The department says the change would keep benefits for the truly needy and close a path that let households above federal income and asset limits qualify; its own analysis estimates 6.3 million people nationwide would lose benefits by 2029.
The Agriculture Department on Tuesday proposed narrowing who qualifies automatically for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal food benefit California runs as CalFresh. The proposed rule, “Reforming Categorical Eligibility”, was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 10 and is open for public comment until Dec. 10 under docket FNA-2026-0661.
Under the Food and Nutrition Act, households whose members receive benefits from a program funded by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the federal welfare block grant, are “categorically eligible” for SNAP; they skip the program’s separate income and asset tests. Current regulations count both cash welfare and non-cash TANF-funded services, such as brochures or referral lines, as qualifying benefits. The proposal would limit categorical eligibility to households that receive TANF “assistance” as federal rules define it, which is essentially ongoing cash aid.
The department’s case
USDA, in the rule signed by Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden, argues that the current approach has outgrown its purpose. Categorical eligibility was meant to spare caseworkers redundant paperwork, the department says, not to raise income limits. Since 2009, it notes, states have used what is called broad-based categorical eligibility to confer SNAP eligibility through TANF-funded benefits of “nominal value,” such as “an informational pamphlet or an 800-number to call to locate TANF-funded services,” a practice the department says has created “a de facto and significant increase in the SNAP gross income” limit and allowed some states to eliminate asset tests entirely.
The change, it says, would ensure that states apply categorical eligibility “in accordance with its original intent” and address concerns that broad-based eligibility expanded the program “beyond congressionally approved limits intended to preserve benefits for the truly needy.”
The department estimates that in fiscal 2024, 2.5 million participating households had resources above the SNAP limit and 1.2 million had incomes above the federal limits. It says more than 840,000 one- and two-person households received the minimum benefit in 2024 only because of broad-based eligibility, nearly $214 million in benefits. It cites a 2012 Government Accountability Office finding that broad-based households with incomes above federal limits had payment errors at 17.2 percent, compared with 6.7 percent for other households, and says that in states with no asset test, a household with “a million dollars or more in available resources but no regular income” could qualify. “It is irresponsible to Congress and the taxpayer to support regulations that permit this practice,” the rule says.
The first Trump administration proposed a similar limit in 2019; the Biden administration withdrew it in 2021.
The numbers
According to the department’s regulatory impact analysis, about 3.2 million households containing 6.3 million people, 17.6 percent of SNAP participants, would no longer receive benefits in fiscal 2029, the first year of full effect. Federal benefit spending would fall by about $44.6 billion from fiscal 2027 through 2031, and state benefit spending by about $6.2 billion; state administrative costs would rise by about $928.5 million.
The effects would reach school cafeterias. About 1.78 million children would lose automatic eligibility for free school meals, though the department estimates about 97 percent would still qualify through a separate application; 28,000 would pay full price. About 42,000 children could lose summer grocery benefits beginning in 2029, and about 5,500 women, infants and children could lose WIC eligibility.
What it could mean in California
California is among the 46 of 53 state SNAP agencies that had adopted broad-based eligibility as of December 2025, according to the rule. Since July 2014, under the state’s version of broad-based eligibility, called Modified Categorical Eligibility, CalFresh households with gross incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level qualify if they are issued, or have online access to, a TANF-funded family-planning brochure known as PUB 275, according to a California Department of Social Services fact sheet. Receiving the brochure also exempts those households from the asset test. Under the proposal, households not receiving cash aid through CalWORKs, the state’s TANF program, would face the federal gross income limit, 130 percent of the poverty level for most households, and an asset test.
The rule does not estimate effects by state, and The Inquirer found no California estimate from the state. Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Santa Barbara Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement that changes under last year’s federal tax and spending law had already cost “over 300,000 people in California” their food assistance since July 2025. “It is just heartless to do this again to families who are already struggling under the Trump administration’s failed economic policies,” he said. Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the committee’s ranking Democrat, called the rule “heartless and cruel,” CNBC reported.
The department acknowledges in the rule that the change may increase administrative burden on states. It also invites comments on “alternative approaches to limit categorical eligibility with TANF that achieve the same policy goals.”
The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, the California Budget & Policy Center, Nourish California and the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco, did not respond to questions sent Wednesday.
Anjali Venkatram covers national news and the federal policies, court rulings and trends that reach California, for National News. More from Anjali Venkatram
