Congress Could Get Millions of People Off of SNAP by Raising the Minimum Wage, but It Hasn’t — for 16 Years

There is, it turns out, something more scandalous than the sight of a U.S. president beaming while hosting a Roaring Twenties party, replete with attendees wearing Gatsbyesque clothing reminiscent of the rich-get-richer years leading to the Great Depression — on the weekend before food stamp benefits for 42 million Americans are cut off.

It’s the part about the 42 million Americans.

One in eight people, more than 12% of the U.S. population, relies on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to help cover some or most of their food costs every month — payments that are now being held hostage to the government shutdown. In many cases, SNAP recipients don’t earn enough to make ends meet despite working full time.

That’s largely because the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour.

It has not changed in 16 years, a longer gap between raises than at any other point since the minimum was created in 1938 in response to the actual Great Depression. During this most recent lapse, since 2009, the cost of a dozen eggs has risen by nearly 125%.

There’s no discernible momentum in Congress toward changing the wage now.

And even though the federal minimum doesn’t apply to as many people as it used to, Congress’ ongoing failure to address it sends a powerful signal to employers, especially corporate ones, that making sure workers earn enough to buy groceries isn’t a primary concern.

Do federal legislators want to take the SNAP conversation in a different direction? There’s a way to reduce those food-stamp rolls by millions and millions of people: Pay workers something that even approaches a living wage.

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The federal minimum wage is so out of touch with the cost of living in the U.S. that it’s essentially worthless as a metric. But that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t matter where the number is set.

In terms of its real value, the federal minimum has lost 30% of its buying power since the last time it was raised, from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour, during the first year of President Barack Obama’s first term in 2009. 

A worker earning the minimum wage in 2024 and working full-time earned almost exactly as much as what the federal government defines as poverty-level income.

Here’s another way to look at it: Robert Reich, the economist and former U.S. secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, estimates that if the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity over the past several decades, it would currently sit at nearly $26 an hour. 

At that level, tens of millions of American workers would be lifted out of poverty cycles and no longer need (or qualify for) a program like SNAP, which the government spends roughly $100 billion a year to run.

Of course, very few people in this country are paid the minimum wage. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 81,000 Americans in 2023 earned exactly $7.25 an hour. Another 789,000 were actually paid less than that amount under exceptions to the law — new hires under age 20, full-time students in certain jobs, etc. — and there’s incomplete data about wages paid in the shadow economy around undocumented workers.

But what Congress sets as the federal minimum is still critical. It becomes the floor for all subsequent conversations about low-income workers and their pay — including the millions and millions of people who earn more than the bare minimum, but nowhere near enough to actually pay for their basic needs.

The latest proposal to hike minimum pay, the Raise the Wage Act of 2025, would bring the federal rate up incrementally to $17 by 2030. According to research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, that change alone would positively impact more than 22 million workers, including many of the lowest-paid in the nation, and provide an additional $70 billion annually in wages.

The proposal was introduced in April by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.). A few months later, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley surprised members of his own party by sponsoring a bill to immediately raise the federal minimum to $15, the kind of action that traditionally has been pushed by liberal and progressive members of Congress.

“This is a populist position,” Hawley said at the time. “If we’re going to be a working people’s party, we have to do something for working people. And working people haven’t gotten a raise in years. So they need a raise.”

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There’s certainly no indication that Republicans under Trump are a “working people’s party,” especially given the so-called Big Beautiful Bill’s extension of tax cuts for the wealthy worth nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, much of it financed by gutting Medicaid and related spending on programs for low-income Americans.

Hawley’s motivation for introducing the measure may be purely pragmatic. His state’s minimum wage will hit $15 on Jan. 1, and the senator may worry that without a similar national wage, businesses might skip Missouri and head to states where they can pay workers less.

That scenario, of course, is one of the reasons a minimum federal wage exists at all. It was part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the wage was initially intended very simply to keep people out of abject poverty no matter where they lived. 

That is the precise role it should be playing today.

States and cities are free to set higher minimums for their residents. California’s minimum, for example, is $16.50 and set to increase to $16.90 next year, and the state also mandates a $20 per hour wage for workers at most fast-food chains. But 20 states, mostly in the South and Midwest, still hew to the rock-bottom federal figure, and three others — Georgia, Oklahoma and Wyoming — actually have a set minimum below that level, and therefore must default to the $7.25 federal wage.

With a few exceptions, Republicans have consistently voted against raising the minimum, arguing that doing so would prompt employers to cut jobs. But with an estimated 26 million American workers earning less than $17 an hour and 42 million on food stamps, that argument carries less weight every day.

At this point, we aren’t even talking about a true living wage — the amount it costs to cover basic necessities such as food and shelter. For a single Californian without children, that wage is nearly $29 an hour. (It’s nearly $21 in Hawley’s Missouri, by the way.)

But the federal minimum isn’t about that; as created, its purpose was to gradually raise wages in order to keep people from falling into poverty cycles. By definition, that is an extremely modest goal. As the furor over SNAP payments has vividly demonstrated, it is also one of the most critical.

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