The Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is one of the most successful anti-hunger programs in American history. By providing food purchasing benefits to low-income households, SNAP helps about one in eight Americans buy groceries. Now, with the Trump White House exploiting the month-long government shutdown to allow SNAP benefits to lapse on Saturday, the right-wing media is working overtime to argue that, in this time of financial peril, the food stamp program should be harder to access.
“It is insane that there are 42 million Americans on food stamps. That is a wild statistic,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on his podcast. “And the amount of government dependency in this country is just way too high, period.” Right-wing podcaster Stephen Crowder similarly complained on X: “It’s rewarding people who abuse the system.” Conservative pundit Ann Coulter claimed that “the federal government has been paying Americans not to work by feeding, housing and medicating them for ‘free,’ and then wonder why we have so many useless, jobless, helpless people.” Slamming Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s attempt to pass a standalone funding mechanism for SNAP, Coulter suggested “40 million of them could get jobs.”
More than one in four American children live in SNAP households, and more than 80% of those households earn less than the federal poverty line, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). For a family of four, the average monthly benefit works out to less than $2 per individual meal per day. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the House and Senate on party-line votes in July, cut $187 billion from the program over 10 years — “the largest cut to SNAP in history,” according to CPBB — and drastically limited eligibility.
The shutdown has created political cover for many on the right to push for further reductions in SNAP funding.
The shutdown has created political cover for many on the right to push for further reductions in SNAP funding. As Democrats have held out for their demands of restoring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act longer than Republicans anticipated, the Trump White House is not shying away from stripping Americans of vital resources.
In a sudden reversal, the administration announced that it would not tap around $5 billion in contingency funds to keep food stamp benefits through November — despite assurances from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to Fox Business that “The president has made a priority to, at least for the short term, continue funding programs like WIC, and food stamps, or SNAP.” And as Axios reported, the new USDA memo “was an apparent departure from its Sept. 30 shutdown plan (which has since been taken down) that stated, ‘Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds.’”
Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the administration on Tuesday to block the cutoff. On Thursday, a federal judge suggested the administration would violate the law if it barred access to the funds. “Congress told you what to do if there is no money,” Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, told the administration’s lawyers, according to the Washington Post. “You need to figure out how to stretch that emergency money for now.”
Welfare programs have long been an easy political target for conservatives seeking to exploit the “undeserving poor” myth. With talk of welfare queens, couch potatoes, the idle poor and a culture of poverty, the “taxpayer vs. taker” paradigm continues to play well with the GOP’s base.
“Why is it that we are subsidizing food for people that weigh 300 pounds?” asked Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt. “We are too fat a country to have 41 million on food stamps,” argued former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz.
Several of the most viral anti-SNAP tweets on X featured fake AI images of Black people claiming to illegally sell food stamp benefits or threatening to steal products in the event of a cutoff. Several feature explicitly racist images, like gorillas ransacking a Walmart.
Stereotypes like these are being used to stoke division and shore up continued support for the shutdown from the MAGA base — many of whom will be directly affected by the SNAP cuts. But while many on the right are using their warnings of the immediate hunger crisis as a negotiation tool in the ongoing shutdown, they are simultaneously using the crisis to justify long-term cuts.
Calling it “an alarming trend,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said “we need to ask ourselves why so many Americans are on SNAP.” Florida GOP Rep. Randy Fine, was even more specific, posting on X, “I am going to introduce a bill to ban all non-citizens from any form of welfare.” Undocumented immigrants are not and have never been eligible for benefits, and the Republican reforms made refugees and asylum seekers ineligible. GOP legislators are also acting to block efforts to help hungry constituents at the state level.
During Thursday’s court hearing in a Boston courtroom, administration officials admitted there were billions of dollars that could be used to head off the shortfall. With the administration able to locate money to continue paying members of the military and law enforcement — including agents involved in Trump’s mass deportation efforts around the country — its priorities are clear. Those actions, as well as the talking points being used by GOP politicians, government officials and the right-wing media, suggest that starving the hungry might not simply be an unfortunate byproduct of required austerity. It could very well be its true purpose.
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