Reopen Government To Fund SNAP—Then Reform It

An estimated 42 million Americans receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is commonly called SNAP. That’s more than one in 10 citizens who depend on government assistance to pay for food. This level of dependency is troubling: We need to improve our economic, education, and work systems so that more people are able to live independently and don’t need government assistance to afford life’s necessities.

Yet reforming SNAP and our welfare system is an issue for another time. Right now, the priority is to reopen the government and restore funding to these programs to prevent serious harm to those who depend on them. No one thinks the way to reduce dependency is to simply cut off funding for people in need with just days’ notice.

Black single mother and her daughter placing products on a cashier of a supermarket

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Yet that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless the Senate passes the House-approved continuing resolution that would reopen the government. Authorization for government funding ended on October 1, 2025, and since that time, the administration has been working hard to minimize pain for the American people during this shutdown. The White House enlisted generous private donors to keep the military paid and repurposed funding to prevent other critical groups, like new moms using the Women and Infant Care (WIC) program, from being hit. Yet options have run out, particularly for as large and costly a program as SNAP, which requires $9 billion in funding each month.

Unfortunately, while the administration has been trying to mitigate the pain created by the shutdown in Washington, Democratic leaders admit to doing the opposite. House Minority Whip Tom Emmer publicly acknowledged how the loss of SNAP benefits will give Democrats “leverage” to force the White House to make concessions and undo provisions of the recently-passed Working Families Tax Cut.

This isn’t business as usual in Washington. In fact, it’s quite unusual. Under President Biden, Congress passed thirteen continuing resolutions of this type that are meant to keep the government funded beyond the normal appropriations deadline. These resolutions received 96% of Democrat votes previously. And yet today, under President Trump, when the stakes include SNAP and millions of food-insecure Americans, Democrats are breaking with tradition to try to use Americans’ pain to advance their political preferences.

Americans can take several lessons from what’s unfolding in Washington. First, they should recognize that our bloated federal spending programs cannot be relied upon. If Democrats are willing today to allow food assistance to expire in hopes of scoring political points against the President, then Americans should be prepared that this could happen again, and again, in the future, anytime it’s seen as politically expedient. Responsible members of Congress should work with the administration and the states to explore how to return control, including direct financing, of these types of welfare programs to the state level so that Washington politicians can’t hold hungry Americans hostage again.

They should also take note of the priorities of those Senators currently holding up the continuing resolution and preventing the government from reopening. They say they want President Trump to restore around a trillion dollars in federal subsidies for ObamaCare insurance premiums. These are subsidies that go not only to low-income Americans, but to those who are relatively well off. More centrally, they go straight into the pocket of insurance companies that worked with President Obama and Congressional Democrats to create the ObamaCare system that has made premiums more and more unaffordable, thus requiring additional rounds of federal bailouts.

Rather than pouring trillions of taxpayer dollars into health insurers’ pockets, Washington should reform the fundamentally dysfunctional ObamaCare system so that insurance isn’t so prohibitively expensive in the first place. Americans should keep that in mind each time they hear Senate Leader Schumer mention ObamaCare funding—that’s funding for a system that he created and that now needs another bailout.

ObamaCare, SNAP, and all of the inefficient and overburdened federal programs that are housed in Washington and that are now “leverage” in Democrats’ shutdown games need to be revisited and reformed so that the vulnerable people who depend on them aren’t left in this precarious position in the future. That discussion needs to start soon. But first, Democrats need to stop holding SNAP hostage and vote to reopen the government.