The Hunger Games

The White House and the GOP are now using food as a weapon in the ongoing shutdown.

Photo: Ethan Swope / AP

Tomorrow, on November 1, SNAP funding runs out for 42 million Americans. And it turns out, Republicans aren’t just okay with that. As Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) decried, they’re actively weaponizing hunger as a political bargaining chip, all to try and force Democrats to abandon their healthcare demands and vote to reopen the government.

The decision by the White House and Republicans not to fund SNAP is a deliberate policy choice. Its goal is to inflict pain and suffering, something this sado-populist party is now well known for.

The White House could choose to keep SNAP funded through the shutdown, but it is deliberately choosing instead not to, all to increase political pressure on the Democrats. And we need to make that clear everywhere to everyone.

How do we know they’re playing these hunger games? For starters, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out, SNAP benefits have been maintained through every government shutdown in the past. Somehow, the GOP can’t seem to do that here.

But even looking just at the current shutdown, we can see that the Republicans are lying. Today, let’s take a closer look at their recent record of finding money when they needed to during this shutdown, and what they’re now trying to actively hide from the American people.

The White House funded food assistance earlier in the shutdown

After emphatically promising not to let vulnerable Americans go hungry, the Trump regime and Republican leadership now claim that they can’t legally reallocate funds to keep food assistance going under SNAP.

That’s some stunning political amnesia. Just over three weeks ago, when Republicans were trying to show they were the compassionate party and wouldn’t let funding lapse for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, they invoked so-called “Section 32” authority to patch the funding gap.

That section was created by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935. And the fund it created had over $23 billion in it as of October 8.

Moreover, the White House specifically reassured the public that it would use tariff revenue to supplement the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for WIC as the government shutdown reached its tenth day. As Politico reported on October 7,

“The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt posted on X on Tuesday, noting officials’ plan to use tariff revenue in the interim.

Here are the receipts from Ms. Leavitt:

So what changed? Certainly not the power of the White House to reallocate funds or to use its Section 32 authority to fund food assistance. The only thing that changed was the GOP’s political calculus.

There was a contingency fund already in place

We also know the White House is playing games because the government had already established a SNAP contingency fund to cover a lapse in funding. It just refused to use it.

On September 30, the USDA published that contingency plan in preparation for the shutdown. Here’s what 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.

Can’t get much clearer than that. The 55-page document even had a very clear title page:

But Speaker Mike Johnson likes to go on television and outright lie. Now he claims the contingency fund doesn’t even exist. CNN’s Dana Bash asked Speaker Johnson about this directly:

“You all have found ways to pay members of the military, which, you know, people understand, and WIC, which people also understand. But why are you drawing the line now on 40 million Americans who literally will not be able to eat without government assistance? Why not help them in the short term?”

Speaker Johnson interjected. ”Dana, I’m not drawing the line. Wait a minute, wait! I reject the premise of the question. I’m not drawing the line. The Democrats are drawing the line. If we had a contingency fund that we could use, that would be done,” Johnson responded.

“If we had a contingency fund.…” You mean, like the 55-page one that the USDA put out in late September?

Here are the facts. After publishing that contingency plan on September 30 claiming there were “multi-year contingency funds” available to support SNAP through the shutdown, and after reallocating tariff revenues to fund WIC on October 7, all while promising the country that it would not let impoverished women and their babies go hungry, the White House had a change of political strategy. It decided to go full Hunger Games.

As Notus reported, the Department of Agriculture reversed course just three days after that scolding statement by Leavitt:

On Oct. 10, state agencies received a letter warning that if the government shutdown continued, the SNAP program would run out of money at the end of the month. Two weeks later, USDA told states they could not “cover the cost of benefits and be reimbursed,” effectively blocking them from using their own funds to keep the program running.

The letter, first reported by Axios, also notified the states that emergency funds would not be used to cover benefits in November.

The 55-page USDA funding plan then disappeared completely from the agency’s website.

The plan is “level 10” pain

Speaker Mike Johnson, who has shuttered the House for over 40 days, admitted Republicans plan to leverage SNAP to create enough pain that Democrats cave on the shutdown.

“The pain register is about to hit level 10,” Johnson recently told his GOP colleagues on a private call. Johnson claimed to have “deep regrets” over that, but as Congressmember Sara Jacobs noted, that regret doesn’t run deep at all.

“3 months ago, he signed a bill with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP. You can’t make it make sense”

Over in the Senate, the GOP leadership appears to understand its role in these games, too. There is presently a bipartisan bill, backed by 62 senators including all Democrats and 15 Republicans, that would provide emergency SNAP funding through the shutdown. But it is is languishing because Majority Leader John Thune won’t call for a vote.

Earlier Democratic attempts in the Senate to fund SNAP and WIC through standalone legislation were blocked outright by Thune, who personally refused to grant unanimous consent.

Suing to release the funds

Blue leaders have swung into action. A group of 25 blue states plus the District of Columbia has sued the Trump administration to release billions in emergency SNAP funds. White House lawyers claim their hands are tied, but a federal judge hearing the case yesterday appeared deeply skeptical and frustrated by the White House’s arguments. As the New York Times reported,

Entering the hearing, top officials in the Trump administration had acknowledged that they had billions of dollars left over across multiple federal accounts, including money in an emergency reserve specifically for SNAP. The amounts appeared to total more than would be needed to cover the full costs of providing food stamps if the shutdown continued through November.

But lawyers for the Justice Department signaled that the administration could not, or would not, use those funds despite the looming shortfall.

The Trump regime claims that its inability to fund SNAP from these emergency funds arises from legal obstacles to transferring existing money to SNAP, technical issues with quick payment remittance and budgetary considerations at the USDA.

This is ironic in the extreme. This White House has never allowed legal impediments to keep it from impounding or shifting funds, and the technical issue with remittances arise from its own actions. As Gov. Pritzker of Illinois told reporters yesterday,

“They’ve shut down the government machines so that they can’t be used. So even if we were to put money into SNAP accounts, they couldn’t be accessed by someone who has a SNAP card.”

As with everything this White House does, it has manufactured a crisis in order to inflict as much chaos and pain as possible, and now claims it has no power to prevent the catastrophe the White House itself began.

All of this comes as millions of Americans are about to face sticker shock from a rise in insurance premiums, with average monthly costs in ACA marketplaces rising 115 percent. As former U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander put it, Republicans are basically demanding this:

“Let us take doctors away from sick people or we’re gonna take food away from poor families.”