Ballooning food stamp program held hostage by Congress’ government shutdown standoff

The food stamp program, which once served just a small fraction of U.S. families, has grown massively in recent years, putting it at the center of a spending stalemate that threatens to cut off millions of people from federally funded grocery money beginning Saturday.

As low-income families begin scouring food banks, Senate Democrats are scrambling to shift the blame after repeatedly blocking a stopgap funding bill to keep the program funded. They are pinning the imminent lapse in food stamp money on President Trump, who they say can tap into reserve funds to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program going despite the government shutdown.

“Millions of hungry kids and working families are about to lose SNAP benefits to buy food because Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Agriculture to rip up its own contingency plan,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said Tuesday.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have staged a monthlong filibuster of a spending bill that would reopen the government and fund SNAP, a program that has doubled in participation and cost in the past two decades.

Nearly 42 million people, or 1 in 8, now rely on SNAP money to buy food each month. If the shutdown persists, one of the nation’s biggest constituencies will be left without supplemental funding for food beginning Saturday.

Democrats have refused to vote for an extension of government funding until the Republican-led Congress caves on extending enhanced pandemic Obamacare subsidies and other welfare benefits signed into law by President Biden. Earlier this month, House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernard Sanders, a self-declared socialist from Vermont, acknowledged that the spending standoff was critical leverage in the party’s fight to extend the subsidies.

“Let that sink in. Forty-two million Americans will lose their SNAP benefits this Saturday because Democrats want to use them as leverage,” House Republican Conference Committee Chair Lisa McClain of Michigan said Tuesday.

Democrats aren’t backing down despite criticism that extending the enhanced subsidies benefits primarily health insurance companies and those earning incomes well above the poverty level. The Biden-era subsidies cap health care premium payments at 8.5% of income for those earning more than 400% of the poverty level.

The expiring insurance premium benefits that Democrats hope to extend permanently allow a family in Arizona earning $500,000 annually to qualify for a taxpayer-funded health care subsidy of $8,423, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I don’t understand the political calculation to hold SNAP benefits hostage to extend subsidies for health insurance to middle- and high-income people. It’s just, it’s very confusing,” said Angela Rachidi, who analyzes social welfare benefits for the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.

Those who receive SNAP benefits, meanwhile, have grown to staggering numbers.

The percentage of U.S. residents receiving monthly food stamp benefits has more than doubled in the past 25 years, from 6.1% in 2020 to roughly 12.3% in 2024, mostly because of policy changes and factors that expanded program participation, Ms. Rachidi found.

It’s a huge increase from 2000, President Clinton’s final year in office, when 17 million people, or 1 in 16, tapped into food stamps.

Ms. Rachidi said the program’s growth has been enabled by state and federal government expansion of eligibility to millions more adults, including early retirees, seniors and those claiming disabilities who have come to rely on it.

Program costs soared as more people became eligible for SNAP, partly because of relaxed work requirements and increased income cutoffs in some states. Under Mr. Biden, a permanent boost in benefits was implemented, amounting to an average 21% increase in money provided to SNAP recipients.

In a 2025 study that Ms. Rachidi co-authored with AEI’s Thomas O’Rourke, government data shows that if SNAP participation were based solely on fluctuations in the unemployment rate and population growth and excluded the other growth factors, fewer than half of the 42 million people who now rely on the program would use it today. It would cost 17% to 31% of the $109 billion currently spent on those benefits.

“It’s not that U.S. households are poorer than they’ve ever been. It’s just that eligibility is expanded. And then, when you have periods of high inflation, like we just experienced, households have to turn to something. And so they tend to turn to SNAP,” Ms. Rachidi said.

The use of SNAP has increased across the country, she said. “It’s not really a political affiliation issue. Red and blue states have both expanded.”

As the Saturday cutoff looms, some state leaders are devising contingency plans for SNAP recipients. In others, among them deep-blue Massachusetts, leaders are saying state coffers have no money to help fill the gap left by the expired federal funding for SNAP, and they blame Mr. Trump for the crisis.

“President Trump is currently choosing not to issue November SNAP benefits that help you and many families put food on the table,” the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance told residents in an online alert.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said she will not tap into her state’s rainy day fund to help the state’s 1.1 million residents who rely on food stamps. She argued that the $240 million monthly cost to keep SNAP funded in the state is too high. Opponents say she has spent $2 billion to shelter illegal immigrants since 2023.

On Tuesday, Massachusetts and two dozen other mostly Democratic-run states sued the Trump administration to try to force it to tap into a $6 billion contingency fund to keep the SNAP payments flowing. The Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, said those funds are needed to pay for the National School Lunch Program and the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, which also have run dry because of the government shutdown.

The Senate has no immediate plans to vote on bipartisan legislation to keep SNAP funded beyond Saturday. Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, said Democrats have blocked every funding measure he has brought to the floor. House Republicans said the federal contingency fund Democrats want to spend on SNAP can’t be accessed because Democrats voted against funding the government.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, told rank-and-file lawmakers in a conference call this week that pressure is mounting on Democrats to fund a stopgap bill that fully opens the government and that pressure will grow more intense as the SNAP funding runs dry.

On Monday, the largest federal workers union called on Democrats to give up their fight for Obamacare subsidies and restart federal worker paychecks by voting for a stopgap spending bill.

“The Democrats have shown, and they’ve said in their own words, that this is leverage. It gets better for them every day,” Mr. Johnson said Tuesday. “They don’t mind inflicting pain on the American people if they can somehow get some sort of political points out of it.”