During Monday night’s meeting, City Council unanimously authorized a request from City Manager Yi-An Huang to allocate $500,000 from the city’s Federal Stabilization Fund to help residents keep MassHealth and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that are jeopardized by the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“A lot of what we’ve realized, especially as we’ve seen the projections of enrollment drops, is just how many federal dollars are at risk,” said Huang, speaking before councillors about the appropriation request. “Dollars that are supporting the real needs of households in the city.”
Starting in January, state estimates say as many as 175,000 residents across Massachusetts could lose their coverage due to new work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. In Cambridge around 2,400 people will be affected, according to city estimates. That could mean $28 to $30 million in benefits lost.
The city’s investment, which will be partially matched with another $100,000 from the Cambridge Community Foundation, will go toward case management, translation and interpretation services, on-site application assistance, and an outreach campaign that will be run in partnership with the nonprofit Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee. Keeping people on SNAP is another goal.
Participation in the food assistance program used by thousands of Cambridge residents has fallen 15 percent since July 2025 due to increased work requirements and narrowed eligibility for immigrants, resulting in nearly $3 million in lost benefits citywide. The city projects another 15 percent decline in the coming year if it doesn’t intervene.
“Most of those people are still eligible for SNAP, but just could not break through the red tape and paperwork burden,” said Rachel Plummer, associate director of the CEOC, during public comment.
In the past, Federal Stabilization Funds have been used for direct food aid. According to Huang, Cambridge’s dollars can be stretched further by keeping people on benefits in the first place.
“$500,000 is an amount that we think will be very well leveraged compared to how much money in federal benefits we can keep people on,” Huang said.
Cambridge’s Federal Stabilization Fund, which has provided an essential cushion to ease cuts to housing vouchers and funding for victims of violent crime, will have a balance of $2,675,000 after the allocation. While this will leave the fund at a little over half of its original size of $5 million, Huang noted that there will be opportunities to replenish the fund if necessary.
“We still have a number of years of this administration to go,” Huang said. “If it were the case that we would need to come back and look at additional funding, I think that we would be very open to that conversation.”
The council also passed a policy order urging the Healey administration to hire more case workers at the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA). Councillors and advocates warned of an upcoming surge in demand for assistance in obtaining benefits from the state agency, which administers Massachusetts’s SNAP program.
“The understaffing at the DTA… has made getting in touch with the agency near impossible,” Plummer said during public comment. “Only 30 percent of calls on a given day get through to DTA.”
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