It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Serna filling in for Brian today. Welcome back, everyone.

Now, we've got a prime example of how national politics can be felt deeply at the local level.

While Congress won't be releasing their budget until September, New York City officials and anti-hunger groups are already anticipating major cuts to the federal food stamps program.

This comes as New Yorkers rely on food assistance programs more than ever before,

a whopping 1.8 million people, 500,000 of which are children. WMYC and Gothamist's

homelessness and poverty reporter Karen Yee hit the streets to talk to New Yorkers about this issue.

She joins us now with her findings. Hi, Karen. Welcome

to the Brian Laird Show. Hey, it's good to be here. Let's start in Washington where this issue

stems from. Why are experts tackling hunger in New York City expecting cuts to the federal

food assistance programs in the next budget? So some of the budget proposals that have been put forth

essentially would dictate to the House Agriculture Committee to cut $230 billion from the programs

they oversee, which the majority of which is SNAP. So there's no way they can make these cuts

without severely cutting back SNAP. You know, the Senate put forth a budget resolution that puts

those cuts at $1 billion. And so we're still waiting to see what the final number will look like.

But the problem here is just the level of cuts that the government wants to make to snap is just

going to have a huge effect on new workers, right? And so they've put

forward a series, a sort of a menu of options as to how they would make these cuts. And one of

those is rolling back an update to SNAP benefits, right? So in 2021, the government decided to

actually increase how much people were getting for SNAP to reflect modern diets.

Right now we eat more fruits and vegetables, food costs have increased.

And so it was a dramatic increase that hadn't happened for many, many years.

And so one of the proposals would be to scale that back, right?

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