Trump's war on hunger the hungry

SNAP is the current iteration of the Food Stamp program, which first came into being during the Great Depression, was made permanent in 1964, and went nationwide in 1974. Almost ever since, it’s faced attacks—and not just from Republicans. In 1996, neoliberal Bill Clinton announced the “end of welfare as we know it”—which just meant inflicting harsh new work requirements on people in need of government assistance, including food stamps—as he triangulated away the Democratic Party’s soul. Making hungry people performatively dance for their supper is apparently a bipartisan fascination.

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Trump’s changes to the SNAP program are nasty and myriad (yep, he’s cutting off refugees)—but I want to focus on the even stricter “work requirements” he and the well-fed dauphins who run Congress put in place. Among other petty cruelties, veterans, people who are homeless, and young adults transitioning out of foster care are now required to work in exchange for their meager food-stamp allowance. So are older people, younger people with older kids, and more.

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It’s hard to overstate how harmful this is. Over 42 million people receive some form of SNAP assistance. Those living in states that previously had waivers account for 36.5 million of those recipients. All those people could now be at risk of losing their benefits. The (Republican-controlled) Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 4 million people will lose all or part of their SNAP benefits once the changes go into effect, but we will never know the true numbers, because the Trump administration canceled the annual reporting on food insecurity that we use to track the numbers of people who need assistance.

Whatever the real number is, it’s unconscionable. Many of those people are already about to face the toughest part of their year—winter—and now, suddenly, they will not know where their next meal is coming from.

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Thanks to our long, bipartisan, embarrassing history of cruelty toward the needy, we know one thing about work requirements: They don’t work. First of all, most working-age people on SNAP already work. This is a simple fact that consistently gets lost or ignored every time this issue comes up. Most of the adults work, but they work unstable or part-time or simply poorly paid jobs that cannot cover their food needs.

All work requirements do is increase the paperwork necessary to get the benefit, and that means fewer people will be able to access the assistance they need even though they meet the work requirements. It’s not like people on SNAP are likely to have access to a personal assistant or a stay-at-home spouse or a lawyer or a CPA or anybody at all who is able to help them navigate through all the red tape. And it’s not like they have a lot of extra time on their hands, during business hours, to sit on the phone or show up to the government office because, you know, they’re working.

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Moreover, focusing on the adult working requirements misses the fact that nearly two-thirds of the people who get food through SNAP are children.

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But I also feel compelled to defend what Alfie P. Doolittle would call the “undeserving” poor. Regardless of what you think about any individual person, food assistance should not be predicated on meeting your personal definition of deserving. People shouldn’t have to perform feats of social worth to get food; in our incredibly wealthy society, people should just get food.

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Of course, this country’s war against the poor does not stop at food stamps. In addition to cutting Medicaid and CHIP, the Trump administration is also covertly cutting Social Security Disability Benefits. Over 8 million people receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) checks. SSDI assistance is available to people with disabilities, regardless of age, but Trump is trying to change the eligibility requirements so that a person’s age is not taken into account when assessing their ability to find another job. I don’t think I’m being “ageist” to say that telling a 60-year-old grandpa to “learn to code, lmao” is not really a practical idea, but that’s pretty much where we are.

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SNAP and SSDI make up part of the safety net for the whole economy in times of recession. When people who are out of work can still buy necessities, like groceries, it props up the businesses who sell those goods, even in times when consumer spending is at a premium. Public benefit programs create a floor that keeps local economies going when whatever bubble we happen to be in at the time bursts.

What’s maddening is that neither Trump, MAGA, mainline Republicans, or some Democrats actually want to do what is necessary so that people don’t have to turn to food assistance. They don’t want to address the underlying, structural factors. They don’t want to address food deserts. They don’t want to provide free childcare. They don’t want to raise wages so that people who have jobs can afford food. They just want to kick people and their children off of welfare, and lie in order to blame the hungry for their suffering. Hunger is a solvable problem. It’s a political problem, not a scarcity problem.

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We have facts and figures proving that work requirements result in people who are working being denied the food assistance they need. Yet there are still people in both parties who think they are a good idea.

  The Nation

In case you wonder where those proving data come from, Georgia and Arkansas tried work requirements for Medicaid and found out they don't work. Doesn't mean they aren't still trying. The cruelty is a GOP bonus in any program.

PS. The government is still shut down.  Republicans in Congress are still not going to work.  Maybe they should have some work requirements.

UPDATE 10/28/2025:  Trump administration has announced SNAP benefits will be cut off November 1.  Because they're hoping people will believe them when they say it's the Democrats' fault people will go hungry.  Or that they can force the Democrats to vote for their cruel budget. Despicable beyond belief.