The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is set to run out of money due to the federal government shutdown by Nov. 1. This means that nearly 42 million people who rely on these benefits—about 1 in 8 U.S. residents and 1 in 5 kids—could go hungry.
I know what it feels like to have the floor fall out from under my family. Over half of my years of mothering have been as a single mom. My youngest, who is 11, has never known hunger or homelessness, but her older sister endured both in her early years.
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We relied on SNAP and lived in a homeless shelter in Washington State when she was an infant. My daughter took her first steps there, in the 90 days we called the shelter home. Our lives were ones of constant relocation. By the time we moved to Missoula when she was four and a half, our new apartment in an old house was our 13th since I’d been pregnant with her. Thirteen different dwellings, a few not much more than a room with a spare foldout couch or futon, and none were dependable.
I have tried to explain this feeling of a floor dropping out from underneath you many times over the years. Your insides become weightless, like when a fast elevator suddenly stops, or a plane drops from turbulence. Then your heart starts to pound. You start sweating profusely. Your hands shake. My mind would always race with questions.
Once, when we lost most of our food stamp benefit, I mentally catalogued every can and box of food in the cupboards, and how long the milk we had would last. They’d kicked me, the mother of a recently-turned six-year-old, off of food stamps because I didn’t meet the work requirement of 20 hours a week. I hadn’t known that my daughter’s age had qualified me to not have to meet that requirement, and without warning, the funds I carefully budgeted for food were gone.
It didn’t matter that I was a full-time student and worked 10-15 hours a week. This letter from my local government office said it wasn’t sufficient to meet their stamp of approval. In their opinion, I wasn’t working enough to deserve to eat. My value, my dignity as a human being, was completely dependent on my ability to work, as if nothing else about me awarded me the ability to feel satiated by food.
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Almost every aspect of our life was precarious then. I worked as a housecleaner, a job that was dependable enough, but clients would regularly cancel without notice because of illness or being out of town. My wages were less than $10 an hour, and funds were so tight that missing out on 30 bucks could mean an electric bill wouldn’t get paid.
Safety net programs like child care grants required piles of paperwork to qualify for, and an ongoing process of recertification every six months. If my wages increased by as little as $50, I risked losing the entire benefit, which would cause a deficit in my budget of hundreds of dollars on top of no longer being able to work. And, suddenly, we would face the possibility of homelessness again.
Despite being referred to as a “safety net,” I found government assistance programs to be anything but that. There is no safety in a place that has numerous cracks to fall through. A form lost in the mail could mean money for food is gone. A handwritten paystub could mean a grant for child care is not approved. Over the near-decade that I depended on these benefits to survive, I started to see that the fear of losing them was part of the point.
Decades of political and policy upheaval around welfare have made the idea of losing these benefits feel like a constant threat.
When what we now call cash assistance, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was created, it was due to the staggering number of women who were left without husbands from World War II. Individual states began to set up systems to give them money they would have otherwise received from their husband’s income. This welfare wasn’t enough to replace it, but just enough to get by. Their alternative was leaving their children on the doorsteps of orphanages.
The government stepped in and created a national system when the Great Depression depleted state funds. By 1934, about 109,000 families with 280,500 children received a monthly cash payment, with an additional 358,000 households receiving some type of emergency assistance. In response to this growing need, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a program in 1935 called the Aid to Dependent Children, which gave women one thing: cash, without any work requirements.
By 1962, the number of recipients had grown to nearly 3.6 million. President John F. Kennedy reformed the program to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), repeating the notion that welfare should be a “hand up,” not a “hand out,” and added strict work requirements to receive funds.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson began many programs still in place today, and called it a “war on poverty,” putting programs like Medicaid, Social Security, and Food Stamps into place. It seemed more like the battle was prevention of single mother households. The Johnson Administration said the AFDC rewarded indolence, and condoned non-marital child bearing. Only 3.1 percent of births to white women and 24 percent of births to Black women were out of wedlock then. Those numbers roughly tripled over the next 30 years, and many blamed welfare as the cause, though that has been shown to be false.
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Despite Johnson’s efforts in reforming how government assistance was dispersed, he did nothing for welfare, or what we now call TANF. The America that grew on rugged individualism and the thought that working hard is the only way to succeed in life got increasingly uncomfortable with such a large population accepting money from the government for doing nothing. Not only that, those funds came from taxes: hard-earned wages. The poor might as well have been stealing.
A group called the National Welfare Rights Organization stepped in to reform the system. Welfare had become a stigma, and caseworkers raided the households of those who accepted it. It was common for midnight raids to happen, looking for an unreported man of the house. During the day, home visits were the norm, checking for a “suitable home.” The caseworker would walk through a house wearing white gloves, inspecting window sills and mantels for dust. Benefits could be denied if the house wasn’t up to par. The message was clear: Since we have given you this resource, we can also take it away.
This year has brought repeated threats to federal programs that work to help those in need of health insurance, child care, in-home care, and particularly food. On Jan. 27, a memo released from the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget stated that a freeze would begin for federal funds to assure they went to programs that aligned with newly signed executive orders on climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion. With vague wording came chaotic confusion as federally funded organizations like Meals on Wheels, which receives federal money to distribute food to the elderly, worried about even a temporary interruption disrupting their ability to fully function. Last week, SNAP recipients received notice that there would be no funds distributed for food stamps beginning Nov. 1.
In my own feeds on social media, I’ve watched panic grow in real time. People are worried about losing their Medicaid. My local housing authority stated they were actively trying to figure out how they might be affected. Community action and mutual aid groups are filling my Facebook feed with posts to share resources for food banks, while others push people to donate and volunteer.
The fear is palpable. Withholding funds for food stamps during the holidays feels especially cruel. I can’t help but think about how many years I went without meals to save up food stamp money to buy stocking stuffers for my daughter.
Whether the current administration decides to continue to fund SNAP in November or not, the intended damage has already been done. The fear of losing means for food, shelter, and health care is the point. Programs referred to as a “safety net” are anything but when they can be removed with a thoughtless, vague message, or scribble from a permanent marker. It’s about control to gain compliance, and our most vulnerable populations will struggle to keep up.
The internalized trauma from this uncertainty goes deep when the stakes are so high—so much that food and housing security for my children are still my number one concern. We haven’t used SNAP in almost ten years, yet seeing a photo of a letter someone received to notify them of their food stamps ending brings up those same feelings of panic.
The lists of suggested meals to make on a tight budget cause my stomach to turn, remembering my daily peanut butter sandwich and countless cans of tuna mixed with relish and mayonnaise. It reminds me of how quickly food insecurity can take over your life, and how terrifying it is to learn that benefit is gone.