpler to run.^[4] Without it, caseworkers have to check bank balances and recalculate eligibility every time an account moves a little. More moving parts means more mistakes.^[13] Tennessee already pays 75 percent of SNAP's administrative costs, up from 50 percent.^[23] More casework means more state tax dollars.

Close the loophole at the top. The same 2025 law that cut SNAP also loosened limits on farm subsidy payments. Researchers at the University of Illinois showed how a layered farm business could now collect about $1.24 million a year.^[24] The small family farms around Bradley County aren't the ones collecting seven figures. Tightening those caps would save money without taking a single sandwich out of a kid's lunchbox.

What you can do

Comments are open through Dec. 10.^[25] Go to regulations.gov and search "SNAP categorical eligibility." Tell them who you are and who you know. Tell them about your Kayla, your Ray and Linda. Real stories belong in the public record, and the agency has to answer substantive comments.^[26]

Call your member of Congress and both of Tennessee's senators.

If you get SNAP now, nothing changes today. A proposed rule isn't a final rule.^[26] Keep reporting income changes and don't miss your recertification dates.

Every family in this story is doing what we ask people to do. They work, they save, and they take care of their own. A food program that cuts them off for that isn't protecting anybody.

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Sources

• The Hill, "USDA proposes SNAP eligibility change" (Nov. 2026): https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6211586-usda-snap-eligibility-proposal/
• Tennessee Justice Center, "A Guide to Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility": https://www.tnjustice.org/post/bbce
• Tennessee Justice Center, "End the SNAP Benefits Cliff with BBCE": https://www.tnjustice.org/_files/ugd/07a490_6e2db852b6684364bac63d1ca6dda303.pdf
• Tennessee Justice Center, "Protect Tennessee's Finances" (SNAP cost shift): https://www.tnjustice.org/_files/ugd/07a490_950f64997c3547fe83d8d8375a3ee12d.pdf
• Tennessee Department of Human Services, SNAP Participation Report, July 2026: https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/human-services/documents/2026-07%20SNAP%20Participation%20Report%20July%202026.pdf
• Tennessee Department of Human Services, SNAP Eligibility Information: https://www.tn.gov/humanservices/for-families/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap-eligibility-information.html
• Tennessee Lookout, "Tennessee faces estimated $220M in extra SNAP costs under new federal rules": https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/10/02/tennessee-faces-estimated-220m-in-extra-snap-costs-under-new-federal-rules/
• Tennessee Lookout, "Tennessee taxpayers could foot bill for some SNAP costs if state's error rate doesn't improve": https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/06/29/tennessee-taxpayers-could-foot-bill-for-some-snap-costs-if-states-error-rate-doesnt-improve/
• USDA Food and Nutrition Service, SNAP Quality Control: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/qc
• Food Research & Action Center, "USDA Proposal to End Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility for SNAP Would Increase Hunger": https://frac.org/blog/usda-proposal-to-end-broad-based-categorical-eligibility-for-snap-would-increase-hunger-for-families-and-children
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "SNAP's Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility Supports Working Families": https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snaps-broad-based-categorical-eligibility-supports-working-families-older
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Food-Insecure Households Likelier to Have Chronic Diseases, Higher Health Costs": https://www.cbpp.org/blog/food-insecure-households-likelier-to-have-chronic-diseases-higher-health-costs
• American Youth Policy Forum, "Food for Thought: How Food Insecurity Affects a Child's Education": https://aypf.org/blog/food-for-thought-how-food-insecurity-affects-a-childs-education/
• Berkowitz et al., "Treat or Eat," American Journal of Medicine (2014): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24440543/
• farmdoc daily, University of Illinois, "The Farm Bill in Reconciliation: Loophole as Rosetta Stone": https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/07/the-farm-bill-in-reconciliation-loophole-as-rosetta-stone-review-and-comment.html