Welfare policy analysts and SNAP advocates tell The New Republic they expect to see changes to the anti-hunger program this year. There are several opportunities to do so. There’s entitlement reform, but also the farm bill, which funds SNAP and is up for reconsideration in 2018. Republicans could also push SNAP reforms through the budget reconciliation process. Whatever process they choose, “[Republicans] are going to want to do some things with SNAP, there’s no question about it,” said Robert Doar, a poverty studies fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Some people are going to say they’re awful things. But I think their real intention is to help people work so they can increase their income and need less SNAP benefits as a result.”

While it’s impossible to know what those reforms will entail, there are a number of likely options. If the approach is anything like what the Trump administration has proposed, billions would be drained from the safety net program. If it’s what Ryan has advocated in the past, it would be a structural change that would render SNAP a shadow of its current self. And if it’s what Republicans on the House Agricultural Committee seem to want, it’ll be incremental changes that affect what kind of food people can buy and how hard they have to work to get it. Any of these paths will guarantee an election-year showdown over how America should treat its neediest citizens.

Neither Mitch McConnell nor Paul Ryan like SNAP the way it is. In 2013, McConnell voted against a Senate-proposed farm bill because he believed the SNAP program was too generous and that it should have work requirements. “Why would anybody object, if they can be given employment, to being productive?” McConnell said. “We need to move in the direction of having a vibrant, productive, expanding economy. And you don’t do that by making it excessively easy to be non-productive.” Two years later, he said business leaders have told him they have “a hard time finding people to do the work because they’re doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest.”

Ryan’s complaint is that SNAP is automatically funded every year, with the amount dictated by need (however many people qualify for the program in a given year). So Ryan has championed turning the now-flexible entitlement into a block-grant program containing a strict amount of funds for each state, with the terms of those funds dictated by the state. His infamous “Opportunity Grant” proposal in 2014 was to consolidate 11 programs, including SNAP, into a single block grant. His “Better Way” program in 2016—alongside House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway—also sought to block-grant the program.