Halloween is meant to be scary, but it’s tomorrow, Nov. 1, that’s proving far more frightening to families around New York and the country as it’s expected to bring the sudden end of SNAP, also known as food stamps, as Donald Trump and congressional Republicans refuse to either move to end the government shutdown or tap into emergency funds to keep the program going.
Run by the USDA under Secretary Brooke Rollins, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is not just one more government program in the sea of initiatives that the Trump administration has opted to target. Not to say that Trump’s obsession with cutting things like cancer research or climate monitoring are good, appropriate or even legal, but their impacts will be more spread out over time. A sudden shut-off of SNAP benefits will have extreme and immediate repercussions in every single state and city in the country.
This is, of course, not just the federal government’s problem. We commend Gov. Hochul for taking quick action to shore up food assistance with a $30 million state expenditure, though the reality is that this is a tiny drop in the bucket in comparison with the billions that the federal government spends on SNAP in New York State alone.
We simply cannot replicate the level of need that the federal program covers, and neither can private philanthropy. The upshot of all of this is that even in the best case scenario, many, many people are going to go hungry as this pause takes effect.
That is bad enough in its own right, but it will have cascading effects for everyone. People who are having trouble affording food are not going to be spending much in the broader economy, are going to avoid routine medical care and end up in the ER and are going to stop paying their rent.
Children who do not receive proper nutrition are proven to absorb less from their schooling in ways that will reverberate throughout the rest of their academic and professional careers. For an administration that reports itself to be so concerned about petty crime and shoplifting, there’s hardly a better way to incentivize this than creating acute and unfulfilled needs among millions of families nationwide.
All of this, for what? The administration’s argument that it is unable to tap emergency funds simply does not pass muster, which is why Attorney General Tish James is joining a coalition of half of all U.S. states in filing suit against Rollins and the administration (frankly, it should be every state on board, as every state will be touched by this self-inflicted disaster).
Rollins and Trump are perfectly able to keep the program going, even as a subservient Congress extends this pointless shutdown over its refusal to negotiate to preserve health care subsidies.
The president is simply choosing not to, which is unsurprising for a man who often talks about how people who are less rich or successful than he is as simply losers who deserve their lot. Yet we think that beyond this being a moral atrocity, it is a political disaster for Trump, who had successfully fooled some number of working class people into thinking that he was on their side. He is prepared to stand by as millions suffer so that he can satisfy his allies’ ideological push to cut government. For shame.
