This morning, with the idea of writing about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), I googled “SNAP benefits news” and received a bevy of conflicting news reports, all from reputable news organizations. NPR’s headline read, “Trump plan for smaller SNAP benefits may leave millions with none at all.” NBC News reported that, “Partial SNAP benefits will be more than previously estimated, Trump official says.” USA Today reported that “SNAP recipients to get as much as two-thirds of promised benefits,” while The Hill reported, “Trump says he’s withholding SNAP benefits until shutdown ends.”
Three days ago as of this writing, the most current news stated that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service would fund 50 percent of SNAP benefits. Today, that number is up to 65 percent. A message on the USDA website currently reads, “Senate Democrats have voted 14 times against reopening the government. This compromises not only SNAP, but farm programs, food inspection, animal and plant disease protection, rural development, and protecting federal lands. Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown ‘leverage’ points.”
That statement is not only pushing the legal boundaries of the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from taking an overtly partisan stance while on duty or using government property, but is an utter falsehood. While no human being is an “illegal” simply for existing or crossing a border, undocumented immigrants are also unable to access federal programs such as SNAP.
Meanwhile, open enrollment for the health insurance marketplace began on November 1st in most states, and many of the Americans who use the marketplace through the Affordable Care Act are set to see just how much health insurance premiums have increased.
So, to summarize, SNAP benefits have at the very least been reduced, health insurance premiums have increased, and the government is still shut down.
This is nothing short of psychological warfare against some of the most vulnerable of our citizens. How many working single mothers have been unable to make a definite budget for the month of November, or begin to plan their healthcare costs for 2026? Because, yes, most Americans who use food assistance programs are employed.
In fact, to get personal for a moment, most of the food I ate as a child was paid for with food stamps, as we called them then. My sister and I also ate reduced-price lunches at school. Our parents were divorced, but they both worked, and my dad paid child support. We were pretty average, as those things go. My mother was, at various times, a waitress, a secretary, and a grocery store worker, and my father was part of the cleaning crew for an airline, doing necessary and thankless work to make sure planes were de-iced and clean. One question I’ve seen bandied about often in the last month or so is, “Why are so many Americans using SNAP?” I might ask why, in a nation where people want to take flights on airplanes and eat food in restaurants, are those workers so horribly underpaid?
According to the USDA website’s fiscal reporting of 2023, approximately 39 percent of all SNAP participants were children, and more than 62 percent of SNAP households included children, with the majority of those households containing at least one child, an elderly person, or a person with a disability. The idea that Americans who receive food assistance don’t want to work is propaganda, pure and simple, and this quibbling about one of the smallest budget items in the national expenditure is political theater. We can afford to bail out Argentina, to send Israel billions of dollars for missile defence, to send federal troops to cities with Democrat mayors, to build a new ballroom for the White House, to fund a huge gestapo (I’m talking about ICE, here), to give away tax incentives to profitable companies, but we can’t feed kids or the elderly.
I know that Flyer editor-in-chief Shara Clark and writer-at-large Bruce VanWyngarden have both written about the SNAP issue, and I’m sorry to bludgeon the reader with my similar concerns. This is an emergency, though. It is a matter of life and death for more than 100,000 people in Shelby County, and it’s a moral question of the utmost importance for our nation. If we’re to be inundated with messaging about how the U.S. is the greatest country ever to pass a law, we should also be reminded of the many Americans who cannot access the privileges we are all supposed to enjoy.
Look, is the United States a great country, or isn’t it? Because, to my mind, a country that lets children go hungry is failing the most basic test. There is a lot of daylight between the myth of America the prosperous and the reality of America the sick and hungry.
The reality of the matter is that for many of our neighbors, the American dream has become a waking nightmare, and it’s time for us to snap out of it.
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, survived off of food stamps, free and reduced-price school lunches, and library books as a child.