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This is a guest post by Johanna Doren, the direct markets & local food access director at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. Their work focuses on increasing Vermonters’ access to local food, while ensuring farmers get a fair price.
In 2025, 619 Vermont food retailers accepted SNAP benefits from customers. By August 2026, just 574 were authorized to do so. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that the number of retailers in Vermont that can accept SNAP declined in the past year at more than double the rate we’ve seen in the previous five years.
This trend is not isolated to Vermont. It’s a pattern across the country (like this case in Hawaii), as retailers contend with increasing hurdles intentionally making it difficult to accept SNAP.
SNAP, known as 3SquaresVT in our state, is our nation’s first line of defense against hunger.
In July 2025, Congress passed H.R.1, or the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” H.R.1 included historic slashes to SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, including a $187 billion cut over the next decade, in exchange for permanent tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations. Nationally, 5.8 million people have lost SNAP benefits between the passage of H.R.1 in July 2025 and April 2026. In Vermont alone, more than 5,000 people have lost their benefits — an 8% decline.
While the federal government chips away at people's ability to purchase food, less common in public discourse is the simultaneous damage it is imparting on stores, farmers markets, and farms offering a place for community members to spend their SNAP dollars.
While USDA claims it is focusing on dispelling rampant “waste, fraud, and abuse” of SNAP, fraudulent use of SNAP is incredibly uncommon and not addressed by USDA’s new efforts.
It just means that low-income Vermonters have fewer places to buy food affordably, and reduced sales threaten stores’ business viability. If the federal administration successfully diminishes the infrastructure of this program, we may see lasting impacts for years to come on retailers, vulnerable Vermonters and, ultimately, our local economy.
SNAP retailers are being targeted through two main channels to decrease participation:
1. Overly burdensome requirements for authorization and eligibility
2. Increased surveillance and harsher enforcement
Stricter retailer requirements
Recently, the already strenuous SNAP retailer authorization process has included more hoops for applicants to jump through.
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration has been requesting a wide variety of additional materials, not in the application itself, on tight timelines. More than 30% of the administration’s staffing was reduced in 2025, making it harder to reach staff for support, or to confirm whether follow-up paperwork was received. If a SNAP retailer authorization application is not completed within 30 days, the applicant must start over.
Compounding application hurdles, USDA announced increased retailer stocking standards earlier this year. Starting Nov. 4, SNAP-authorized retailers must stock a larger variety of types of food to maintain eligibility. Ostensibly, this looks like an effort to increase healthy food options for SNAP customers. In reality it means small food retailers, general stores and some farmers markets will find it harder to accept SNAP. USDA estimates 5,000 retailers nationally will lose authorization because of this ruling.
The tremendous pressure the federal administration is placing on food retailers does not stop there. USDA has urged states to apply for legally dubious food restrictions waivers to further restrict what SNAP shoppers can buy with their benefits. Not only does this harm the autonomy of SNAP shoppers, but it also creates a logistical nightmare and is a costly process for businesses.
Increased oversight
A national trend of increased retail oversight has affected Vermont as well.
In 2025, three Vermont farmers markets received unexpected visits from third-party “SNAP field reviewers,” which is atypical outside of the authorization process. Over the past several months, the more pernicious “secret shoppers” have been active in stores, trying to sting cashiers by attempting to use benefits to purchase items not eligible for SNAP. This happened in Cambridge earlier this year.
Actively entrapping stores and revoking authorization as the immediate consequence is particularly concerning in rural areas, where the store stripped of its SNAP authorization may be the only place to buy food nearby.
Economic impact of declining participation
During economic downturns, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Currently, $11.3 million in SNAP flows into the Vermont economy every month, down from $12.4 million per month a year ago. Losing the ability to accept SNAP as tender, plus the shrinking number of community members receiving SNAP, means that small businesses lose an important income source.
We need to know that our taxpayer dollars are investing in programs with integrity. Time and time again, SNAP has proven to be an effective anti-poverty tool and economic stimulus with systems to maintain the negligible rates of fraud.
Slashing this program, both for participants and retailers, unfairly complicates business operations for Vermont’s farms and food retailers, and cruelly strips away basic needs for children, older adults and folks with disabilities — with the only clear benefit being financial support for the billionaires receiving tax cuts through the same bills that slash SNAP.
Our state and federal governments should be finding every way possible to make it simpler, not more complicated, to ensure that the people who live, work, grow food and eat here can thrive.