Robert Greenstein is president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based nonpartisan research and policy institute. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

A new Trump administration rule will end Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (food stamps) for nearly 700,000 of the nation's poorest people. That is the opposite of what the administration should do if, as it says, it wants to help them find jobs and get them back into the workforce.

Those affected by the rule are individuals aged 18 through 49 who aren't raising minor children or disabled and who are either unemployed or working less than 20 hours a week. Their average income is just 18% of the poverty line, or about $2,250 a year, based on our analysis of SNAP data, and they receive about $165 in SNAP benefits each month on average — or, as we've calculated, $1.80 per meal. Most of them aren't eligible for any other government financial assistance (because they aren't elderly, disabled or raising a child). SNAP is generally the only assistance they can get.

What's more, they're often facing some of the biggest hurdles in the labor market: They are adults with no more than a high school education who suffer from much higher unemployment than others; people who live in rural areas where jobs can be scarce; people who are between jobs or those whose employer cut their hours to less than 20 hours a week, which is common in the very-low-wage labor market, even when the economy is strong.

harsh provision of SNAP law from 1996 already limits the food benefits of childless adults aged 18 through 49 — while they're not employed for at least 20 hours a week — to just three months out of every three years. Because the provision is so severe — people who look for a job but can't find one are cut off anyway — Congress gave states the flexibility to seek federal waivers of the three-month cut-off rule for areas where there aren't enough jobs. Since the provision's enactment, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used a common set of criteria in granting these waivers. And Democratic and Republican governors alike have requested and secured the waivers; 36 states currently have waivers for the parts of their state where unemployment is higher than the national average.

Now, the administration is abandoning this longstanding bipartisan practice and replacing it with a highly restrictive policy that will sharply limit state flexibility by sharply narrowing the criteria that states have long been using to qualify for waivers. As a result, hundreds of thousands of impoverished citizens will be tossed aside and left without the means to secure adequate food.