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The ongoing government shutdown has already had dramatic effects on the federal government, its workforce and areas of the country with high concentrations of federal workers.
Starting Saturday, that impact will widen dramatically.
If the government wasn’t shut down, funds for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program commonly known as food stamps, and Head Start, a federal program that funds child care and health and education programs for low-income children, would have started to go out on Nov. 1. But because of the shutdown, President Donald Trump’s administration has said those payments can’t be made.
Saturday is also the start of open enrollment for all health care plans offered through the Affordable Care Act. Subsidies aimed at making health care plans more affordable are at the center of the shutdown, and when many Americans log on to their federal and state health care exchanges starting on Saturday, they could see their health insurance premiums increase by 30 percent on average.
Taken together, a broad swath of Americans could begin to feel the shutdown’s impact this weekend, far more intensely than they did in weeks past. And that confluence of pressure points could increase calls for lawmakers to find a way out of the shutdown.
“We already know that families are struggling with the high cost of food and other expenses. These folks should not be used as pawns in this political game,” said Dottie Rosenbaum, director of federal SNAP policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It’s a direct impact of the shutdown that some 42 million people are looking at not having access to their benefits next month.”
The possible loss of SNAP benefits has made headlines nationwide, with communities from Maine to Florida to Texas to Idaho bracing for the impact. Approximately 1 in 8 Americans receive SNAP benefits each month, and, according to federal data, the average benefit per household is $332. While some families use the aid to supplement food purchased with other income, many need it to pay for the lion’s share of their food costs.
We asked our readers about their experiences with the program, and Cindy Piotrowski reflected on how her family was on SNAP for two years when her children were 1 and 2.
“I don’t know what we would have done without it. It literally put food on the table when we had little to no money,” Piotrowski wrote. “SNAP is not a life sentence, it’s a life line!”
Trump, when asked about the possible lapse in SNAP benefits, said aboard Air Force One this week that his administration is “going to get it done.” Still, the president offered no insights on how that would happen, and Brooke Rollins, who oversees SNAP as Trump’s secretary of agriculture, said earlier this month that the agency did not have funds to pay for November’s SNAP benefits. The header of the Agriculture Department website yesterday blamed Democrats for the shutdown, said “the well has run dry” on the government’s ability to pay SNAP benefits, and argued that the shutdown is now at “an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”
“There’s literally no precedent for this,” Kathy Underhill, CEO of the Des Moines Area Religious Council that runs 14 food pantries in Iowa, told Iowa Public Radio. “In the history of the SNAP program, benefits have never been delayed or not issued.”
The government would need approximately $9.2 billion to cover November SNAP benefits. Our colleagues Mariana Alfaro and Jacob Bogage reported this week that USDA has “$5.5 billion on hand in contingency funds for the program, enough to cover more than half of the month’s costs,” but that the administration declined to use that money because it is meant for “natural disasters or other catastrophes.” Governors from more than two dozen states sued USDA this week to compel the federal government to allocate those contingency funds to support SNAP.
“There are emergency funds sitting around that the president could use to fund the SNAP program,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said in a news conference this week. “All he has to do is be willing to do it.”
Significant changes were made to SNAP before the shutdown began. Trump’s premier second-term legislative achievement, the sweeping tax and spending bill Republicans passed earlier this year, made an estimated $187 billion in cuts to the hunger program through 2034, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which estimated that 4 million people could lose most, or all, of their benefits.
It isn’t just a SNAP disruption that is about to impact millions of Americans. Our colleague Todd Wallack reported this week that 134 Head Start programs, serving tens of thousands of children nationally by providing free child care, early education, health screenings and other services for children under 6 from low-income families, will have to either close or find other funding methods starting on Saturday. In total, Head Start serves about 750,000 children nationally.
“If you are that program or you are a family in that program, it is definitely dramatic,” said Sarah Rittling, the executive director of First Five Years Fund, a federal advocacy organization focused on increasing access to programs like Head Start. “It’s frustrating.”
Rittling told us one of the key issues is the uncertainty about what will happen after Saturday — that it’s unclear how long programs will have to go without federal funding, and to what degree states and private individuals might be able to step in to fill the gap.
“It is a program-by-program situation,” she said. “But the fact is, there is only so much contingency planning you can do when you are reliant on a federal program, and that means receiving a federal check.”
A disruption in Head Start could mean that low-income families nationwide would lose access to child care services. Children might also miss out on food provided as part of the program’s nutrition initiatives, as well as various health screenings.
There had been a sense in Washington, particularly among government officials, that the impact of the shutdown was limited to those directly on the federal government’s payroll.
However, the combination of cuts that start on Saturday — and the way they affect millions of Americans — may change that view, as families nationwide prepare for the possibility that they could lose access to food and child care.
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