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Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.
Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”
Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.
Today, in yet another violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan ends, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service website reads: “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. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. 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.”
It appears the administration is using those Americans who depend on food assistance as pawns to put more pressure on Democrats to cave to Trump’s will. Today, Annie Karni of the New York Times reported that Trump has joked, “I’m the speaker and the president,” and Trump ally Steven Bannon calls Congress “the state Duma,” a reference to Russia’s rubber-stamp assembly.
With Republicans refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the normal way, with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) keeping the House out of session, and with Trump leaving for Asia for a week, Republicans are clearly making the calculation that Democrats who refused to give up their demand for the extension of the premium tax credit to stop dramatic hikes in the cost of healthcare premiums will cave when America falls into a hunger crisis.
What are we doing here, folks?
The nation’s nutrition program was once the symbol of government brokering between different interests to benefit everyone. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, one of the first crises he had to meet was the collapse of agricultural prices, which had been falling since the end of World War I and fell off a cliff after the stock market crash of October 1929. Farmers reacted to falling prices by increasing production, driving prices even lower.
In summer 1933, the government tried to raise prices by creating artificial scarcity. They paid farmers to plow their crops under and bought and slaughtered six million piglets, turning the carcasses into salt pork, lard, industrial grease, and fertilizer. The outcry over the slaughter of the pigs was immediate, and the escape of some intrepid animals into the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois, increased the protest at both the slaughter and the waste of food when Americans were going hungry.
So in fall 1933 the administration set up the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, designed to raise commodity prices by buying surplus production and distributing that surplus through local charities. In a story about the history of nutrition assistance programs, journalist Matthew Algeo noted that in January 1934, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation bought 234,600 hogs. This time, their meat went to hungry Americans.
But that fall, when officials from the FSRC announced they were planning to open a “goods exchange” or “commissary” outside Nashville, Tennessee, to distribute food directly to those who needed it, grocers protested that the government was infringing on private business and directly competing with them.
The next year, the agency became the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation and began to distribute surplus food to schools to be used in school lunch programs. Needy students would not otherwise be able to afford food, so providing it for them did not compete with grocers. In 1937, Congress placed that agency within the Department of Agriculture.
To get food into the hands of Americans more generally, officials at the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea of “food stamps.” As Algeo explains, eligible recipients bought orange-colored stamps that could be redeemed for any food except alcohol, drugs, or food consumed on the premises. With the orange stamps, a buyer received blue stamps worth half the value of the orange stamps purchased. The blue stamps could be redeemed only for foods the government said were surplus: butter, flour, beans, and citrus fruits, for example.
Any grocery store could redeem the stamps, and grocers could then exchange all the stamps—orange and blue—for face value at any bank. The Treasury would pay back the banks.
It was a complicated system, but when the government launched it in May 1939 in Rochester, New York, it was a roaring success. By early December, Algeo notes, the government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps. That meant another half-million dollars’ worth of the blue stamps had been distributed, thus pumping a half a million dollars directly into the 1,200 grocery stores in Rochester, and from there into the local economy.
The program spread quickly. In the four years it existed, nearly 20 million Americans received benefits from it at a cost to the government of $262 million. With the economic boom caused by World War II, the government ended the program in 1943.
In 1959, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to restart a food stamp program, but it was not until 1961, after seeing the poverty in West Virginia during his campaign, that President John F. Kennedy announced a new program. Since then, the program has gone through several iterations, most notably when the Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries purchase stamps, a requirement that had kept many of the nation’s neediest families from participating.
In 1990 the USDA began to replace stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, and in 2008, Congress renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In July 2025 the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut about $186 billion from SNAP programs, and then in September 2025 the USDA announced it would no longer produce reports on food insecurity in the U.S., calling them “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies” that “do nothing more than fear monger.”
While a great deal has changed in nutrition support programs in the past sixty years, what has not changed is the importance of food assistance programs to retailers, and thus to local economies. In 2020, Ed Bolen and Elizabeth Wolkomir of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that about 8% of the food U.S. families buy is funded by SNAP. In fiscal year 2019, that amounted to about $56 billion. Beneficiaries spent SNAP dollars at about 248,000 retailers. While about 80% of that money went to superstores or supermarkets—in 2025, Walmart alone captured about 25% of that money—the rest of it went to small businesses. Bolen and Wolkomir note that about 80% of stores that accept SNAP are small enterprises. SNAP benefits are an important part of revenue for those smaller businesses, especially in poorer areas, where they generate significant additional economic activity.
Not only will the loss of SNAP create more hunger in the richest country on earth, it will also rip a hole in local economies just as people’s health insurance premiums skyrocket.
And yet, at the same time the Department of Agriculture says it cannot spend its $6 billion in reserves to address the $8 billion needed for SNAP in November, the administration easily found $20 billion to prop up right-wing Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina.
What are we doing here?
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Notes:
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/24/usda-says-it-cant-use-contingency-fund-for-food-stamps/
George T. Blakey, “Ham That Never Was: The 1933 Emergency Hog Slaughter,” The Historian 30 (November 1967): 41–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24440624?seq=1
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000019a-17b3-dc69-abda-fff3f76a0000
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/24/snap-food-aid-shutdown-usda-00622690
https://werehistory.org/replacing-food-stamps-with-food-in-a-box-a-brief-history/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/us/politics/mike-johnson-speaker-congress.html
https://www.jandonline.org/article/S0002-8223(07)01619-7/fulltext
https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-boosts-retailers-and-local-economies
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/18/politics/snap-food-stamps-november-government-shutdown
https://www.fns.usda.gov/
https://www.fns.usda.gov/newsroom/usda-0219.25
https://foodtank.com/news/2025/10/usda-ends-key-food-security-report-leaving-advocates-in-the-dark/
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