The Trump administration said Monday that SNAP benefits, formerly called the food stamp program, will use an emergency fund to pay half of the normal payments in the wake of the government shutdown. This is not helping a bad situation, according to Florida Gulf Coast University professor of social work Thomas Felke.
"That fund is around $5 billion plus. But the amount needed to run the SNAP program is about $9.2 billion," he said.
In addition, there is no timeline for these half-payments and no guarantees that this administration will pay retroactive SNAP benefits to these households, Felke said.
"So they could see a complete loss at this point."
Affected are about 130,000 people in a local five-county area, including Charlotte. Collier, Glades, Hendry and Lee. The majority are in Lee County, with 85,000 people affected.
Felke said there are plenty of misunderstandings about the program.
"I think a lot of people in the general public are unaware of the fact that the intended purpose of the SNAP program is to keep households above the poverty line from sliding backwards into poverty," he said. "
These are not simple handouts. There are work and education requirements for eligibility.
Another misunderstanding is about to whom the benefits go. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible and never have been. What’s more, this problem of SNAP underfunding didn’t just start, according to Felke.
"With the passage of the so-called 'big beautiful bill,' we know that there was an intended $138 billion of cuts specifically to the SNAP program going out through 2034. So that is going to move approximately 4 million individuals off of the Snap program rolls just due to those changes in budget."
The tools researchers use to measure how deep food insecurity goes have also been slashed.
"We found out recently that the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA, will no longer conduct the annual Food Security Survey … that is where we get a lot of our information about individuals and households experiencing food insecurity utilizing the SNAP program," Felke said.
Add the affordable housing problem to SNAP cuts and there’s a crisis at the front door, particularly for the older adult population, most of whom are not looking for work or educational opportunities because they are retired.
"And the only alternative right now that a lot of people are considering is the utilization of food pantries. However… the food pantries and food banks are not in a good position to support the number of individuals that could be affected by this," Felke said.
A woman at a local food pantry this week predicted a rise in crime, particularly shoplifting.
"And that also becomes a problem here because people are going to act desperate in desperate times," Felke remarked.
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