‘A terrible time to be poor’: Cuts to SNAP benefits will hit 700,000 hungry Americans (Source usatoday.com) Alisa Holteen likes to play a game where she imagines a life different from the ones she’s living. “What would it be like,” she wonders, “to never have to worry about money?” She posed this question recently at the homeless camp where she lives in Northeast Portland, chatting with friends outside her tent about what it would be like to have an unlimited supply of cash. Certainly, they’d always be warm and clean and have a roof over their heads, they agreed. Perhaps best of all, she recalled wistfully, she’d never go hungry.

Holteen, 32, is one of an estimated 36 million Americans on food stamps, a federal benefits program that President Donald Trump’s administration wants to cut dramatically.

There are lots of potential changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the table, but earlier this month the Trump administration announced the first major change will be implemented early next year, limiting benefits available to able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49 – like Holteen – who do not have dependents. The change will not affect children and their parents, people over 50, people with disabilities or pregnant women. Hunger is a problem across the U.S., with 37 million people suffering from food insecurity. That means roughly 1 in 10 Americans are hungry. And nearly one-third, or 11 million, are children.