Amid the current and second longest running government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—food stamps—would not be replenished starting on November 1. As state governments and food pantries scrambled to fill the gap, a federal judge ruled that the USDA must use a contingency fund to cover SNAP partially, although people may not see those funds immediately.
The constant uncertainty created by the Trump administration has continually forced us to figure things out for ourselves—and that very figuring is also under attack. As community members attempt to protect their neighbors from violent ICE raids, federal agents have upped the ante by teargassing and detaining anyone who so much as looks at them wrong. How are they connected? On Tuesday, President Trump expressed his disdain for the “radical left” and their “haphazard” distribution of SNAP benefits while blaming the current shutdown on them as well.
What Trump deems “radical” has no bounds. His false guarantee that only “criminals” would be targets of mass deportation holds the same energy as millions of Americans who voted for him losing the ability to feed their families.
It’s not the first time hunger has been used as a political weapon in the U.S., but food stamps have not always been the target of political games.
The original Food Stamp Program (FSP) was introduced in 1939 in direct response to widespread hunger caused by the Great Depression. This economic crisis in America meant that people couldn’t purchase food that was now in surplus.
As the government explored solutions like destroying excess food to purchasing and redistributing it, eventually the first food stamps were born. Americans could purchase orange stamps equivalent to the amount they’d spend on food, and for every dollar spent, they’d receive 50 cents worth of blue stamps to spend on surplus.
This gave low-income families the autonomy to choose what they ate instead of receiving whatever the government boxed up for them. Despite the common stigma around welfare, people of color continued to struggle because they couldn’t afford to purchase the stamps required to participate in the program. During the Great Depression, African Americans were said to be the “last hired, first fired.”
The original program ended in 1943 as the need seemingly dwindled, but after continued reworking, John F. Kennedy officially revived the program when he took office in 1961. For years to come, the program received bipartisan support. When signing the Food Stamp Act into law, Lyndon B. Johnson referred to it as “one of our most valuable weapons in the war on poverty.”
In 1977, the Food Stamp Reform Act eliminated the requirement to purchase stamps, and in 1990 the program switched to the electronic benefits transfer card (EBT). In 2008 it was renamed SNAP. In 2024, SNAP served 41.7 million Americans a month. It is this country’s largest anti-hunger effort.
Reliance on SNAP by millions of people gives the federal government immense power, and it has acted to enforce it over the years. In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was organizing a free breakfast program for school children. In January 1969, the first iteration began in Oakland, and soon thousands were being fed across BPP outposts.
But FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover loathed the positive light this shed on the Black Panthers, and the agency worked tirelessly to thwart these efforts. The night before the first breakfast program opened in Chicago, Chicago police broke into the church and destroyed the food. They even urinated on it.
In response to the pressure put on political leaders due to the standard set by the Panthers’ efforts, the National School Breakfast Program became permanent in 1975.
The Trump administration is using hunger as a political tool to force Democrats into submission and end the shutdown. But Democrats are standing firm so far, unwilling to accept a Republican budget that would make health insurance prohibitively more expensive than it already is for millions of people. “Radicals,” once again, seem to have the right idea of where pressure belongs.