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San Francisco, United States – Greer Dove’s days are filled with studying business and finance, working as a college administrator, and caring for her eight-year-old daughter who has special needs. But once a week, a single parent, Dove, makes sure to pop into a food pantry in Marin County, California to pick up vegetables, fruits and other foods. Along with federal food benefits, she maintains her own home.
“We need this to continue working at a high level,” he says. “She likes fruit, so I try to get it,” she says of her daughter.
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Dove, who is also looking for a full-time job, has worked in restaurants, event management, marketing, TV programming, office management and payroll for years. But she has been with the federal government’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) for six years, and with the food bank, for more than three years. Before she got food benefits, Nkhunda was feeding her daughter all she had and skipping meals or looking around the offices where she worked to get her through the day.
United States President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which was passed in June, cut SNAP benefits by more than $186bn over the next 10 years to increase income tax cuts. This could result in more than 3 million people nationwide, and 665,000 recipients in California, losing benefits for such food, according to estimates.
“This is going to put a lot of pressure on food security,” said Andrew Cheyne, manager of public relations and public affairs for the County Welfare Directors Association of California.
California to tax billionaires wantwhich wants to impose a one-time tax of 5 percent on the wealth of more than 200 billion of the government to solve the difference in the income created by the OBBBA, received more than 1.5 million signatures in April. He is expected to be on the ballot in mid-November.
Although about $100bn expected to be raised through taxes will cover the health insurance gap created by the OBBBA, 10 per cent will be used to pay for food rebates.
In California, where more than 5.3 million people, more than any other state, receive food, the effects of the cuts began to be felt in April when 72,000 immigrants began to lose benefits. From June onwards, approximately 600,000 recipients will be screened for eligibility to work. Recipients, including the homeless, the elderly, foster youth and the elderly, will work, study or volunteer to receive food. Failure to meet work requirements for three months will result in their food benefits being reduced.
Brian Galle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the authors of the tax report, said that in California, the state that started the game industry, “jobs are increasing.
Making impossible decisions
On a recent Friday morning, new members lined up to sign up at La Ofrenda’s whitewashed food bank in San Francisco’s Mission district. The food bank produces fresh vegetables, fruits and breads that have been donated by food stores that are about to run out.
Gladys Lee had been on the train for 45 minutes when a friend told her about the news. Lee worked at the downtown San Francisco Hyatt hotel as a room cleaner for three decades until a back injury left him unable to push the heavy cleaning carts and he left. After seven years of struggling to find work, food became scarce, and Lee found his way to La Ofrenda. He packed what he could in a cardboard box and carried it in his hands to board the train on the way back.
Food benefit rolls have decreased by more than 3.3 million nationally in the six months from July 2025, when OBBBA was launched, to January 2026.
In California, Calfresh rolls, as the food is known in the state, decreased by 288,000 or 6 percent from July 2025 to February 2026, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank based in Washington, DC. This reduction in rolls occurred even before the OBBBA cuts began.
Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, wrote in a recent article that the decline in SNAP rolls reflects a strong economy and job growth.
“The decline in SNAP recipients confirms that more Americans are moving from welfare to work,” he wrote. “It’s no secret that Trump’s tax cuts and tax cuts are leading to economic growth led by the private sector, which is adding billions to businesses, wage growth”.
But the unemployment rate has stabilized at about 4.4 percent as of July 2025, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while SNAP rolls have declined.
“The last time we saw such a large decline, such a rapid decline, except during natural disasters, was three decades ago when health care reform was enacted,” says Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of Federal SNAP Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Nationwide, SNAP rolls were down 8 percent, while in California, they were down 5.5 percent, in part because work requirements were delayed until June, when other states had already met them.
In La Ofrenda, Roberto Alfaro, head of the non-profit organization Homey, says he started a food bank when food prices rose during the pandemic. They are sitting on top, he said. Now they see people working day and night and coming for food while they have rent.
“People are making impossible decisions,” says Keely O’Brien, a policy advocate at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.
Although California is the fourth largest economy in the world, the growth has been hampered by the high cost of living.
“With the high cost of housing and utilities, few families can spend that much of their money on food,” says O’Brien.
The OBBA has also changed the cost of public service programs to states, and beginning next year, a portion of the cost of SNAP will also fall to states.
Jaren Sorkow, director of the Children’s Defense Fund said: “In order for things to go well, you are creating many governments, disagreements with the authorities.
That has already led to a 51 percent drop in SNAP rolls in Arizona, which has begun using the OBBBA cuts, according to data from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Making something out of nothing
Several measures to address the $100bn gap in health insurance coverage and food benefits created by the OBBBA have been floated in California. Chief among these is a one-time tax of 5 percent on those with assets over one billion dollars. The tax will raise $100bn, its authors estimate.
As it looks set to be voted on in the November election, it is facing growing opposition from government tech entrepreneurs who have offered to fund the tax cuts.
Tech entrepreneurs have called it the 9/11 of the economy, saying that crowdfunding, including startup sharing, will lead to a flight of capital and innovation from the government. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google Inc, now lives a week in Nevada and a week in his offices in the Bay Area and has spent more than $57m in opposition to the billionaire tax. He supported two measures that reduce the tax rate for billionaires, which received 1.4 million and 1.5 million signatures and should also be in the November election.
One of these measures prevents future taxes on personal assets, including wealth, savings and retirement funds, and intellectual property. Some would increase the number of taxpayer-funded programs, and include language that would prevent billions in tax dollars.
In a recent statement to The New York Times, Brin said: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and I know the destructive, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union.”
A coalition of corporations that support the billionaire tax is preparing for the coming battle. “We hope to be successful,” says Kris Cuaresma-Primm, director of the coalition that supports the billions tax. “We will continue to tell people that there is a lot of pain because of the injuries, and we want to make up for the losses from the OBBBA.”
Giulia Varaschin, senior adviser on tax law at the International Tax Observatory, which recently collaborated on a study on wealth taxes, says there is little academic evidence that such taxes make the rich move away from the mainstream. “There are slow-moving trips that have very few, if any, financial implications,” he says.
The study, conducted by economist Gabriel Zucman, who supports the California billionaire tax, found that wealth taxes did not raise as much revenue as expected in several European countries and ended up being too small.
Varaschin says this was because these taxes were levied on a large group of the wealthy, which included homeowners or small businesses, rather than the super-rich or billionaires. The taxpayers did not have enough money to pay, and instead the government exempted them. These taxes have also not affected property, where most of the wealth of the super-rich lies, Varaschin says.
California’s tax system solves this problem by taxing billionaires with taxable assets, including shares in corporations.
Daniel Shaviro, professor of taxation at New York University, Wayne Perry, says, “Traditionally, these taxes are difficult to enforce because the tax authorities do not want to go after these people.”
Even if it passes, “the governor can just say it’s not important to him and not enforce it,” Shaviro says, referring to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed the tax.
But Primm says, “The Governor did not agree with the people of California on this”.
Newsom is in the final year of his last term as governor. However, almost all of the candidates for governor on June 2, with the exception of billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running as a progressive Democrat, also oppose the move. Although some said that this will lead to the flight of money, others say that the spending plan does not include funding for education, which was not cut in the OBBBA.
Greer Dove, who gets food through Calfresh and the San Francisco Marin Food Bank for herself and her daughter, says the incoming benefits are worrying. “The anxiety of all this is increasing. I could be next.”
