Trump Is Ready to Let Millions of Americans Go Hungry
The Trump administration says it will withhold funding for food stamps starting November 1. The move will inflict hardship on tens of millions of lower-income Americans who rely on the program and potentially cause broader economic disruption.
If the government does refuse to fund SNAP, as many as 42 million low-income Americans could lose their benefits. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Nick French
The Trump administration recently declared that, because of the ongoing federal government shutdown, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will stop funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) starting November 1. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia are suing the administration to try to force it to fund the food stamp program; Donald Trump’s Department of Justice admitted in court on Thursday that the government has enough funds in emergency reserve to pay for SNAP benefits next month but is nonetheless refusing to do so. If the government does refuse to fund the program, as many as forty-two million low-income Americans could lose their benefits.
Christopher Bosso is a professor of policy and political science at Northeastern University who specializes in food and environmental policy. He is the author, most recently, of Why SNAP Works: A Political History — and Defense — of the Food Stamp Program. Jacobin editor Nick French sat down with Bosso earlier this week to discuss the history and evolution of SNAP, its cross-partisan popularity, and the potential impact of the cuts on program recipients and the US economy more broadly.
Could you give a very brief history of SNAP? When and why was the program started, and how has it evolved up to the present?
The conceptual origins of the program that we know today as SNAP, like those of so much of the US social welfare state, go back to the Great Depression in the 1930s. It’s all rooted in the paradox of abundance at the same time that you have need — the paradox of “want amidst plenty” is what they called it back then.
There’s a perverse economics to farming: the individual farmer is going to try to maximize production, and unless you can sell it all at the price that will cover your costs, you’re going to lose money. The big dilemma in the 1930s with the Depression was that demand for a lot of the food that was being produced dropped precipitously, for a lot of reasons: trade wars and decline of globalization, but also slumping domestic demand as people lost their jobs and were cutting back.
Again, the perverse economic logic is that all the farmers are being rational and producing as much as possible to make money. The aggregate result is going to be surplus, and that surplus drives down the price of the commodity because there’s too much of it. As a result, individual farmers take a bath, and you had this spike in bankruptcies. And farmers, to make some money, will continue to produce on marginal lands, which led to the Dust Bowl and the great migration to California.
The federal government under [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was desperate to find a way to reduce the surplus and prop up commodity prices for farmers so the farmers could make a living; [the surplus was] going to drive a lot of the marginal farmers out of the business. There was a lot of agricultural policy also [aimed at facilitating consolidation and bigger farms]. But you’re trying to keep the individual farmers going, at least the more efficient ones. At the same time, you didn’t want food to be too expensive, so you had to figure out a way to hit that sweet spot.
So you had the surplus of grain, pork, and so on. Now there’s one way you can get rid of surplus: you destroy it. And they started doing that — burning grain, pouring the milk down drains, slaughtering pigs but burying the carcasses and rendering it inedible.
That outraged people. That was a moral failure, because you have the Great Depression, with 25 percent unemployment. Even the federal government folks were really uncomfortable with the moral dilemma here.
So what do you do with all the surplus? One thing you can do is give the surplus commodities to the needy. You ship commodities to the states, and the states distribute it to local governments for distribution to residents who needed food.
They did that, and that was something. But you see these images of people standing in line for the box of food or big piles of potatoes. . . . There were some problems with that. First, people didn’t like it — standing in line was shame-inducing. Also, in the big box of food, you might get stuff you don’t like or don’t know how to prepare. Or you get these classic examples of people getting twenty pounds of oranges that were surplus.
It was very inefficient. You didn’t know what you were going to get; you couldn’t plan. And retailers hated it because if people are getting free food, they’re not coming to your store. Retailers hated the free giveaway of food.
So some folks in the retail grocery industry and the federal government got together and came up with this idea: we will create a system where those who are on public assistance are given permission to purchase orange stamps. Say you purchase a dollar’s worth of orange stamps. Those orange stamps could be used to buy any food item in participating stores, essentially a one-for-one conversion. But in buying that dollar’s worth of orange stamps, you would get $0.50 in bonus blue stamps — and the bonus blue stamps, which are essentially free, could be used to purchase any food declared in surplus by the federal government for that month.
If you go into your local grocery store that’s participating, and let’s say that prunes are declared in surplus that month by the federal government, and there’s a box of prunes for $0.25 — you, as the food-stamp consumer, could use $0.25 of your free blue food stamp to purchase that box of prunes. It’s the same box of prunes that your neighbor next door who’s using “regular” currency would purchase for $0.25; the only difference is your currency is the blue stamp.
You’re allowing people who need supplemental food assistance to go into the regular retail grocery store system, use the orange stamps on any food, and then use the blue stamp to purchase those foods that were declared in surplus. The idea was to help use up the surplus and to incentivize people to use the retail system and keep grocery stores going.
It ran from 1939 to roughly 1943, and it was actually very popular. People thought this was a better idea than having people stand in line for a box of food. Social workers liked it; retailers liked it; everybody liked it. But they didn’t have enough money to do a truly national program.
The program was ended in 1943 because the war created a lot of jobs, creating greater demand, and a lot of food was shipped overseas to troops and allied nations. So there was no surplus to actually worry about.
The program was revived in the late 1950s by some Democrats in Congress. Surpluses returned with a vengeance in the late ’50s; with technology improvements and everything else, you have massive production. We’re shipping food overseas with the Food for Peace program; we’re giving surplus commodities to local governments and to schools for school-lunch programs. Guess where the origins of school meal programs come from? It’s surplus commodities. And again, [the government is] doing these commodity distributions.
Some folks think, why don’t we revive the food stamp program? So the [John F.] Kennedy administration revived some pilot programs for food stamps. This time, instead of the orange and blue stamps, they just said, we’re just going to have $1, $2, $5 currency vouchers. If you’re eligible, based on your income, you would get a certain dollar amount of food stamps, which effectively gave a 40 percent discount on purchasing food. And you go to your local grocery store and you use your coupons to buy any domestically produced food in the store. Eventually, much later, it became any food item.
The Food Stamp Program as we know it has its origins in those pilot programs and then was solidified in law in the 1964 Food Stamp Act. Fast-forward sixty years, it’s now SNAP, because we no longer use stamps — we use EBT cards. The government formally changed the name in 2008 to make clear that there are no stamps anymore.
The Food Stamp Program really never made that big of a dent in the surplus. But it enabled low-income households to go to regular food stores, whether it’s a bodega or Walmart or Costco or whatever, and shop like everybody else. That’s the whole point of it.
How many people are on SNAP now, and how much do they receive in benefits?
It’s now roughly $100 billion a year supporting roughly forty-two million Americans. I say “Americans,” because it’s only available to those who are legally here now. There’s an asterisk here: if your household has children born in the United States, whatever the documentation of their parents is, the household is eligible for SNAP because of the children. Whether the parents are going to seek out support is a different question.
The average benefit level is about $180 a month per household, so it’s not a huge amount. The maximum is roughly $600 dollars. But a relatively small percentage of households is getting the maximum.
It’s supplemental. Benefits are based on your household size and income and expenses. They are calibrated for all these things and can fluctuate based on your income.
What does the average SNAP household look like? It’s some combination of children, elderly, disabled people, and the working poor. In fact, the working poor has become the growth area of SNAP over the last ten or fifteen years since the Great Recession and now constitute around 30 percent of SNAP households. What people don’t understand is that the percentage of SNAP households that are getting some form of cash welfare is very small: 7 percent maybe, because there’s not much cash welfare around anymore. A great many more SNAP households contain some combination of the elderly, disabled, or children.
As noted, around 30 percent of SNAP households are the working poor. They’re working — they just don’t make enough money. That speaks to stagnant wages over the last fifteen or twenty years. If you’re a low-income household, both parents are working minimum-wage jobs, and say it’s a household of four — the federal poverty threshold for a family of four is about $32,150 now. If you have two minimum-wage workers, they’re not making much more than that. And you’re eligible for SNAP at 130 percent of the federal poverty threshold — or about $42,000 for a family of four.
So you could see why the working poor become a much larger percentage of SNAP households, because they’re simply not making enough money to get by, especially in areas with high housing costs.
Has anything like the impending SNAP benefit cuts happened before? And what do you expect the impact to be — on recipients but also on retailers or the economy more broadly?
If this goes through, and on November 1 the USDA does not deposit any money into people’s accounts, it would be the first time in the history of the program this has happened. The federal government has never stopped providing it, even in past shutdowns.
The impacts are going to be dire for some folks pretty quickly — within a week or so. Many households get their SNAP benefits in the first week of the month; others are spread out, depending on their last name or case number. A lot of households, by the third week of the month, have run through their benefits and their spare cash. They’re showing up at food pantries around the third week of the month. So you would expect that to happen faster for some households; you’re going to see people showing up at food pantries at the end of the first week, maybe the second week of the month instead.
People in the food bank and food pantry sector are really worried about this. A lot of the states are trying to do something, but the states don’t have the capacity to make up $8 billion, which is roughly the monthly amount that we’re spending on SNAP.
Also, that $8 billion is being spent in the retail food sector. So it’s $8 billion that’s not going to be spent at your Walmart or Costco or your local bodega or convenience store or independent grocery store. That’s real money. And in an industry where margins are relatively narrow, you’re talking a loss of revenue. . . . Depending on different estimates, some 10 to 12 percent of revenues for food retailers is from SNAP. So that’s 10 to 12 percent of revenue that suddenly you don’t have. You can imagine the retail food sector is not terribly happy about this — $100 billion a year is not chump change.
So it will have macro effects. It will probably lead to job loss if it lingers too long — if we go through the entire month.
I’m wondering what the public reaction will be, or if there’s any lobbying going on behind the scenes by, say, food retailers.
I imagine there is. That Josh Hawley had an op-ed in the New York Times this week is emblematic of the fact that Republicans are getting nervous about this.
Despite the public image of SNAP as an urban program — the classic “welfare queen” trope — food insecurity and SNAP utilization rates are just as high and sometimes even higher in rural America and a lot of areas that are otherwise conservative and voted for Donald Trump and Republicans. Republicans from some of these areas are getting a bit nervous because they’re worried that their constituents are going to get hit hard.
Rural poverty is different from urban poverty. If you’re low-income and living in a city, there’s actually probably a denser network of support out there — denser and closer by, in terms of social service agencies, food pantries, and other kinds of support systems. If you’re in rural America, especially if you’re elderly, you may be isolated, and it may be harder to tap into a support system.
I suspect that a number of Republicans who are otherwise supportive of the administration and are conservative themselves are concerned because, again, this is a big hit, and it’s going to be a big hit to the grocery store industry, to retailers in their own states and districts. I think there’s nervousness out there.
Americans may not like welfare in an abstract sense, but they don’t want to see their fellow Americans go hungry. So if you start seeing these narratives of people standing in pantry lines, especially in small-town America, that’s going to resonate.
What is the public sentiment toward SNAP in general?
If you ask people about welfare in a general, in the abstract sense, people are typically very conservative. They’re like, “People should stand on their own feet.” But then you start asking about specific programs . . . I saw one poll from 2023 specifically about food assistance, and even a majority of Republicans were supportive of spending on food assistance programs, SNAP in particular.
Again, Americans may be in the abstract sense conservative, but programmatically they’re a bit more liberal than we think, in the sense of wanting to support government spending for certain kinds of programs to support the poor. Everybody loves Medicare and Social Security, of course. But even SNAP gets a fair percentage of support among Republicans and conservatives.
Conservatives have critiques of SNAP, but they have never tried to get rid of it. Even in the Big Beautiful Bill, they’re trying to reduce it and undermine it through rules changes that put greater burdens on the states. But there has never been a direct assault on it, at least since Newt Gingrich tried to put federal nutrition programs into a block grant. That effort failed because fellow Republicans did not want to eliminate the federal safety net. A lot of conservatives still support SNAP because they see it as the safety net of last resort.
In the end, it’s about food, and we don’t want people to go hungry. And it’s a food program where you go to the store and act like a consumer. You’re using the regular channels of commerce. What could be more American? You’re giving people choice. SNAP has been very resilient for sixty years largely because it taps the American market capitalist system to enable low-income households to get more food.
This is a unique moment. The problem that we have is that we have an ideologue in the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, and we’ve got a president who is famously not attentive to policy, and he’s AWOL on the entire shutdown. And essentially, we’ve got a moribund House of Representatives. So what’s going to happen . . . I have no idea.
But if the shutdown continues and SNAP dollars stop flowing, there’s going to be pain. And I don’t think it’s going to redound to Republicans’ benefit. Because it’s about food, there’s a visceral feeling here.
The administration is justifying the benefit suspension in terms of the shutdown. Elizabeth Warren responded that, actually, they do have the funds to pay SNAP benefits next month.
Yeah, there are contingency funds. Congress has allocated in law $3 billion a year for the last couple fiscal years as a contingency fund. Even the Trump administration earlier said this could be used in case of a government shutdown. Also, the USDA has a lot of ability to move money around from other programs. If it wanted to continue funding the program, it could do it. It’s a political choice not to do it.