As Grocery Prices Skyrocket, Americans Are Going Into Debt Just to Eat, and Congress Is Making It Worse.
By Mark Huelsman | July 23, 2026
Over the past several years, high grocery prices have become an enduring symbol of our national politics. They are now a fact of life that has consistently weighed down economic sentiment and growth and forced Americans to cut back at the supermarket. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service now projects food prices will rise another 3.2 percent in 2026, while USDA officials have been reduced to phoning grocery chains and politely asking them to lower the price of beef.
This persistent pain at the checkout aisle is a catastrophe for working families on a good day. Yet as the rising price of meat, juice, and produce—to say nothing of rent, child care, and other essentials—eats into monthly budgets, millions of families are also experiencing the simultaneous loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, thanks to Congress enacting the largest cuts in modern history to anti-hunger programming last year.
As often happens when an affordability crisis meets an insufficient safety net, something has to give. And predictably, the large void in family budgets is increasingly being filled by debt. Faced with unaffordable grocery bills, Americans are turning increasingly to risky and predatory products like high-interest credit cards and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products to put food on the table.
A series of deliberate policy choices by the Trump Administration and Congress have led us to this point.
The list of broken promises on affordability from the Administration is far too long to litigate here, but a series of decisions—from tariffs to reckless wars to the inability to even try and address Americans’ staggering utility bills—have erased any possible wage increases or tax benefits American workers may have seen over the past year. The result: families are forced to choose between essentials like food, gas, rent, and basic needs for their children. The deliberate destruction of the only federal financial regulator with direct supervisory authority over non-bank financial lenders—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—has handed fintech and other firms an unfettered opportunity to prey on populations in need of financial relief.
For its part, Congress has spent the past year or so making the problem overwhelmingly worse, by taking vital safety net programs such as SNAP—our nation’s largest and most successful anti-hunger program—away from millions and forcing families and states alike to scramble to fill in the gaps. All of this was in service of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Faced with a looming grocery debt crisis, lawmakers could tap the current reauthorization of the Farm Bill to reverse course and protect SNAP benefits to help families meet their needs. To the surprise of exactly no one who has been paying attention, they’re refusing to address it.
The grocery aisle is now a credit product.
Two new studies this month take stock of the current grocery debt crisis. Last week, the Urban Institute released findings from its December 2025 Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, which asked more than 7,500 working-age adults how they paid for food over the previous year. The answers are a portrait of a country whose grocery budget is now run on credit:
- More than 1 in 4 working-age adults put groceries on a credit card and then couldn’t pay it off. 28 percent of adults carried a balance while making minimum payments or could not even make the minimum payment.
- Food shopping is increasingly precarious. The share of adults who bought groceries on a credit card and then missed the minimum payment rose from 7.1 percent in 2023 to 8.7 percent in 2025.
- The savings well is running dry. Nearly 1 in 5 adults, and 1 in 4 low- and middle-income adults, raided savings that weren’t meant for daily expenses in order to pay their grocery bill.
- Desperation finance is widespread. About 1 in 20 adults, including 1 in 11 low-income working adults, bought groceries with cash from a payday loan, one of the most notorious debt traps in consumer finance.
The latter point is especially frightening given the state of Trump’s CFPB. The Bureau’s current leadership has sent strong signals that it will do less than the bare minimum when it comes to enforcing the law. That includes allowing payday lenders to obfuscate the real costs of their products and permitting BNPL products to proliferate with little oversight. Our latest Protect Borrowers poll with Data for Progress specifically explored American voters’ experience with BNPL products, finding that:
- Roughly 1 in 4 of all voters (23 percent) have used BNPL to buy groceries. Among BNPL users, nearly half (46 percent) have used the product to help pay for groceries.
- Among all voters under 45, nearly half (46 percent) have used BNPL on groceries. Among younger BNPL users, two-thirds (66 percent) have used these loans to pay for groceries, including a quarter who report using them weekly to finance their grocery purchases.
- Among voters currently carrying over $2,500 in BNPL debt, three-quarters (72 percent) have used these loans for groceries, and 22 percent use them weekly.
For context on how quickly the landscape is shifting: LendingTree found last spring that 29 percent of BNPL users had financed groceries, roughly double the share two years earlier. Internet jokes about financing burrito orders have aged into the oldest dynamic in American consumer finance: families paying a premium for being broke. According to the Urban survey, a full one-third (34.8 percent) of those who used BNPL products for groceries missed a payment, subjecting them to late fees that can equate to 200 percent APR.
Congress turbocharged grocery debt by slashing SNAP.
Make no mistake, millions of families are putting meals on risky credit in part because Congress has prevented them from accessing SNAP, the program specifically designed to prevent persistent hunger among low-income households.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) made the largest cuts to SNAP in the program’s history, $186 billion over a decade, in part by expanding draconian and ineffective time limits and work requirements on older, vulnerable Americans. OBBBA raised the age ceiling for work reporting requirements from 54 to 64; removed exemptions for workers with teenage children; ended recent work requirement exemptions for veterans, those experiencing homelessness, and youth who recently aged out of foster care; and hamstrung future Administrations from ensuring that the value of SNAP benefits rises with inflation. It piled on documentation requirements for hungry families and shifted administrative costs—and starting in 2027, a share of benefit costs—onto states that don’t have the fiscal capacity to absorb them.
Results have been predictable. More than 4.5 million people, or about 11 percent of everyone enrolled, lost SNAP between July 2025 and April 2026, with every state except for Alaska seeing a decline. Overall, this represents the steepest fall in SNAP participation in nearly 30 years, at a time when the need is more acute than ever.
In other words, Congress has deliberately shifted the way that hungry Americans finance their food, from a safety net program that has proven wildly successful at reducing hunger among its beneficiaries, to a set of fintech and financial products under little to no supervision.
If this shift from safety net to predatory finance sounds familiar, it is. The same law that slashed SNAP has also shifted the financing of other public goods, including higher education, to far riskier markets. OBBBA has goosed demand for private student loans by capping federal student loan borrowing, prorating federal loan eligibility part-time (disproportionately lower-income and food-insecure students) from getting aid, all while cutting SNAP and Medicaid by over $1 trillion and severely jeopardizing states’ ability to fund higher education.
The Farm Bill is Congress’s best chance to reduce grocery debt. Instead, lawmakers are ignoring it.
Currently, Congress is in the throes of reauthorizing the Farm Bill, the legislative vehicle that sets federal agriculture policy and governs nutrition programs, including SNAP. Reauthorized roughly every five years, and notoriously bipartisan, this year’s Farm Bill process represented a chance for lawmakers to issue a mea culpa and undo—or at least delay—some of OBBBA’s most draconian SNAP cuts, from eligibility restrictions to provisions that severely reduce SNAP’s purchasing power at a time when food prices show little sign of slowing down.
Instead, the House passed its Farm Bill (H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026) on April 30th by a vote of 224 to 200. The House bill would essentially lock in SNAP cuts and massive cost-shift to states through 2031 and make no changes to the financing, benefit calculation, and eligibility rules that OBBBA rewrote. Then last month in the Senate, Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman released the Agricultural Act of 2026, a “discussion draft” that is open for revisions but which, at the moment, largely holds the line: the OBBBA cuts remain, and the state cost shift isn’t delayed. Senate Democrats have said they won’t vote for a bill that ignores this and does not at least delay several provisions. Markup is expected before the August recess, and the current extension runs out September 30.
Essentially, both chambers looked at the same evidence and settled on the same conclusion: let them eat credit.
This, to put it mildly, is not sustainable. Should Congress fail to act to restore access to SNAP, the number of families reaching a breaking point will continue to rise. These families will have nowhere to turn but BNPL, high-interest credit cards, or worse. While the public has reached near-consensus on reining in the credit products families are using to survive the demolition of the safety net, without commonsense reforms like a BNPL Borrower Bill of Rights, or a meaningful Congressional directive that CFPB use the regulation, supervision, and enforcement tools at its disposal, these remain risky options.
The Senate also still has time to fix the Farm Bill’s nutrition title before markup. Delaying the cost shift would help on several fronts, giving states a reprieve to fund essential services and support programs. Repealing the cruel new expanded time limits and work reporting rules, which have pushed millions off the rolls without pushing anyone into a job, would help more. So would restoring waivers in states and localities where the job market is particularly unstable.
Or it can pass the bill as written and force working Americans to pay for it later.
###
Mark Huelsman is a Senior Fellow at Protect Borrowers and the Director of Policy & Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs. This blog was also published on In Debt, a Protect Borrowers Substack.