SNAP benefit delays could mean millions go hungry
Note that there are some states moving on providing some form of state-level contingency plan.
This article was written a few days ago, prior to the ruling that required the Trump administration to at least partially fund SNAP for November:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/map-shows-every-states-plan-011500589.html
How States Are Taking Action
As of the time of reporting, so far 10 states have implemented some form of a contingency plan: California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia.
-
California: Governor Gavin Newsom has deployed California Volunteers and the National Guard to assist with preparing and distributing meals and fast-tracked $80 million to food banks.
-
Hawaii: State officials have created the Hawaii Relief Program, where Governor Josh Green plans to tap into $110 million from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families federal grant program that typically provides benefits for basic living expenses.
-
Louisiana: Governor Jeff Landry has issued a state of emergency and signed an emergency order allowing benefits to be filled through November for vulnerable populations, (children, elderly, and those with disabilities).
-
Virginia: Governor Glenn Youngkin has also declared a state of emergency and stated that “the Commonwealth will provide food benefits” until the government shutdown is over.
-
Minnesota: Governor Tim Walz has issued $4 million in emergency funding for state food shelves.
-
New York: Similarly, Governor Kathy Hochul pledged over $11 million to support local emergency food relief providers and has fast-tracked $30 million of previously allocated anti-hunger funds.
-
West Virginia: Governor Patrick Morrisey has also expedited $1 million in emergency funding to support food banks.
-
New Hampshire: The state’s Department of Health and Human Services announced a contingency plan that involves partnering with the state’s mobile food pantry program to open up 20 locations twice a week for the next 5 weeks specifically for SNAP recipients.
-
Vermont: Officials have pledged to fully fund SNAP throughout November despite the cuts using state funds.
-
Utah: Officials have told SNAP recipients that they can still use the remaining SNAP dollars on their card past November 1, and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) will still be available due to emergency funds.
Other states have some contingency plans or the makings of ones in the works, but it’s unclear if they will actually come to fruition come November 1. Those include Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington.
-
Massachusetts: Governor Maura Healey announced that the state was working on a contingency plan alongside the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.
-
Nevada: Governor Joe Lombardo successfully secured $7.3 million in emergency funding to support WIC. However, it remains unclear if anything will be done for SNAP recipients. WIC is also being funded throughout November in Washington, but a larger plan for SNAP remains unclear.
-
New Mexico: Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is also expediting $8 million previously allocated for food banks, and officials are weighing options for an emergency food plan.
-
Colorado: Governor Jared Polis has asked state lawmakers for $10 million to support emergency feeding efforts.
-
Ohio: State Representative Latyna Humphrey has urged the governor to take immediate action and proposed a bill to provide interim relief.
-
South Carolina: State Representative Hamilton Grant is calling upon the governor to declare a state of emergency.
-
Iowa and Missouri: Officials in Iowa have introduced a bill (Keep SNAP Funded Act of 2025), in companionship with a bill introduced by officials in Missouri.
-
Maryland: Governor Wes Moore alluded to talks about the state potentially funding SNAP, arguing that it’s unclear if they would be reimbursed.
-
Maine: Food security advocates are taking a stand and sent a letter to state Senator Susan Collins urging her to release contingency funds.
EDIT: I do think that it’s a bit interesting that the policy split here is not really along a Republican/Democratic basis. California and Hawaii are very Democratic and Utah, Lousiana, and West Virginia are very Republican, yet all are moving early on providing state-level food support.
-
We didn’t build a system to distribute food…
We built a system to maximize profits on selling food to people. Not even selling the most food, just making the most profit.
If that means 25% of people starve but profits go up 10%…
That’s not even a trolley problem for a corporation. That’s barely a choice.
Edit:
Mamdani’s solution is city owned grocery stores that pay employees fairly and a focus on providing healthy foods at affordable prices
While ideally states and other cities would do it, a progressive Fed could distribute funds to get it built up and self sustaining.
City owned grocery stores don’t really solve the affordable food problem.
Grocery stores aren’t particularly profitable in the scheme of things. Neither are distributors, food processors, or farmers.
Each link takes a bit of profit of course, but for most non-luxury foods there’s just not a lot of profit along the line.
In order to solve it for real, you need to a) make farming cheaper, especially for certain labour intensive foods b) control the entire supply chain from farm to grocery store
However, this tends not to work well for any sort of non-commodity food item like say cookies or ice cream. There are just too many different preferences for that to work well. The government could produce 3 types of cookies really cheap, but if they tried to produce even 30 different types they’d just end up being worse than what we currently have and we currently have 300 types.
I agree that city-owned grocery stores won’t solve the food affordability problem on their own. I do take issue with this statement though:
Grocery stores aren’t particularly profitable in the scheme of things.
Kroger posted ~$150,039,000,000 in revenue, ~$33,364,000,000 in gross profit, and ~$2,164,000,000 net profit for 2025. They posted a gross profit margin of ~22% and a net profit margin of ~2%.
That’s pretty profitable. Profitable enough for the CEO to walk away with ~$15,400,000 of it. That’s not as profitable as economic abortions like FAANG but I’d argue nothing should be.t
Even if it weren’t: we don’t have to make farming cheaper or control the entire supply chain. The issue is primarily top-down. Not bottom-up.
If, after we enforce the paying of livable wages, a crop is too labor-intensive to be economically sustainable then we ought to either subsidize that expense because we collectively agree that’s the best option OR stop mass-producing the inefficient food.
Capping C-level salaries to a reasonable percentage of the company’s lowest paid worker and capping profit per-item based on total cost to create, process, house, and distribute each item to retailers would be much more effective means of lowering the cost of groceries nationally.
Corporate logistics, especially for perishables, already have all of this information and more. It’s how they know how much they can gouge the consumer (or what price to set if colluding in price-fixing schemes).
City-owned grocery stores don’t solve the whole problem. No single solution can. It’s a good beginning for the effort though. Starting with the top-end of the stack, where most of the waste occurs purely due to corporate and individual greed, makes sense and sets the stage for addressing other systemic issues within that industry’s supply chains.
The cookie variety concern also seems misplaced to me. Though you didn’t list it as a blocker. Just a problem these kinds of solutions can’t solve.
I agree. I don’t see why a municipal grocer would need to match the variety offered by the private sector though. Their aim is to provide consistent access to safe and affordable staple food stuffs. Not help Nabisco weasel into additional market segments so numbers go up and make investors happy. The municipal grocer should only care about making their laborers and shoppers happy. We don’t need cookies for that! Though I’d bet putting a handful of options from locally-owned bakers on the shelves would help.
I would be OK with losing out on random novelty hotdog-flavored chips.
That being said, you could get around this problem by focusing on staples (rice, flour, vegetables, salt, etc.) since the vast majority of folks don’t really have a preference on this sort of thing, aside from allergies/gluten free.
Is it just to make room for more? In other words, he’s ending so called lives in a cruel manner
Businesses are wasting $400 billion per year. Our leadership needs to start accepting responsibility for what their policies are doing and quit blaming the population. This applies across the entire world.
Retirement benefits that are directly tied to the performance of corporations, what a fucking awful idea.
That’s indeed such a big issue… fact is the trash problems of our cheap wrappers etc… were so huge… what prevented regulation. The endless spree of ads saying “You terrible people, stop throwing your trash on the ground”.
I thought Trump was gonna be forced to use available funds for SNAP. Or was it just an empty threat?
Yes, but the fund sources that the administration is required to use are not sufficient to fully pay for all of SNAP for this month, and my understanding is that it is very possible that benefits will be only partially paid. There are apparently other sources that they can use to fully pay them if they want to do so. There should be more clarity in the next few days.
This is also only talking about November.
A court says to do something, trump says no. We’ve played this game before. The few times the admin actually follows the rulings end if it gets to the supreme court.
