Food Stamp Cuts Expose Trump’s Strategy to Use Shutdown to Advance Agenda
The president has stretched the limits of his powers to help those at the heart of his agenda, not the many in greatest need.
nytimes.com
As the federal shutdown stretched into its fifth week, imperiling the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, Vice President JD Vance insisted that there was little the White House could do to help.
“The American people are already suffering,” he told reporters, “and the suffering is going to get a lot worse.”
In fact, the administration had billions of dollars at its disposal — more, by its own admission, than it needed to sustain food stamps for the roughly 42 million low-income people who depend on them. And it was only after a federal judge intervened that President Trump signaled he could use the money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP.
Even now, much remains unclear about whether or when poor families may receive their scheduled benefits. Still, the saga has laid bare the shutdown strategy at the White House, where Mr. Trump has been willing to shield only some Americans from the harms of a fiscal standoff that he has made no effort to resolve.
In what may become the longest federal stoppage in history, the president has frequently bent the rules of budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP.
The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut.
“They are willing to hurt people at the bottom when they take care of their friends and priorities,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.
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