Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will expire at the end of the month, impacting as many as 42 million people—16 million of them children.
And if you’re thinking that this is just an unfortunate, unfixable product of the government shutdown, think again.
The Department of Agriculture has about $5 billion in contingency funds it could use, even during the shutdown. It would cover about two-thirds of the whole month of benefits. But, according to the administration, those funds are only for emergencies “like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice.”
Starvation is apparently not an emergency.
So the administration won’t spend those contingency funds, nor will it reimburse states if they pick up the slack.
Unsurprisingly, the administration is saying this is the fault of Democrats, who have “voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program.” Of course, Democrats have done no such thing. They’ve voted 12 times against the GOP's refusal even to discuss things like the expiration of expanded health care subsidies. But according to the USDA, “the well has run dry.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, shown in February.
Yeah, about that.
The requirement that these contingency funds be used to keep SNAP aid flowing isn’t something that the Democrats invented out of whole cloth. The USDA’s own shutdown plan said, “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown.”
Of course, rather than fulfill, or even acknowledge, this obligation, the administration instead just deleted the USDA report from its website. That’s one way to deal with it.
It isn’t just that the administration could fund SNAP but doesn’t want to. The administration is required to fund SNAP but doesn’t want to.
Pretending that Democrats are the ones blocking access to SNAP funds is made even more absurd by the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill, which congressional Republicans passed earlier this year, cut SNAP funding by $187 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a 20% hit to the program. There’s only one party eager to starve people, and it isn’t the Democrats.
Some conservatives don’t care if people could soon go hungry. Take Mike Davis, former chief counsel to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley.
Shhh, nobody tell him that no matter how you slice and dice the government’s own data, white people are the largest racial demographic of SNAP recipients. Definitely don’t tell him that the majority of SNAP recipients who can work do work.
Withholding SNAP funds is nothing but abject cruelty toward some of the most vulnerable people in America. Meanwhile, when it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons or the military, the cash flows freely. The administration is making its priorities crystal clear.
