Bob Marley’s song “Them Belly Full (But They Hungry) has a lyric that goes “A hungry mob is a angry mob…” I quote the song because tens of millions of people in the United States will lose their access to SNAP/EBT on November 1, 2025. For those who don’t know, SNAP/EBT is how those people can afford enough food to feed themselves and their families. Not only do these folks depend on this program to supplement their income so they can buy food, so do the grocery stores—big and small—depend on the income generated by those purchases. Those purchases came to almost 94 billion dollars in 2024. SNAP/EBT is not a handout, it is an essential part of a US economy that is out of whack; an economy that continues to give more money to the wealthiest among us while impoverishing more and more hardworking people. Yes, most people who receive EBT subsidies work, just like most of the people who receive Medicaid and even more of the people who receive subsidies to help pay their health insurance. Let me repeat, these subsidies are not handouts, even though it would be irrelevant if they were.
According to an October 26, 2025 article on the The Hill website, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a five billion dollar reserve in its contingency fund. This funding is there to be used when regular funding is not available. The USDA administers the SNAP/EBT program. It could use these funds to stave off what will certainly be a drastic increase in hunger, but it refuses to do so. There’s one main reason it is refusing. The GOP and Donald Trump won’t let them. It seems reasonable to say that the GOP and Donald Trump want people to go hungry, even while they continue to collect their paychecks and eat good meals most likely prepared by someone else. Yes, letting people go hungry is a choice, just like deciding to send thousands of troops and sailors to the Caribbean to kill people accused without proof of being involved in drug trafficking while threatening sovereign nations with war is a choice. Letting people go hungry is a choice, just like spending billions of dollars to build a gestapo-like police force with orders to kidnap people because of their skin tone and accent is a choice. I could go on, but I think I made my point.
The current government shutdown is an act of vengeance by Donald Trump and his minions. This becomes clear when one reads the text on the websites of numerous government agencies blaming the “far-left” Democrats for the shutdown. It becomes even clearer when one goes beyond the alleged reasons given by the White House, reasons that include the lies that undocumented immigrants receive SNAP/EBT, Medicaid and ACA healthcare supplements. They don’t. Do I think they should be able to? Yes. But they can’t under current law.
I live in Vermont. A few days ago (10/23/2025), the newspaper Vermont Digger reported that some Vermont legislators are looking for a way to provide emergency funding so tens of thousands of Vermonters will not go without food sometime in November, the month we celebrate Thanksgiving. That same article also reported that Vermont’s Governor Scott can order funds to be released that would cover those payments. I hope and expect Vermont will figure something out. However, that will do nothing for the tens of millions of other people in the US whose cupboards will be bare without the funds they receive because of the SNAP/EBT program.
By the way, Happy Thanksgiving.
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