Items currently moving briskly at Catholic Charities food pantries in Nevada include baby formula and other infant-care needs, Marie Baxter reports. Ms. Baxter is the chief executive of Catholic Charities of Northern Nevada. It has been a busy month for her and her team.

C.C.N.N. food pantries recently became a primary resource for many folks suddenly bereft of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits because of the record-breaking 43-day federal government shutdown across October and November. C.C.N.N. responded by boosting family food allotments, extending daily hours and opening pantries on weekends. She plans to keep those expanded services running through at least Christmas.

“Not only were we seeing lots more seniors, which is probably our largest population, but lots of families coming in,” she said. And “lots of new people,” she said, “which we also saw during the pandemic—lots of people relying on food pantries…that never thought they were going to need that as a resource.”

Among the startled newcomers at C.C.N.N.’s food pantries, she said, were government workers, people “who are not SNAP recipients, but were finding themselves without paychecks and needing access to food.”

Catholic Charities of Northern Nevada sponsors nine separate pantries. It covers 70,000 square miles in the state of Nevada, including cities like Reno and Sparks but also hard-to-reach rural communities, food deserts hours away from the supermarkets and local groceries suburban and urban Americans take for granted. It was a near thing getting through the shutdown in a region that faces its share of a national food-insecurity crisis.

Rising prices, rising food insecurity

Assailed by inflation, the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of supply and logistics shocks—among them weather events, avian influenza and, most recently, Trump administration tariffs—food prices in the United States have increased by 25 to 30 percent since 2019.

As the prices continue to go up, it is no surprise that food insecurity is also on the rise in the United States, affecting 14 percent of U.S. households in 2023. That is 18 million households and 47 million people. In Nevada, one in seven people—and one in five children—are struggling to avoid hunger.

The federal shutdown may have ended on Nov. 13, but its malevolent impact on SNAP may continue until Thanksgiving. That could mean gnawing hunger as the holiday season begins for thousands of U.S. families.

But beyond its practical effects on national efforts to combat hunger, the shutdown turned SNAP itself, once again, into a political football. As the federal government closed in October, the Trump administration refused to use resources from a SNAP contingency fund to continue to fund benefits and resisted court orders to do so for weeks, leading to the first interruption in SNAP disbursements in the program’s 60-year history.

Mr. Trump seemed to perceive the program as a means of leverage against Senate Democrats, and when a federal court ordered the administration to make full SNAP payments on Nov. 6—a ruling stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court—the president complained that too many undeserving people were using the program.

“This was meant for people that had real problems,” he said. “It wasn’t meant for people that say, ‘Well, I don’t want to work.’”

Other politicians and social commentators charged that SNAP eligibility criteria and monthly allotments were too generous. Many alleged that “illegal” immigrants were tapping into a system reserved for U.S. citizens, and profound misinterpretations of government data served up on cable news and social media became sources of boiling resentment.

For example, Newsmax—once a fringe amplifier of fringe conspiracies, now an increasingly influential right-wing purveyor of news-like substances—claimed to general fury that 59 percent of SNAP recipients were “all illegal aliens—think about that.”

Indeed, but don’t think about it too hard because it was a deeply inaccurate assessment.

The truth is, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the administrative manager of SNAP, 89 percent of the program’s participants—36 million people in 2023—were U.S. citizens; an additional 2.5 million were naturalized citizens—6.2 percent of all participants.

Among the remaining 5 to 6 percent of SNAP participants in 2023 were people admitted to the United States as refugees—1.1 percent—and “other non-citizens,” people with lawful permanent status or awaiting decisions on asylum claims and U.S. citizen children in noncitizen households.

But if you think that paltry distribution to noncitizens was still too much, never fear. Those noncitizens were stripped of SNAP eligibility by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July.

SNAP’s big, not-so-beautiful cuts

Like the president, many of the born-again SNAP skeptics marveled at the vast reach of the program as it came under heightened scrutiny. SNAP served about 42 million Americans each month in 2023 and 2024, a little over 12 percent of the general public.

Many SNAP recipients are also regular customers at food pantries run by Catholic Charities agencies across the country. Ms. Baxter was not surprised by those numbers, “largely because we know that the majority of that 42 million are children and seniors.”

The U.S.D.A. reports that children account for about 39 percent of all SNAP participants, and seniors 60 and older represented another 20 percent. Another 10 percent of SNAP recipients in 2023 were among the nation’s non-elderly, disabled population.

Elsy Cipriani is the chief executive of the New Hampshire Food Bank, a program of Catholic Charities New Hampshire and the state’s sole food bank. The last few weeks contending with the impact of the shutdown and making sense of the changes occurring to SNAP eligibility have been a “roller coaster” for her, a person deeply knowledgeable about food logistics and government eligibility requirements. She can only wonder how confused and discouraged needful people in New Hampshire have become attempting to find their place in the system.

“In New Hampshire we see people experiencing food insecurity all across the board,” she said. “We see families with two working parents facing food insecurity; we see senior citizens; we see people living with disabilities.”

“Regardless of their background, their race, their ethnicity, any family that goes through financial hardship, one of the first things that they are going to cut is their food budget,” Ms. Cipriani said. “They are not going to be able to cut their rent or their mortgage or utilities because they have to pay those.”

The government shutdown and the consternation surrounding SNAP, Ms. Cipriani said, just made the nation’s hunger crisis “more visible—that people are just one emergency away from hunger and from poverty.” She thinks the true number of people struggling to keep enough healthy food on their family table is much higher than SNAP critics are willing to believe.

In New Hampshire, she reports that only a third of the 242,000 people estimated to be eligible for SNAP were enrolled in the program—about 77,000 people. “These numbers should really be higher if the program were effective in reaching the people who need it.”

According to a study published in March by AARP’s Public Policy Institute, 16 million adults ages 50 and older eligible for SNAP were not participating in the program in F.Y. 2022.

The blaming-and-shaming, misinformation-overloaded debate over SNAP this month has not helped. “There is always a lot of stigma for people to apply for SNAP,” Ms. Cipriani says, “even though people really need it.”

For U.S. children and seniors living on a fixed income, SNAP “is really what makes it possible for them to access a variety of healthy foods, which have such long-term positive impacts for children and for seniors,” Ms. Baxter said.

SNAP is a demonstrated anti-hunger and anti-poverty success story, lifting 17 percent of participant households above the poverty line. SNAP means billions in income to the U.S. agricultural sector and acts as an unofficial subsidy program for profitable U.S. corporations like Walmart and Amazon, which pay so little that many of their employees qualify for the federal nutrition assistance.

And despite the shutdown-adjacent outrage over SNAP costs, federal spending on food-assistance programs, including SNAP, has been trending down, according to the U.S.D.A. The system indeed managed substantial increases in 2021 and 2022, when eligibility was broadened and monthly allowances boosted to help get U.S. households through job losses and other disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

But since that emergency, inflation-adjusted federal nutrition-assistance costs have declined significantly—down 32 percent since F.Y. 2021. The One Big Beautiful Bill will further reduce SNAP funding by $186 billion over 10 years—a 20 percent cut that marks the largest reduction in the history of the program.

New requirements mean new hunger?

The small percentage of SNAP participants classified as “Abawds”—“adults without disabilities and dependents”—has become a focus of many SNAP critics, who accuse those participants of “gaming the system.” Drilling down into the category, however, Ms. Baxter explains that most are homeless people, veterans with mental health or addiction problems and young people just coming out of foster care.

The Biden administration in 2023 expanded SNAP eligibility to include more people in those subgroups. Now they face heightened scrutiny under H.R. 1. The Trump administration moved up the start date for those new standards—originally planned for Spring 2026—to Nov. 1 during the shutdown before waiver guidance from the U.S.D.A. had been issued to states.

Now Ms. Baxter worries that a significant number of current SNAP participants are unaware of the new paperwork and eligibility requirements and are likely to lose their benefits. If they do, it could be up to three years before they are able to restore their eligibility.

And despite demands among some politicians that SNAP work requirements be increased, “most of the other folks that are coming in, they’re already working,” Ms. Baxter reports.

She may manage a food bank, but Ms. Cipriani says her goal is “not just to help people transition out of food insecurity but out of poverty.” Viewing the U.S. safety net comprehensively, she worries about gaps that are emerging. “We cannot think about food insecurity like a silo, like something that we do outside of everything else that is going on,” Ms. Cipriani said. The status of vulnerable families appears increasingly precarious in the face of rising housing and health care costs, she said.

“We put people in positions so they have to make impossible choices,” between paying for a medical bill and covering their rent.

Ms. Cipriani reports that Catholic Charities agencies and other food advocacy and delivery charities will do what they can to help, but they cannot fully make up shortfalls in nutrition that government interventions like SNAP were created to address. Both Catholic Charities leaders expect that even beefed-up capacity among charities will not be enough to address a renewed hunger crisis should another government shutdown begin in January, when a large portion of federal funding will expire if lawmakers do not reach a long-term deal.

How bad will U.S. food insecurity become in the near term, as the government gets back to business, and beyond that, as social spending priorities are negotiated next year? We may not be able to know.

The Trump administration terminated the annual Household Food Security survey on Sept. 20. “These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” U.S.D.A. officials said, describing a report that food security charities rely on for planning and budgeting as “subjective, liberal fodder.”

More from America

A deeper dive

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week.

For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, church leaders bring concerns about care of creation to COP30 in Brazil and in Canada, a petition before Parliament demands accountability from global mining interests.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).