New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Friday that he brokered a nationwide deal with President Donald Trump granting relief for bodegas and other small retailers at risk of losing their federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program authorization.
Mamdani, who has a productive working relationship with the president, said he called Trump after learning that new Department of Agriculture guidance would have stopped tens of thousands of small grocery stores from being allowed to accept food stamps.
“I told the president that this is a rule that — if allowed to be implemented on the timeline as it was scheduled — would be one that would throw the lives of so many working New Yorkers into a real place of anxiety and chaos,” he said during a news conference.
Following their call, Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins agreed to give small business owners “at least a 90-day extension” to comply with a rule dictating what foods retailers must stock in order to maintain SNAP authorization.
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The new regulations sought to double the amount of “staple foods” grocery stores are required to stock, mandating that store shelves include seven varieties of food in four different categories — dairy, grains, proteins and produce — to be SNAP eligible.
SNAP purchases account for up to roughly 10% of an average grocery store’s sales. In areas like the Bronx, that figure rises to 30%, according to Mamdani’s office.
“For corporate grocery giants, these requirements posed little challenge, but the story was different for our neighborhood corner stores and bodegas,” Mamdani said.
Trump has maintained widely adversarial relationships with other Democratic big-city leaders, though Mamdani has quietly lobbied the president on a number of fronts throughout his tenure as mayor, including brokering multiple releases of detained immigrants and students from federal custody over the last year and working to cancel threats to New York’s federal funding last November.
Mamdani said the broader threats surrounding SNAP availability are still being negotiated with the administration and framed the Friday announcement as a quick-fix solution to an “impossibly short” federal deadline for bodegas.
“The president and I have an ongoing conversation about anything that affects our city, and for all of the policy disagreements the two of us have, we do have a shared love of this city,” he said.
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