Why Trump Is Allowing Food Stamp Funding to Run Out

American elites tend to have a “normalcy bias,” which allows them to believe that our political leaders would never take actions so reckless and so clearly out of touch with reality that they would seriously harm the country.

Many elites simply could not imagine that President George W. Bush would invade a sovereign nation under false pretenses or that President Donald Trump would incite violent riots in an attempt to overthrow democracy.

Likewise, during the standoff, elites largely denied that there was a serious threat to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called the Food Stamp Program.

Before the shutdown, I warned some colleagues and elected officials that President Trump and congressional Republicans could use the shutdown as an excuse to deny up to 42 million SNAP recipients (and more than 260,000 local SNAP retailers) nationwide $8 billion a month in food banks. Many believed that I was exaggerating the threat and that our political system would never allow something so catastrophic to happen. But that's exactly what happens.

On the same day that Trump promised CNN that it would continue SNAP benefits in November, its own Department of Agriculture (USDA) said the government would not do so. The next day, The USDA used its website Redouble efforts to shut down the SNAP program by using lies about immigrants and false smears against transgender Americans in a partisan message that clearly violates the federal Hatch Act prohibiting the use of tax dollars for partisan purposes. Even if Trump, the GOP Congress or the Democratic attorneys general suing the government over the debacle succeed in ending the SNAP program shutdown, there will still be a significant delay in the delivery of November SNAP benefits.

It wasn't always like this. In the late 1960s and 1970s, spurred by Martin Luther King Jr.'s pro-poor campaign and widespread media coverage of the serious domestic problem of hunger, a bipartisan coalition in Washington (including President Nixon, President Carter, conservative Republican Senator Robert Dole, and liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern) launched the National School Breakfast Program and the Women, Infants and Children program for pregnant women and children under 5 years old. Notably, they created the Food Stamp Program, which ultimately allowed tens of millions of Americans to receive monthly benefits to help them afford food. In total, these programs worked amazingalmost completely ending hunger in America.

But since the 1980s, Ronald Reagan has combined union busting and the outsourcing of middle-class jobs overseas with racial dog whistles to demonize those on social safety net benefits. Drawing on the divisive but electorally successful rhetoric of George Wallace, Reagan denounced:strong young bucks” after receiving food stamps, and began cutting domestic food aid.

The Republican Party stepped up its racist rhetoric to undermine the social safety net during the Obama administration, as Newt Gingrich called Obama “food stamp president” and Senator Rick Santorum implied that non-white people were uniquely dependent on food stamps (for reference, most SNAP recipients then were, and remain today, white). Even a supposed moderate Republican Mitt Romney falsely accused Obama eliminating work requirements for food stamps, which the GOP says are necessary to promote the employment of people in safety-net programs, even though data shows such requirements do not increase employment, and even though conservatives would never impose such work requirements on programs that help the wealthiest Americans.

The bipartisan coalition to fight hunger has collapsed. In 2018, when the US House of Representatives, led by Paul Ryan, voted to billions of dollars worth of food Of the millions of SNAP recipients, not a single House Democrat voted for the bill, but 86 percent of House Republicans did.

A massive influx of federal food and cash aid provided by Democrats has kept hunger in the U.S. during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. But after conservatives, including then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, allowed such aid to expire, hunger in the United States surged. USDA found The number of Americans living in households that were food insecure (meaning they could not afford enough food) jumped to 47 million in 2023, a 40 percent increase from 2021.

Between 2021 and 2023, 17 percent of U.S. children, 10 percent of working adults and 8 percent of older Americans lived in food insecure households, the data shows. USDA data analysis from my organization Hunger Free America.

The number of Americans who did not have enough food for two-week periods increased by 55 percent between August/September 2021 and August/September 2024, according to our calculations. Census Household Pulse Survey data.

However, during this period of time, many elites (even liberal ones) celebrated the supposed overall health of the economy, ignoring the fact that struggling Americans could not eat up the growing GDP. These same economic leaders then scratched their heads as Americans voted against the Democratic administration they blamed (often wrongly) for their problems. With Trump back in the White House pushing an overtly racist agenda, it was only a matter of time before his administration took aim at the food security system.

We didn't have to wait long. In their big, ugly bill, Trump and his GOP stooges in Congress cut SNAP by $186 billion, the deepest cut in history, citing the outrageously false charge that most of SNAP's spending is on “illegal aliens” and “waste, fraud and abuse.” Not a single Democrat in the House or Senate voted for the bill, and of the tiny handful of GOP members of Congress who voted against the bill, most did so because SNAP cuts weren't big enough. Contrary to their claims, the vast majority of SNAP recipients affected by the cuts are low-wage workers, children, people with disabilities, older Americans and/or veterans. On top of that, the Trump administration canceled more than 84 million pounds of food aid planned to be distributed by charities, many of which are faith-based.

Then, in an act of reality denial fit for North Korea, the Trump administration ended 27 years of USDA practice collecting and publishing data on food insecurity, giving various ridiculous excuses for this. Clearly, the real reason for deleting this data is their desire to keep the public in the dark about how Trump's disastrous tariffs and other economic policies – coupled with massive food aid cuts – are leading to an even more exponential increase in hunger in the US. It is clear that the ostrich approach will not end hunger.

Now, nearly 42 million Americans across the country may lose access to enough food. Not only will this lead to the greatest domestic hunger crisis since the Great Depression; it will also hurt food retailers, perhaps even forcing some to lay off staff.

No one should be fooled into thinking that charitable food programs can make up for the end of the SNAP program, which provides literally 10 times more food dollars than any charity in America. Even before the closure of emergency food assistance programs across the country, it was widely reported that they were unable to meet the current growing demand for food.

The map below, compiled by Hunger Free America using data from the USDA and Census Bureau, shows the percentage of each state's population that relies on SNAP. In red states such as Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia, more than 15 percent of the population relies on SNAP. More than 10 percent of residents receive SNAP in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina and Missouri.

Many SNAP recipients are Trump supporters and Republican voters. Not surprisingly, key GOP leaders and MAGA supporters have begun to backtrack on criticism of SNAP and defend it as the key to helping the “vulnerable,” while wrongly blaming Democrats for ending it.

So where do we go next?

While progressives should push governors and state legislatures to take emergency measures to mitigate the effects of the shutdown, the only real solution is to pressure Trump and congressional Republicans to compromise with Democrats on a plan that would both reopen the federal government and prevent tens of millions of Americans from suffering from huge health insurance hikes.

After all, if people have to spend hundreds of dollars more a month on health care, they will have to spend much less on food, so raising premiums will also lead to more hunger. That's why this fight for health care is also a fight against hunger. We all must stand strong and win.

In addition, progressives must consistently and decisively advocate for transforming our nation's policies and programs to create an “Opportunity Society” in which people who work hard are not just pass by but really go forward. We must build on means-tested programs aimed primarily at the poor to also focus more broadly on helping a broad range of Americans through universal programs, as well as comprehensive policies that will help struggling Americans transition from in debt debts and interest payments (and loss of wealth) possession assets such as homes, small businesses, and savings that earn interest (and accumulate wealth).

The most effective—and most politically popular—policies would restore the American Dream for both the middle class and the tens of millions of Americans trying to rise into the middle class. America can only achieve normalcy again when we have a society that works for everyone.