Next month, when Thanksgiving arrives, Americans with the means to enjoy the holiday will again acknowledge and celebrate the nation’s bounty, the fact that everything we want to eat or drink can be found in thousands of aisles in thousands of supermarkets, all across the fruited plain.
But for many others — people of modest incomes, who rely on government benefits to keep the refrigerator stocked — November could be a month of uncertainty and dread.
The federal government shutdown, resulting from a politically partisan dispute over another benefit for low-income families — subsidized health insurance — could mean the sudden cutoff of the entitlement (about $187 a month per person) that puts food on the table for 42 million Americans.
Quick history, somewhat personalized: Before there was a national food assistance program, there was hunger. There was begging. There was the humiliation of a widow and her son, immigrants mourning the death of a husband and father, made to feel guilty for asking for a handout from the local government.
The latter situation — a widow asking a town council for help to feed herself and a teenaged boy — occurred in my family in the late 1920s, during the Great Depression. My father told me the story only once, how town leaders made him and his mother feel, as if being poor was a character flaw.
A decade later, toward the end of the Depression, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt established the nation’s first food stamp program. It lasted just a few years, but served some 20 million needy people.
Democratic administrations brought the program back in the 1960s in a fight against hunger and a national poverty rate of close to 20%.
Over the years, Americans who do not earn enough to get by — for rent, electricity, transportation, medical needs, clothing, food — benefited from the program.
The 1964 Food Stamp Act passed the House, 229 to 189, with only 13 Republicans joining the Democratic majority, signaling what turned out to be the prevailing GOP attitude about food entitlements over the next 60 years.
Despite Republican opposition, millions of Americans have been able to feed themselves and their families because of food stamps and all the forms of food benefits that followed over the years, culminating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps one in eight Americans, many of them children.
It has become part of the nation’s pact with the poor, an entitlement for those who do not earn enough to be insulated from hunger.
The nation’s current governmental crisis — not only the shutdown of federal agencies, but the stifling hyperpartisanship of Congress and the Trump administration’s slashing of funds for programs — threatens the monthly distribution of benefits to about 680,000 in Maryland.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, said it will not use contingency funding to maintain benefits despite the government shutdown. And, of course, Trump administration officials blame Democrats.
On Tuesday, Maryland and other states sued the administration over the planned cutoff of SNAP benefits.
“We’re looking at impacts on almost 270,000 children under the age of 18,” says LaMonika Jones, director of Maryland Hunger Solutions. “So we need USDA to step up and do what the law says that they should be doing, which is using the contingency funds, which is about $6 billion, as well as additional funding in their authority to meet the rest of the $8 billion that’s needed come November 1.
“SNAP,” she added, “is our nation’s number one defense against hunger. … We wish every single household had the means to provide for themselves in a way that they all want to — with an income matching the growth of inflation and the cost of food. But the reality is that those things aren’t in line in our country, and we have households that are experiencing food insecurity.
“And so,” she added, “for the federal government not to do what is legally their responsibility and what they have the authority to do, it is pushing households further into food insecurity. It is increasing childhood poverty.”
In addition to the direct threat to SNAP caused by the government shutdown, new SNAP work requirements, pushed by congressional Republicans, go into effect Nov. 1, and may knock more people living on the edges of poverty off the rolls.
Maryland’s Department of Human Services says that the new law subjects close to 80,000 more individuals to work requirements. The law applies to able-bodied adults between 18 and 64 years; veterans under age 65; young adults who might have aged out of out-of-home care; and people who are homeless.
They’ll have to prove that they spend 80 hours a month at a job, or in job training, or volunteering somewhere.
You have to wonder how many people currently collecting SNAP fit those criteria or would be able to meet the requirements. Republican attacks on SNAP have always included the assertion that millions are cheating to get the benefits. Their strategies include more red tape to discourage people from applying for benefits, and the work/volunteering requirements could do exactly that.
Many of the recipients of SNAP benefits are also eligible for Medicaid, the government’s subsidized health insurance program. They are facing uncertainty about that, too, because the Trump/Republican budget, the subject of the partisan dispute that led to the government shutdown, cuts Medicaid subsidies for millions of Americans.
It’s never a good time to be poor, or on the edge of being poor. But certain times are worse than others. This is one.
Dan Rodricks’ column appears weekly in the Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com
