FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 23, 2025
House Budget Slashes Food Aid, Boosts Billionaires
HEAL Food Alliance Urges Senate to Reject Reconciliation Bill That Cuts SNAP, Escalates Deportations, and Guts Climate Funding
Yesterday, House Republicans passed a budget reconciliation bill that guts critical support systems for working families while giving more handouts to billionaires and corporate polluters. The bill slashes $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), greenlights $130 billion for immigration enforcement and detention, and rolls back key clean energy and environmental protections.
Below is a response from the HEAL Food Alliance:
At a time when the cost of living is rising and communities are calling for solutions rooted in care and sustainability, this bill does the opposite. It’s not about balancing budgets—it’s about advancing a political agenda that fuels fear, divides people, and lines the pockets of powerful corporate CEOs at the expense of the rest of us.
“Programs like SNAP are a hand up—not a handout,” said Nichelle Harriott, Policy Director at the HEAL Food Alliance. “But now republican leaders and their corporate allies are pushing the manufactured lie that there’s not enough to go around. They’re choosing to take food away from children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities so they can afford more tax breaks for billionaires. SNAP helps more than 41 million people afford groceries, and those dollars flow directly into local communities, supporting our farmers and rural economies. Congress should be expanding support for families—not snatching food from lunchboxes and dinner tables.”
The bill also includes a massive investment in detention and deportation: $16 billion to expand ICE and $48 billion for detention centers. These funds target immigrant communities — especially undocumented farm workers who make up nearly 40% of the people who work to feed us.
“This bill punishes the very people who grow and prepare our food,” said Navina Khanna, Executive Director of the HEAL Food Alliance. “Instead of honoring food and farm workers, it criminalizes them—pouring billions into ICE and detention centers that terrorize communities and tear families apart. Increased enforcement doesn’t make us safer. It pushes people into the shadows so that they don’t go to the doctor, don’t go to church, and don’t support local businesses. It erodes trust and connection in our communities.”
In addition, the bill rolls back critical climate and environmental protections—stripping clean energy tax credits, killing pollution standards for cars and trucks, and gutting funding for national parks and climate resilience programs.
“House Republicans didn’t just vote to cut food and care—they voted for climate chaos,” added Khanna. “They’re opening the floodgates for more pollution, more climate disasters like hurricanes and fires, and more suffering, while shielding corporate polluters and the fossil fuel industry from accountability. At a time when farmers, working people, and everyday people are already bearing the brunt of climate change, this is the exact opposite of what we need.”
This budget will take us down the wrong path. According to the Congressional Budget Office, over the next eight years household resources for the poorest Americans would decrease by 4% under this bill—while the wealthiest households would see a 4% gain. The HEAL Food Alliance strongly urges the Senate to reject this disastrous bill – and instead invest in care, climate, and community.
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The HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance is a national multi-sector, multi-racial coalition. HEAL is led by its member-organizations, who represent about two million rural and urban farmers, ranchers, fishers, farm and food chain workers, Indigenous groups, scientists, public health advocates, policy experts, and community organizers united in their commitment to transformed food and farm systems.