Editorial: This shutdown is about to get real for SNAP recipients

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Oct 30, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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To most of us who aren’t federal employees, the government shutdown has, so far, been a distant partisan spat with limited direct impact on real life. That will change this weekend when, barring legislative action, tens of millions of America’s poorest families will start losing access to government food subsidies.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will cease to distribute food benefits for low-income recipients starting Nov. 1 — this Saturday — unless Congress either reopens the government or passes special legislation to fund the program. That both parties are watching this approaching cliff without acting to stop it is a bipartisan abrogation of duty that will literally mean hunger for some 42 million of their most vulnerable constituents, including more than 15 million children.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Sen. Josh Hawley has filed legislation to keep the food benefits flowing. The Missouri Republican may not be the best messenger for the cause of protecting the poor — like most of his party, Hawley recently helped gut both SNAP and Medicaid and has done everything possible for years to undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But this time, he’s on the right side.

“Republicans blame Democrats, and Democrats blame Republicans, but all these people have food to spare,” Hawley wrote in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday. “One suspects that if senators couldn’t buy groceries, the government would never close down again.”

There is plenty of blame to go around.

The Trump administration could shift funding to keep the SNAP benefits available after Saturday if the shutdown continues, but has opted not to.

Democrats could back Hawley’s bill to save those benefits, but party leaders reportedly are hesitant to do anything to relieve pressure from Republicans in the showdown over ACA subsidies that are set to expire.

Some Republicans reportedly are similarly hesitant to extend food benefits because it would take pressure off Democrats to end the shutdown. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to call his chamber back to order, a strategic decision that complicates any effort to pass emergency food subsidies.

Put simply, players on all sides of the D.C. impasse are apparently willing to use hungry children as partisan bargaining chips. That’s grotesque.

“[N]obody in America, this richest of nations, should go to bed hungry, and certainly no child,” writes Hawley. “ … The character of a nation is revealed not in quarterly profits or C.E.O. pay, but in how it treats the small and forgotten — the last, the least, the lost.”

He’s right. Food aid recipients aren’t at fault for this conflict and there’s no reason they should suffer further from it. Both parties have the ability to prevent that — and both should feel the wrath of voters if they don’t.