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July 14, 2025 
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 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Health and Science Editor, Opinion |
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In a country as wealthy and technologically advanced as the United States, it’s shocking how many people still go hungry. About 42 million Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. But more than two million people could lose those benefits under President Trump’s newly passed domestic policy law.
In an essay published today, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tracy Kidder reports from a food bank in Easthampton, Mass., where the staff works around the clock to help families struggling to get by. The people Kidder observes, many of them working, many of them raising children, are trying to hold on even as the support systems they depend on are being pulled away.
“There is an array of opinion about government safety nets,” Kidder writes. “What should they encompass? Should they even exist? Watching people wait in the food line in Easthampton, I found myself thinking that if our current safety net were destroyed, this landscape would turn truly dystopian.”
The Trump administration’s second term has brought a sweeping change to America’s social contract — whether it’s through weakening disaster response agencies or with policies that may remove people from Medicaid coverage. Places like the Easthampton food bank are doing everything they can to mitigate the fallout. “Their pantries represent a model of decency,” Kidder writes, “of coherent community efforts on behalf of people in need.” But they can’t replace a functioning safety net, and they’re going to be under strain.
The effects of the new domestic policy law will unfold over time, but it forces an immediate reckoning over what kind of country we are and want to be. As Kidder writes, “There is a great deal of suffering in the United States.”
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