WASHINGTON — Enrollment in the federal government’s main nutrition program has fallen sharply as a result of changes Republicans enacted last year to help pay for tax cuts.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program had more than 3 million fewer beneficiaries in January than it had last July, according to the government’s latest data. It’s a drop of 8%, among the steepest ever. The program is the government’s largest antihunger initiative and one of the most responsive to economic need.

Republicans claimed the cuts merely addressed fraud in SNAP, which still served 38.5 million people in 20.9 million households in January.

“We’ve gone from 43 million to around 38 million in just a little over a year,” Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, said last week on Fox News, referring to the change since a full year ago. “But it’s going to be even more and more and more as we work to take people back to the dignity of work and we kick the fraudsters out of the program.”

The Donald Trump administration has made cracking down on supposed welfare fraud a signature issue of Trump’s second term, and “work requirements” for SNAP and Medicaid were one of the best-polling aspects of an otherwise unpopular piece of legislation. At the same time, a sharp reduction in SNAP enrollment could mean there are more Americans struggling to afford basic life necessities.

The Republican bill expanded the pool of SNAP recipients subject to a three-month limit on benefits if they’re unemployed. Before the law passed, the work requirement applied to childless, able-bodied adults as old as 54. The law raised the upper age limit to 64.

William Cleary, a 61-year-old in Las Vegas, said his benefits fell from around $225 to around $100 per month this year after the Nevada Division of Social Services said Cleary’s wife, who is also 61, needed to get a job.

“A hundred bucks in the store now, I mean, that’ll give me a pack of chicken, a pack of brown beef, a can of coffee and some milk and like minor crap,” Cleary told HuffPost. “It ain’t enough to get through the month, that’s for sure.”

“I see a lot of people that are my age and still under 65. They’re in worse shape than me, and you’re gonna try to make these people go to work? Not gonna happen, bro, these people are gonna starve.”

Cleary said he spent all his life in residential construction until degenerative disk disease in his spine made the work impossible. Now he gets by on about $1,200 a month in Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. He said his wife, too, is disabled, but didn’t qualify for an exemption from the SNAP work requirement. He thinks Republicans failed to understand the realities of American life when they wrote their legislation.

“I see a lot of people that are my age and still under 65,” Cleary said. “They’re in worse shape than me, and you’re gonna try to make these people go to work? Not gonna happen, bro, these people are gonna starve.”

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP, suggested earlier this month that a decline in enrollment could occur for good economic reasons, not just because people are being kicked off the program.

“If there’s a decline, maybe it’s because people are actually finding jobs,” Thompson told HuffPost. “I mean, there’s a lot of scenarios that could lead to a decline in the enrollment of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and I think it’s worthy of a deep dive to look at.”

HuffPost readers: Were your SNAP benefits cut as a result of the changes Congress enacted last year? Tell us about it ― email arthur@huffpost.com. Please include your phone number if you’re willing to be interviewed.

In an analysis last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, said the enrollment drop is not a happy story about the economy. After all, the unemployment rate hasn’t fallen since last year.

“This dramatic six-month drop cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food,” CBPP’s Joseph Llobrera said in the analysis.

In addition to the expanded work requirement, the Republican law will require states to pay part of the cost of SNAP benefits if they have high rates of overpayments. The change gives states, which administer SNAP but haven’t ever had to pay the benefits themselves, a strong incentive to cut enrollment.

“A more likely explanation for why people are losing access to food assistance is that states are now facing new challenges as they respond to the cuts in H.R. 1 — the largest in the program’s history,” Llobrera wrote.

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