Trump Has Just Condemned More Americans to Hunger

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have long been at war with poor people. It’s a weird enemy for the allegedly Christian leaders of the white wing to pick, but I guess MAGA Jesus is only capable of turning bread into bullets. In July, Trump’s Dumb Cruel Bill cut over $1 trillion from Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The Medicaid fight makes consistent headlines, with noted “woke” empath—Marjorie Taylor Greene—regularly criticizing her own party for taking away people’s healthcare. The fight over food stamps garners less attention.

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.

The most recent attack came this summer, when Trump and his ex-bestie Elon Musk decided to shrink the country’s social safety net even further by cutting food and healthcare benefits to impoverished Americans. 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.

The pain of these changes was not immediately felt—but it’s about to be. Twelve states and territories had previously gotten exemptions from the federal government that allowed them to avoid enforcing many of the work requirements. These states, which include New York, where I live, had until February of next year to implement Trump’s demands. But on October 3, the Trump administration simply changed its mind and rescinded the waivers. New York now has to implement the work requirements by November 1. That jeopardizes the food resources of 3 million New Yorkers who rely on the assistance.

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. Like walking past a homeless person who asks you for change on the subway, the Trump administration wants us to pretend that these people aren’t even here. They want us to be blind, deaf, and dumb to their suffering.

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. If our government were run by Marie Antoinette, it wouldn’t be as callous.

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. Sometimes they’re working jobs that are somewhat reluctant to provide the kind of employment verification the government might be looking for. Sometimes they’re working jobs that don’t give them a lot of time to sit on hold with a government agency.

Moreover, focusing on the adult working requirements misses the fact that nearly two-thirds of the people who get food through SNAP are children. The callous attitude people in this country take toward the reality that the people who benefit most from food stamps are kids would make characters in a Charles Dickens novel blush. “I’m sorry, Tiny Tim, but your dad didn’t spend 80 hours this month begging Scrooge for a job, so you can eat your freaking crutches for all I care.”