On most days, my Nextdoor feed plays the usual standbys: Neighborhood coyote sightings, reports of porch pirates and catalytic-converter thefts, conspiratorial screeds about city government, heated arguments about whether or not it’s a hanging offense to put dog-poop bags in other people’s garbage cans. This week, though, the tone has shifted dramatically: With November 1st and the end of federal SNAP benefits looming, residents have locked into mutual-aid mode on the oft-derided social platform. Some posters are people losing their benefits and seeking out free food pantries and food banks. Some are people hoping to help, like a woman offering to bake birthday cakes for kids whose families have lost their benefits. Some are local business owners raising money for emergency food support, like the coffee shop that has raised $200K this week to provide SNAP breakfasts. All are moving reminders of how neighbors rally to take care of each other in crisis moments; all are deeply infuriating reminders that in cases like this, they should not have to.
Last week, a banner appeared at the top of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s home page that reads, in part: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry…. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”
That this is a clear violation of the Hatch Act on the part of the USDA isn’t news: The government shutdown that began October 1 has been attended by similarly petty Hatch-Act infractions on the websites of the Department of Justice (“Democrats have shut down the government. Department of Justice websites are not currently regularly updated”) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government”). The fact that a contingency plan explaining how the department could continue to fund SNAP during the shutdown with emergency funds disappeared overnight from the USDA site, however, definitely is.
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The Agriculture Department had previously confirmed that it would tap these contingency funds — between $5 and $6 billion, which would not fully restore SNAP but could provide partial relief — in the event of a government shutdown. It reversed its policy in late October, stating without explanation that the funds were “not legally available.” The lawsuit filed Tuesday by more than 23 state attorneys general and several governors was an effort to compel the Trump administration to tap the reserve, and two federal judges have since ruled in their favor.
On Thursday, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts gave the Trump administration until Monday to explain how it plans to fund benefits, saying “If you don’t have money, you tighten your belt. You are not going to make everyone drop dead because it’s a political game someplace.” And on Friday, Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled that the administration must restore benefits “as soon as possible.” Thus far there has been no response from the administration on how they plan to address these rulings.
The disappearance of the contingency plan from the USDA’s site counters Vice President J.D. Vance’s confusing, if telling, assertion that the president has “tried to do everything” in his power to make the shutdown as “unpainless as possible” (mission accomplished?) and suggests that the administration hopes to avoid accountability by denying that it ever existed. Whether or not it works, the effort this administration has put into dissembling is in itself evidence that people not having food is of minimal concern to them.
Not that any further evidence is needed: The viciousness of the second Trump administration in the months since he took office for the second time has been matched only by the giddy relish with which it is carried out. And, of course, coinciding with last week’s announcement that the Agriculture Department would halt SNAP benefits was Trump’s sudden and belligerent demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for an enormous, glass-walled ballroom whose cost was initially projected at $200 million but has, unsurprisingly, been adjusted to $300 million since. The spectacle of the demolition amid the government shutdown and pending SNAP cuts was an ostentatious spotlight on Trump’s will to power and the carte blanche he’s been granted to destroy anything and everything he chooses to. The fact that the president’s approval rating has been on the decline as he’s increasingly become a petulant sandbox bully isn’t actually incongruous. Reactionary and emotion-driven, the only way he can respond to not being liked or admired is to attempt to punish those who fail to like and admire him by becoming less likable and admirable.
In the case of SNAP, this extends to a substantial chunk of his base. Twenty-five of the 30 states that voted for Trump in 2024, according to data from Center for Policy and Budget Priorities, surpass the national average in relying on SNAP; 29 of them have a higher-than-average proportion of SNAP recipients with children. This might explain the promiscuity of recent Hatch Act violations — the USDA’s erasure of its contingency plan suggests an administration that knows they have blameshifted too close to the sun. Democrats definitely bear criticism for once again failing to believe that there might be a line of depravity the GOP will not cross.
On Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson responded to CNN’s Dana Bash asking why money couldn’t be reprogrammed to avert SNAP cancellation by confirming that this is an act of political theater and deliberate sadism. “The New Republic” labeled Johnson’s admission as “accidental,” which, as with Vance’s, sounds like more wishful thinking: The Speaker’s very clear, very concise answer was “Because when you deviate from the goal of reopening the entire government, Chuck Schumer and the radicals over there will continue to play games with people’s paychecks, their livelihoods,” Johnson said. “And if you do just part of this, it will reduce pressure for them to do all of it, to do their basic job, and that is reopen the government.”
A handful of states have freed up state funds to help keep their SNAP programs going; others have given emergency funding to food banks. But some of the quickest to respond to the looming cutoff have been communities and citizens mobilizing in every state. Churches, synagogues, and other faith centers are opening their doors; the Free Formula Network is connecting families in need of baby formula with direct donations; DoorDash has launched an Emergency Food Response. Mutual aid has always been necessary: Where politicians look at people and see data, mutual aid networks recognize them as humans with needs that cannot wait. These networks have become increasingly visible as Trump 2.0’s enacting of policy continually levels up in inhumanity. Stepping into the breach to address the impact of the SNAP cutoff foregrounds people as people — and shows the machinations behind it in all their rancid venality.
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This administration has already acknowledged how willing it is to let Americans lose food security, The Republican tax bill with the too-ludicrous-to-name title passed earlier this year with a proposed $186 billion cut to SNAP that guaranteed huge economic repercussions. Along with deporting immigrants, rolling out the red carpet for infectious diseases and letting Musk fanboys loose on Social Security data, willingness to cut off SNAP access is just one more way this administration is pissing into the wind. It’s not just that, as Adam Serwer declared, the cruelty is the point; the cruelty is the only tool it has. The number of people in Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana who rely on SNAP is one of the highest in the nation, and they’re unlikely to see “We’re deliberately starving you, but we’re starving everyone who uses SNAP” as a win-win situation.
As author Stephanie Land points out, weaponized government assistance is the opposite of benevolent. “Over the near-decade that I depended on these benefits to survive, I started to see that the fear of losing them was part of the point,” she wrote in an October 30th Time dispatch. “Programs referred to as a ‘safety net’ are anything but when they can be removed with a thoughtless, vague message, or scribble from a permanent marker. It’s about control to gain compliance.” It’s also about an increasingly frantic effort to portray the most pronounced national struggle as one between right and left, rather than between the people who have everything and the people struggling daily to hold onto whatever they can.
A longstanding tactic of the GOP is spinning narratives meant to demonize people who receive SNAP benefits — known as food stamps until a 2008 rebrand meant, in part, to reduce stigma — as leeches who prefer preying on hardworking, tax-paying Americans to holding a job. In fact, the vast majority of those relying on SNAP who can work do work: for Walmart and Amazon, as military personnel, at fast-food restaurants. SNAP recipients are created and sustained by the companies that don’t pay them a living wage. Republicans work so hard to portray SNAP as an entitlement program for people who refuse to work because otherwise they risk exposing it as a subsidy for corporations who underpay their workers and refuse to pay taxes.
The current moment’s battle of optics has a clear loser: On one side is Trump, furious that no one wants his tacky gold ballroom and an administration that can’t keep its own lies straight. administration. On the other is a U.S. citizenry continuing to band together so the most vulnerable in their communities don’t go hungry. One is actively trying to hurt 42 million food-insecure American; the other is actively trying to help them. One side has bulldozers; the other side has humanity. If only we could count on that being enough.
