Bay Area food banks are sounding the alarm about proposed cuts to a critical federal food assistance program that could result in the loss of up to 9.5 billion meals per year nationally, leaving more families hungry and further straining already overwhelmed hunger-relief nonprofits.

Congressional Republicans, through the budget reconciliation bill, are looking to make drastic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food benefits to more than 42 million Americans.

The elimination of roughly $300 billion in federal food benefits over the next decade could impact more than 7 million people — including 2 million children — who would see their food assistance slashed or terminated, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank.

On Tuesday morning, leaders at five of the Bay Area’s largest food banks, which provide food assistance from Santa Clara County to the Oregon border, gathered at Second Harvest of Silicon Valley in San Jose to call on elected officials to protect what SF-Marin Food Bank Executive Director Tanis Crosby called “the most effective anti-poverty tool that we have in this country.”

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, which passed through the House of Representatives last month, would restructure SNAP and require each state to increase its funding share. It would also impose more work requirements, and raise the cut-off age from 55 to 65 for the end of these requirements.

The Urban Institute recently found that 480,000 families with someone between the age 55 to 64 would lose benefits entirely, and another 312,000 would receive lower benefits.

Gutting food assistance could be especially devastating in California, where roughly 5.4 million residents rely on SNAP, called CalFresh locally, including 1.5 million children and nearly 1.1 million seniors. During the 2024-25 fiscal year, federal funds made up 99% of total funds for CalFresh, according to the California Budget and Policy Center.

Leslie Bacho, the CEO of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, said that the proposed cuts are the “greatest rollback of food assistance that we have seen in our modern U.S. history” and come at a time when they’re seeing a “historic level of need.”