Rising prices and government cutbacks leave food banks struggling nationwide

Amna Nawaz:

As the holiday season begins, food banks across the nation are still struggling to keep up with the need. That's partly fueled by the disruption in SNAP benefits during the government shutdown.

But, as William Brangham reports, there will be more restrictions and cutbacks coming.

William Brangham:

The supplies at food banks nationwide are already low, but, as they have been telling us, demand for their assistance is still climbing.

We spoke with the head of a few of them around the country as the shutdown came to a close.

Eric Cooper, President and CEO, San Antonio Food Bank: It's been a rough 2025. We have received a reduction in the amount of food that we have been getting year over year when it comes to federal programs. Although we're struggling to make sure that we have the supply, we want to make sure that anyone in need knows we can help.

Jeff Marlow, CEO, Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma: Even before this announcement of the government shutdown and SNAP not being funded as of November 1, we had consistently seen an increase across our service area of 27 percent to 30 percent of neighbor visits to our agency partners in our service area. That just put even more strain on an already weakened system.

Lauren Conigliaro, St. Leo’s Food Pantry:

Six months ago, we were giving you enough food for your whole household. Now we're giving you half of the food, and you start to feed every member of that household with half the food.

Caroline Hissong, We Don’t Waste:

All of our nonprofit partners that we distribute food to have pretty much just been requesting more food. If they come to us and they're typically picking up 10,000 servings of food per week, they're hoping to get 15,000 servings per week. And multiply that by 110 nonprofits,and we're looking at massive numbers of food that's being requested.

Alexander Moore, Chief Development Officer, D.C. Central Kitchen:

We prepare about 17,000 meals a day across Washington, D.C. We have already increased our daily production of healthy meals by about 500 daily meals so far this month. And we have frontline partners all across the city that are reporting 50 to 100 percent increases in turnout.

Iris Sharp, Co-Director, FAST Blackfeet Food Pantry:

We're a Native-led nonprofit organization that's based on the Blackfeet tribal community.

Really, the last couple of weeks of October, we were really just stressed. To be honest, we were just stressed. As of right now, we're about $54,000 over budget. We're having to look into our emergency contingency funding to cover those funds.

Eric Cooper:

For food banks, we have depleted our inventory. We have distributed the food that we have, as we should. But now we have got to continue. And so the restoration of that is going to be on the private side, because I just don't see the public side stepping up right now.

Jeff Marlow:

We lose money seven to eight months of the year. And this is our time of the year to make money just so we can break even. And we are having to make a call just to ask people to give above and beyond, so we can have food on the tables right now in this crisis that government created.

Iris Sharp:

This isn't the first time our nation, our tribal nation has experienced food insecurity at the hands of the federal government. It's not unfamiliar to us, but that's kind of made us really tap into our community, and how can we really gather in a way that we haven't had to?

Alexander Moore:

When the chips are down, it's emergency food providers like D.C. Central Kitchen, like many of our partners, who are asked to find ways to do more even when we're already at capacity. And that's the challenge before us right now. And that's exactly what we have to do.

William Brangham:

While food stamp benefits are flowing again for now, the massive Republican tax-and-spending law signed by President Trump this summer contains perhaps the biggest looming cut to food assistance and America's social safety net in decades. Millions of Americans could soon find themselves without assistance starting very soon.

For more on what this means, we are joined by Adam Chandler. He's a journalist and author of the book "99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life."

Adam Chandler, thank you so much for being here.

You have argued that the way we talk about SNAP and food stamps and this kind of assistance is broken and misinformed. What do you mean by that?

Adam Chandler, Author, "99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life": Thanks so much for having me, William.

As we just saw from that footage, people who rely on SNAP and even food banks are people from all walks of life in America.Talking about old and young, rural and urban.The percentage of households that enroll in SNAP, by proportion, are higher in rural areas.

So there are a lot of perceptions politically that certain people like to promote in talking about the need that we have. But the reality is that SNAP encompasses huge percentages of Americans from every corner of the country.

William Brangham:

I mean, Republicans have always argued that SNAP is rife with fraud, that it's too expensive, that it's illegally being used by undocumented immigrants.

Here's how the secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, described the SNAP program recently.

Brooke Rollins, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture: This has sort of shined a light on a program that, especially under the last administration, has just become so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt that it is astonishing when you dig in.

William Brangham:

How accurate is that characterization overall?

Adam Chandler:

Well, overall, it's not terribly accurate.

I would point to a congressional report from April that points out that fraud is generally pretty rare in SNAP. There are errors, just like in any major government program, but the idea that this is a program that's being completely taken advantage of by people is absurd, in and of itself.

The idea that people who basically receive $6 a day, which is the average SNAP allocation, are somehow not wanting to work or living high on the hog is just something that is undercut by the reality of who uses SNAP, what the demographics are. These are, by and large, people who are either under the age of 18 or over the age of 60.

These are people who are often working full-time hours. So the thought that this is not being used by working people is unserious.

William Brangham:

As I mentioned, the GOP's huge tax-and-spending bill that passed this summer is going to make some fundamental changes to food assistance. What are those changes?

Adam Chandler:

It's a great question.

What's important to think about is, first of all, how difficult it already is to apply for SNAP. You constantly have to recertify that you're searching for work or that you're doing whatever the various requirements are — and it varies from state to state — to remain on the rolls of SNAP.

What this new bill does is expand the requirements. It requires that you have 80 hours a month of work or job training or volunteering. And that might not sound like a lot to the average American, but think about some of the people who are receiving SNAP. These are often caregivers, single parents, people who are taking care of families.

And so to step out of the roles that they currently inhabit in their lives and pursue different sort of requirements to stay on SNAP is an onerous benefit to an already difficult process. We have a broken disability program that requires months and sometimes years of waiting to have claims handled in a timely fashion.

So these are all obstacles that already exist in the system. And this is going to make it more difficult for people to enroll in SNAP. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, already suggests that over two million people will drop off of SNAP in the next few years because of these requirements.

Another thing that the Big Beautiful Bill does for SNAP is, it gives states less power to waive work requirements in areas with fewer jobs. So we're talking about rural households, which enroll in SNAP more than urban households. We're talking about areas that don't have a lot of jobs sometimes.

And what it allowed local government to do was offer SNAP to people who can't find jobs because there aren't jobs in their area. And this makes it more difficult for people to stay on SNAP who need to stay on SNAP because there just isn't the opportunity in their part of the country.

And that's an important thing to realize when we talk about SNAP because the way that it's often framed is people not wanting to work. And the reality is, there aren't these great jobs out there that often cover the basics; 44 percent of jobs in America are low-wage jobs, and 60 percent of Americans are already living paycheck to paycheck.

So the idea that SNAP is the one thing keeping people from working is a silly idea in and of itself too.

William Brangham:

All right, that is writer and author Adam Chandler.

Thank you so much for being here.

Adam Chandler:

Thank you for having me.