As benefit summary letters trickled in, residents began to compare notes in lobbies and apartments to try to understand why the same reduction was happening to the group all at once.

“I was getting $214 a month, and I managed well on it,” said Irene Lillie, a Riverview Terrace resident. “But when it dropped down to $52, like a lot of the tenants here in our building, we freaked out.”

Lillie’s letter came just a few weeks before her next benefit was supposed to be deposited.

“We had no other notice of it. This came in our mailboxes, and that was it,” she said.

A little-known SNAP deduction

At first, Lillie wasn't sure why her benefits had changed and neither were many of her neighbors. Residents called caseworkers, searched online and even turned to artificial intelligence for answers.

Eventually, they learned that their SNAP cuts were related to a change that’s had little coverage: shelter deductions.

This deduction allows low-income households to lower their net income used to calculate their monthly benefits by including housing and utility costs. This deduction was automatically applied to households that received small payments from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

That option was removed with the passing of the Trump Administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last year. Now, households whose rent includes utilities — or who pay utility bills in someone else's name — may lose this benefit.

Why these changes are happening now in Michigan, instead of earlier when the bill passed, is unclear.

IPR reached out to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHSS) about the implementation of this change, but the department did not respond for comment.

In April, it was estimated by the non-profit Food Research and Action Center that 72,000 of the more than 200,000 Michigan households that receive this benefit will face these cuts.

Nationwide, this change is expected to cut SNAP benefits for more than 670,000 households.

While the Center also notes that seniors and people with disabilities should be exempt from this change, that was not communicated to the seniors IPR spoke to.

Under the OBBBA, households without seniors or a person with a disability must now document and report utility expenses, after which SNAP agencies process and verify the information.

"These changes are likely to result in benefit losses for thousands of eligible families — not because their needs have changed, but because the process has become more complex and burdensome," wrote the non-profit.

'The end user is always the last one considered'

Along with this specific change, OBBBA has rolled out a broader overhaul of federal safety-net programs in phases. These changes to SNAP and Medicaid include adding new work requirements, ending automatic re-enrollments, and further cutting to federal funding.

One result of these dramatic changes is confusion among the people who rely on these benefits.

Jaimie Clayton, president and CEO of Oakland Family Services, said the organization has heard from people who didn't realize their benefits had changed until they tried to use their cards.

“Mostly, what my staff have heard is people who lost their SNAP benefit and didn't even know that they had lost it until they went to renew their card for the month,” Clayton said.

Clayton said the changes have created a significant administrative burden for both the state and the people receiving benefits.

“Supposedly [changes have] been staggered to help states be able to administer all of this,” she said. “But it's also confusing for the people that it affects. The end user is always the last one considered, and they're the people that it impacts the most.”

Since OBBBA was passed, more than five million people nationwide have fallen out of SNAP enrollment, according to federal data. Clayton said even small administrative hurdles can cause people to lose benefits.

“It's really just administratively intense,” she said. “And so people will get kicked off without knowing it because they didn't tick a box, or they didn't redo a form — or, like you're saying, they change requirements and nobody even knew.”

More changes are coming

How that confusion will clear up is uncertain. So far, new SNAP requirements have created a difficult caseload in Michigan.

Just in March, new work requirements dropped 200,000 people from SNAP. A month later, referrals to the program through Michigan Works! jumped by over 16,000%.

Earlier this year, Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity wrote that their workers were “currently overwhelmed with the pressures of various work requirements found in [OBBA], which makes it more difficult to help Michiganders enter or get back into the workforce.”

On top of this, even more new work requirements for Medicaid recipients are slated to take effect next year, creating another layer of administrative work for the state and additional requirements for people receiving assistance.

In anticipation of an overwhelmed MDHHS, Clayton said, Oakland Family Services is considering hiring its own private case managers and benefit navigators for clients.

“I expect to see people who are more overwhelmed by the system and unsure of how to get online or wait on the phone and do the verifications that they have to,” Clayton said. “So, I see us having to figure out how to spend more time helping clients do that, which then detracts from the real work that we're trying to do with them.”

Michigan faces higher costs, too

The federal changes also shift more of the cost of administering SNAP onto the states.

Under the new law, Michigan is expected to take on roughly $95 million in additional annual SNAP administrative costs.

The state just recently budgeted for that money, but how the extra work will test the department is still to be seen.