US elites tend to have a “normalcy bias” that allows them to believe our political leaders would never take actions so reckless, and so clearly detached from reality, that they would grievously harm the country.

Many elites simply couldn’t fathom that President George W. Bush would invade a sovereign nation based on false pretenses or that President Donald Trump would incite a violent riot to try to overturn democracy.

Likewise, elites were largely in denial about the grave threat to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—formerly called the Food Stamp Program—during a showdown.

Prior to the shutdown, I warned some colleagues and elected officials that President Trump and congressional Republicans could use a shutdown as an excuse to deny up to 42 million SNAP recipients (and more than 260,000 neighborhood SNAP retailers) nationwide of $8 billion per month in grocery funds. Many assumed that I was exaggerating the threat and there was no way that our political system would allow something that disastrous to occur. But that is exactly what is playing out.

On the same day that Trump pledged to CNN that he would continue SNAP payments in November, his own Department of Agriculture (USDA) said the government wouldn’t. The next day, the USDA used its website to double down on the SNAP shutdown, using lies about immigrants and a false smear against transgender Americans in a partisan message that clearly violated the federal Hatch Act prohibition on using tax dollars for partisan purposes. Even if Trump or the GOP Congress or the Democratic attorneys general suing the government over the debacle succeed in ending the SNAP shutdown, there will still be a significant delay in the delivery of November’s SNAP benefits.

It wasn’t always this way. In the late 1960s and 1970s, prompted by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and widespread media coverage of the serious domestic hunger problem, a bipartisan coalition in Washington (including President Nixon, President Carter, conservative Republican Senator Robert Dole, and liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern) started the National School Breakfast Program and the Women, Infants, and Children Program for pregnant women and children under 5. Most significantly, they created the Food Stamp Program, which eventually enabled tens of millions of Americans to receive monthly benefits to help them afford groceries. Collectively, these programs worked spectacularly, almost entirely ending hunger in America.

But, starting in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan combined crushing unions and outsourcing middle-class jobs overseas with using racial dog whistles to demonize those receiving social safety net benefits. Building on the divisive but electorally successful rhetoric of George Wallace, Reagan decried “strapping young bucks” getting food stamps, and began to slash away at domestic food assistance.

The GOP intensified its racist rhetoric to undermine the social safety net during the time of the Obama administration, as Newt Gingrich called Obama the “food stamp president” and Senator Rick Santorum implied that non-white people were uniquely dependent upon food stamps (for the record, the plurality of SNAP recipients were then, and are today, white). Even the supposed moderate Republican Mitt Romney falsely accused Obama of eliminating work requirements for food stamps, which the GOP maintains are necessary into promote work for people in safety net programs even though data proves such requirements don’t increase employment and even though conservatives never impose such work requirements on programs that aid the wealthiest Americans.

Current Issue

December 2025 Issue

The bipartisan anti-hunger coalition unraveled. In 2018, when the Paul Ryan–led US House voted to take billions of dollars’ worth of food from millions of SNAP recipients, not a single House Democrat voted for the bill, but 86 percent of House Republicans did.

Massive influxes of federal food and cash aid allotted by Democrats kept US hunger at bay during the economic recession caused by the pandemic. But after conservatives, including then–Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, allowed such assistance to expire, US hunger soared. The USDA found that the number Americans who lived in food-insecure households (meaning they were unable to afford a sufficient supply of food) jumped to 47 million people in 2023, a 40 percent increase over 2021. The number of food insecure Americans in 2023 exceeded the total populations of the states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia, combined.

Fully 17 percent of US children, 10 percent of employed adults, and 8 percent of older Americans lived in food-insecure households from 2021 to 2023, according to an analysis of USDA data from my organization, Hunger Free America.

The number of Americans who didn’t have enough to eat over two one-week periods increased by 55 percent between August/September 2021 and August/September 2024, according to our computation of Census Household Pulse Survey data.

Still, over this time period, many elites (even liberal ones) have celebrated the supposed overall health of the economy, ignoring that struggling Americans can’t eat a rising GDP. These same economic cheerleaders then scratched their heads when Americans voted against the Democratic administration, which they blamed (often incorrectly) for their troubles. With Trump back in the White House, advancing an openly racist agenda, it was only a matter of time before his administration took aim at the nutrition safety net.

We didn’t have to wait long. In their big ugly bill, Trump and his congressional GOP puppets slashed $186 billion out of SNAP, the deepest cut in history, citing the outrageously false charge that most SNAP spending is on “illegal aliens” and “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Not a single House or Senate Democrat voted for the bill, and of the tiny handful of GOP Members of Congress who voted against the bill, most did so because the SNAP cuts weren’t large enough. Contrary to their assertions, the vast majority of SNAP recipients harmed by the cuts are low-paid workers, children, people with disabilities, older Americans, and/or veterans. On top of all that, the Trump administration canceled more than 84 million pounds of food aid scheduled to be distributed by charities, many of which are faith-based.

Then, in an act of reality-denial fit for Noth Korea, the Trump administration ended USDA’s 27-year practice of collecting and publishing food insecurity data, citing variety of preposterous justifications for doing so. Its obvious that their real reason for eliminating this data is their desire to keep the public in the dark about how Trump’s failing tariff and other economic policies—combined with the massive food aid cuts—are causing US hunger to skyrocket even more exponentially. Obviously, the ostrich approach won’t end hunger.

Now nearly 42 million Americans nationwide may lose access to sufficient food. Not only would this create the greatest domestic hunger crises since the Great Depression; it would also wreak havoc on food retailers, perhaps even forcing some to lay off staff.

No one should be duped into thinking that charitable food programs can make up for the end of SNAP, which provides literally 10 times the dollar amount for food as does every charity in America. Even before the shutdown, emergency food programs nationwide widely reported that they were unable to meet the current surging demand for food.

The map below, complied by Hunger Free America using USDA and Census Bureau data, shows the percentage of each state’s population that relies on SNAP. In red states like Louisiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, more than 15 percent of the population relies on SNAP. More than 10 percent of residents receive SNAP in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina, and Missouri.

Many SNAP recipients are Trump supporters and Republican voters. It’s no wonder that key GOP leaders and MAGA acolytes have starting pivoting away from lambasting SNAP to defending it as key to helping the “vulnerable,” incorrectly blaming Democrats for halting it.

So, where do we go from here?

While progressives should push governors and state legislatures to take emergency steps to ameliorate the impact of the shutdown, the only real solution is to pressure Trump and congressional Republicans to compromise with the Democrats on a plan that both reopens the federal government and prevents tens of millions of Americans from suffering from huge spikes in their healthcare premiums.

After all, if people have to spend hundreds of more dollars per month on healthcare, they will have far less to spend of food, so those premium hikes would also increase hunger. That’s why this healthcare fight is also an anti-hunger fight. We must all hang tough and win.

Beyond that, progressives should consistently and forcefully advocate for transforming our nation’s policies and programs in order to ensure an “Opportunity Society,” in which people who work hard don’t just get by but actually get ahead. We must build upon a reliance on means-tested programs aimed at mostly the impoverished in order to also focus more broadly on helping a wide array of Americans with universal programs, as well as comprehensive policies to help struggling Americans transition from owing debts and paying interest (and losing wealth) to owning assets—such as homes, small businesses, and savings—that earn interest (and accumulate wealth).

The most effective—and most political popular—policies need to restore the American dream for both the middle class and then tens of millions of American struggling to rise into the middle class. America can achieve normalcy again only when we have society that works for everyone.