Erica is a single mother living in Troy, N.Y., with two children. Erica, who asked that only her first name be used, works two part-time jobs to make ends meet, but the rising cost of living is throwing her off balance. Like families headed by working people around the country, years of cumulative inflation have overrun her monthly budget.
“Everything is going up, but I am not getting paid more,” she told Catholic Charities staff. Though she is already a recipient of food benefits through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the additional supplies she can pick up at the Catholic Charities food pantry have become monthly essentials.
Erica has no idea what she will do if President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which was passed by the House of Representatives on July 3, leads to reductions in her SNAP allowance or, worse, to her losing eligibility altogether.
Another single mother who asked that her name not be used told Catholic Charities: “I have a disabled child at home, and I can only work while she is in school. I am not from the area, and I don’t have family to help me.
“I rely on SNAP to feed myself and my daughter. If this is cut, I can honestly say we just won’t be able to eat. All the money I make goes to housing and keeping the lights on. Food is what I am going to have to go without because I can’t lose my housing.”
It is the kind of predicament Betsy Van Deusen, C.S.J., the chief executive of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany, hears about all the time. “What we’re seeing is people coming to the food pantry who might not have had to come before,” Sister Van Deusen says. “They just can’t make ends meet.
“Many of our food pantries are open in the evenings or on weekends so that people who are working full-time can come.”
Sister Van Deusen estimates that SNAP will cover a family’s food needs for about 16 days out of a given month. Food pantries can provide enough for three to five days more, she says. “So that gets us to day 21; it’s still a long way to the end of the month.”
Increasingly, families served by Catholic Charities in the Albany area, Sister Van Deusen says, have had to rely on emergency food disbursements and soup kitchens to bridge that gap. She expects that challenge will only get harder when the budget reconciliation bill reaches Mr. Trump’s desk, a legislative package of tax cuts for some and social spending cuts for others that includes vast new allocations for the Department of Defense and immigration enforcement.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, using an analysis conducted by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, estimates that the package will mean a 20 percent reduction in SNAP funding—$186 billion through 2034—the largest cut in the program’s history.
SNAP’s losses will affect “more than 40 million people who receive basic food assistance through SNAP, including some 16 million children, eight million seniors and four million non-elderly adults with disabilities.”
Unhappiness among a handful of Republican House members at the prospect of adding some $3 trillion to the national debt had been the only remaining obstacle in Congress to an Independence Day deadline for Mr. Trump’s bill. Among Catholic providers of domestic health and hunger services, there was unanimity on the plan: They flat out don’t like it.
In a recent letter to Congress, Kerry Alys Robinson, the C.E.O. of Catholic Charities USA, reminded Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that Catholic Charities agencies operate more than 3,500 service sites across the United States and its territories, serving more than 16 million people. Ms. Robinson wrote, “Every day, we witness firsthand the struggles of individuals and families in our communities who rely on federal food and health programs to make ends meet.”
The “deep cuts” to SNAP and Medicaid, she says, will “inflict real suffering on these families…. SNAP and Medicaid are not luxuries, they are lifelines for millions of children across our country.”
Tim Neumann is the senior director of Catholic Charities of Eastern Oklahoma in Tulsa, Ok. He has the unenviable task, these days, of running the agency’s food service.
Oklahoma faces its share of troubles, Mr. Neumann points out. “We rank high in a lot of the categories that no state wants to be: teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, all those things, unfortunately, that no state wants to be noted for.” Among them is food insecurity: Oklahoma ranks fifth in the nation.
Many of the people Tulsa Catholic Charities serves are working parents who are “one step away [from crisis] because they have a medical bill or they have a car expense or some unexpected expense that kind of pushes them to the limit.”
The managers of the nation’s food pantries and food banks, like Mr. Neumann, face a uniquely challenging environment this year—costs are rising, supplies are pinched and demand is up. Supermarkets, once the source of a dependable flow of donations as food products reached the end of their shelf life, have been responding in their own way to rising costs, doing all they can to control inventory. That has meant fewer donations to food banks and pantries.
In addition, formerly reliable reserves of U.S. Department of Agriculture commodities have dried up since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term in January. Mr. Neumann has been forced to beg and borrow to keep a reliable supply coming into Catholic Charities nutrition programs and had to buy more food on the open market than has been typical in the past.
With more U.S.D.A. cuts looming in the reconciliation package passed by Congress, Mr. Neumann expects that his job will get much harder. The need has only been growing. “In ’22, I think we were averaging 125 families a day,” he reports. “In ’23, that number jumped to 157, and then in ’24, that number jumped to 186 families a day.”
Given the need, he doesn’t understand how food became a trade-off in efforts to contain U.S. budget deficits. Food insecurity has ripple effects in terms of family stress and divorce, student performance and lifetime potential wasted that are worth calculating, too, he points out.
“It’s not moving the needle in the end,” he says, “because all we are doing is cutting over here, and then we’re going to increase the spending over there. It’s all a little disheartening.”
About a third of the nation’s food supply ends up thrown into the garbage, he adds. “So it’s never a problem of food; it’s a problem of logistics, of getting it from point A to point B and into the hands of the people that need it.”
Sister Van Deusen is struck by the legislative terminology bandied about in Washington this week, especially the expression reconciliation. “Oh, yeah, who’s being reconciled here?” she asks. “How is this really coming together?” She struggles to understand the new spending and taxing priorities established by the legislation. “People who are millionaires and billionaires are not impacted in their day-to-day lives, whether they get a tax increase or a tax cut or nothing. The cuts that they’re talking about, and that sounds like they’re going to pass, are devastating to millions of people.”
“These cuts are making it really hard for people to have health care, to have food on their table. In our diocese, 14 counties, 10,000 square miles, we have a number of hospitals in rural areas that are likely to close because of the cuts to Medicaid,” she warns. “So if you have an emergency, instead of having to go 28 miles, you will have to go 50 miles. And that’s life or death in some situations.”
She says the people her agency works with have been fearful and “off balance” because of the uncertainty created by the social service reductions included in the legislation.
“We have about 750 employees, and I tell them, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen and if and when something has to be different, I’m going to tell you,’” she says.
“But in the meantime, every day, people come here looking for our assistance, seeking help with whatever their situation is. So today, and as long as we can, we’re going to keep doing that.”
