Eight GOP lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration to crack down on a federal program that has funneled more than half a billion dollars in food-assistance money to burger joints and fried-chicken counters, spending they say betrays the program's original purpose.
Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and seven House Republicans sent a letter Thursday to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins demanding a review of the SNAP Restaurant Meals Program, a decades-old carve-out that lets certain benefit recipients spend taxpayer-funded food dollars at fast-food chains. The lawmakers estimate that at least $524 million flowed to those restaurants over roughly the past two to three years, with California alone accounting for $475 million of the total, the New York Post reported.
The program, known as RMP, currently operates in nine states. Arizona ranked second at $41.4 million in SNAP fast-food spending between June 2023 and May 2025. New York came in third at $3.6 million over the same window. The remaining six participating states, Michigan, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, and Maryland, accounted for a comparatively small share, with the three named states alone summing to roughly $520 million of the $524 million total.
Congress created the RMP through the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977. The original idea was narrow: help people who lacked a kitchen or adequate food storage, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, buy a prepared meal. For years, few states bothered to participate.
By 2003, nineteen states had enrolled. Fifteen years later, that number had collapsed to just four. Then California changed the math. In 2019, the state expanded restaurant eligibility statewide, opening the program to more than 5,800 eateries, including outlets of Subway, McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, and Dairy Queen.
The pandemic period accelerated the trend further. Colorado and Oregon have since taken steps to join the program, which would push enrollment back into double digits. What started as a modest accommodation for people who literally could not cook a meal has become, in the lawmakers' words, a system "dominated by large national fast-food and quick-service chains."
Ernst put the contradiction bluntly.
"SNAP is intended to feed hungry families with nutritious food, but loopholes have funneled half-a-billion dollars to burgers and fries."
She added that she is "partnering with the Trump administration to improve the menu by adding healthy options," and offered a line that doubles as a bumper sticker: "The 'N' in SNAP stands for 'nutrition,' after all, not nuggets."
The numbers tell a lopsided story. California's $475 million in SNAP fast-food spending over the June 2023, May 2025 period represents more than 90 percent of the lawmakers' national estimate. Arizona's $41.4 million is a distant second. New York's $3.6 million barely registers by comparison.
That concentration raises a question the lawmakers' letter does not fully answer: is the RMP a national problem or primarily a California problem? The state's 2019 expansion to more than 5,800 restaurants created a scale no other participant approaches. Recent changes to SNAP rules have already hit small grocers hard across the country, but the fast-food pipeline runs overwhelmingly through one state.
Still, the trajectory matters. With Colorado and Oregon moving toward enrollment, the program's footprint is growing again, and the lawmakers want guardrails in place before it does.
The letter to Kennedy and Rollins frames the RMP review as a natural extension of the administration's Make America Healthy Again initiative, which targets diet-related chronic disease. The lawmakers wrote that "as USDA and HHS continue advancing efforts to address diet-related chronic disease through the Make America Healthy Again initiative, it is worth examining whether the current RMP structure reflects those same priorities."
That framing is deliberate. The administration has made nutrition reform a signature issue under Kennedy's leadership at HHS. Letting hundreds of millions in federal food-assistance dollars flow to deep fryers sits awkwardly alongside any serious push to improve American diets. The lawmakers are asking the administration to square its own stated priorities with how the money actually moves.
Some states have tried their own approaches to food-assistance gaps. Connecticut, for instance, has explored state-funded alternatives for residents who lost SNAP benefits. But those efforts do not address the structural question of whether federal dollars should subsidize fast food at all.
USDA offered a measured response. A department representative told the Post that the agency is "firmly committed to conducting rigorous integrity reviews across all USDA programs that serve our Nation's most vulnerable individuals." The statement did not address the RMP specifically or indicate whether the department plans to tighten eligibility.
The eight lawmakers urged Kennedy and Rollins to "assess" whether tighter rules should govern the RMP. They did not lay out specific legislative proposals or regulatory changes. The letter reads more as a shot across the bow than a detailed reform plan.
Several questions remain unanswered. The $524 million estimate comes from the lawmakers themselves, not from an independent audit or published USDA transaction data. The methodology behind the figure is not described in the letter or in reporting on it. And while the spending window cited runs from June 2023 to May 2025, roughly two years, the lawmakers describe it as covering "the past three years," a discrepancy that has not been explained.
Neither Kennedy nor Rollins has publicly responded to the letter beyond USDA's general statement. Whether the administration treats this as a priority or a backburner item will say a good deal about how seriously the Make America Healthy Again initiative extends beyond public messaging. Meanwhile, families navigating tight food budgets face rising prices at every turn, research has shown that grocery shoppers can overpay by a third depending on where they shop.
The lawmakers who signed the letter alongside Ernst, Reps. Ben Cline of Virginia, Beth Van Duyne of Texas, Randy Fine of Florida, Brandon Gill of Texas, Daniel Webster of Florida, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Mike Kennedy of Utah, represent a cross-section of fiscal conservatives. Their argument is straightforward: a program built for people who could not cook a meal has become a subsidy for some of the largest restaurant corporations in the country.
Across the broader food-assistance landscape, states continue to experiment with stopgap measures. Louisiana recently rolled out a summer food benefit for families with strict enrollment deadlines. But none of those programs answer the central question Ernst and her colleagues are raising: whether federal nutrition dollars belong in a drive-through lane.
A program that was supposed to help people who had no stove is now writing checks to corporations that own thousands of them. If the administration means what it says about making America healthy, this is a good place to start proving it.