SNAP Lapse Stretches Churches, Food Pantries Past Their Breaking Point

For Deidra Harrison in Nacogdoches, Texas, the lead up to All Saints Day wasn’t what it usually is. In addition to preparing for the usual church festivals and trick-or-treaters that mark the season associated with abundant harvests, Harrison and her team of volunteers were scrambling to meet a growing food scarcity created by the U.S. Government shutdown as it entered its fourth week.

Harrison is the board president for HOPE (Helping Other People Eat) Food Pantry, one of the many food pantries and food banks seeing long lines and high turnout as 42 million Americans brace for delays to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payouts.

“People are scared,” she told Sojourners via email, early in the week. In Fiscal Year 2023, the federal government paid an average of $574 per month to SNAP recipient households with children, according to the Department of Agriculture. More than 34% of SNAP recipients were households with children.

For weeks, with the November delays approaching, Republicans and Democrats in Congress failed to agree on a budget that would release funds appropriated for the program. Days before the lapse, federal courts had ruled that the Trump administration and the USDA should be required to access contingency funds to prevent delays in SNAP payments. On Nov. 3, the White House said in a court filing that it would send partial payments, refusing additional funds that would help low-income families.

As the November lapse approached, fundraisers for food pantries and food banks proliferated across social media. Local governments and churches created emergency funds and food drives. Elementary schools sent home resource sheets with lists of churches with weekly pantries. Mutual aid networks popped up in neighborhoods, connecting SNAP beneficiaries with “grocery buddies” who volunteered to help them endure the lapse.

“All the religious organizations that I know are participating in food drives right now for food pantries,” said Rev. Jason Coker, national director of Together for Hope, the rural community development coalition of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

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It’s not just the increased demand putting pressure on local pantries either, he said. The regional food banks that partially supply many church, school, and nonprofit pantries have also seen funding cuts this year, reducing their ability to scale up support.

“The whole food supply chain that was directed toward the most food insecure is drying up,” Coker said.

Deep in East Texas, Harrison has been rallying churches and community organizations to try to keep food on pantry shelves since well before the shutdown.

“We are having to ask the community to help by donating money and/or food to HOPE,” she wrote. “The lack of availability of foods that are affordable for the pantry to purchase is growing.”

Rising grocery prices have limited how far her budget can go. They’ve also led to more and more fully employed workers in line for food. Ivanka, whose last name Sojourners is withholding at her request for privacy, is a new mom who recently went back to work for an online company that allows her to be home with her 7-month-old. She’s worried, because soon her income will probably be too high to collect SNAP benefits. She has been pooling with her parents, whose benefits aren’t enough to get them through the month. She’d never been to HOPE before, but she figured she should get to know more food pantries during the shutdown, she said. Once her SNAP got cut, she’d be more reliant on them than ever.

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Many fully employed people earn incomes that exceed the SNAP eligibility limit of $34,656 for a family of three. Qualifications are rigorous, and the more the program is constrained, the more pressure is placed on charitable organizations.

Nonprofits like Feeding America, which supports food bank networks in all 50 states, began raising funds for their food bank partners and awareness to correct the political messaging that SNAP is a costly, often abused government handout. In actuality, the program represents around 1.5% of the national budget and has been able to keep its overpayment rate (commonly considered its fraud rate, though it is more complicated than that) below 10%.

Narratives of waste and laziness have contributed to the political appetite for cutting SNAP funding. The Trump administration’s signature policy, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will make programmatic changes to SNAP that the Brookings Institute said “will result in the program being substantially and detrimentally less responsive to deteriorating or poor economic conditions.”

While those cuts are likely still months away and will not be as severe as the total stoppage of the shutdown, many pantries and food banks know that the shutdown is a preview of a future with less government aid.

This is one part of the government’s decades-long shift from supporting low-income Americans to supporting high-income Americans, Coker said, pointing to tax cuts for wealthier Americans paid for by reductions in social safety net programs. It’s a trend that has continued across administrations, Democratic and Republican, since the 1980s.

“This massive redistribution of wealth from the poorest families to the richest families is unprecedented in American history,” Coker said. “Economic inequality is greater now than it was during the robber baron period. Churches can’t fix that. Community-based organizations can’t fix that.”

Living in Mississippi, Coker knows there are plenty of people who believe that the church, not the government, should be the primary institution feeding the hungry. But there’s simply no way, he said, for churches to replace the federal government when it comes to food assistance, nor can they override the tax codes and policies driving the wealth gap. Adam Buzard, a director with Operation Andrew Group, a city movement network in Nashville, said he’s encouraged by the massive mobilization of faith-based aid—but it’s not a long-term fix.

In the leadup to the SNAP delays, Buzard helped churches connect with food pantries and other nonprofits already working on hunger relief in their area. Instead of trying to start a new food program, he encouraged them to support existing infrastructure.

It’s especially true in this circumstance, he said, because the hunger crisis is not something churches, even working together, have the capacity to solve without a more comprehensive social investment like SNAP. As moved as he’s been by the generosity and savvy of his church partners, they are in emergency mode, running on finite funds and volunteer energy.

“So many churches can do well for a short amount of time,” he told Sojourners, the day before the lapse began.

But hunger in the U.S. is not a short-term emergency, said Jeremy Everett, founder and executive director of the Baylor University Collaborative of Hunger and Poverty. Food insecurity is defined by the USDA as “limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” A food insecure person will, at some point in the week, month, or even year, not know where their next meal will come from. Of the 47 million Americans identified by USDA as food insecure in 2023, more than 7 million of those were children.

Everett also serves as board chair for Bread for the World, a faith-based anti-hunger organization. Bread for the World has estimated in the past that if churches were to replace government cuts to social safety network programs, every church would have to raise $400,000 more a year to offset the deficits. That’s more than many churches’ operating budget for the entire year.

Churches cannot solve hunger, and trying to—or even just trying to meet urgent local food needs—will monopolize their resources, Buzard said. Every dollar spent replacing SNAP is a dollar pulled from some other ministry, including outreach programs that are vital to their communities. When the government spends tax dollars on programs that help people stabilize their basic needs, the church is free to expand its mission to greater thriving.

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Household budgets are much the same, advocates say. In a recent survey, No Kid Hungry Texas, a campaign working to solve problems of hunger and poverty, asked parents about the effects of food insecurity. It found that rising grocery costs have stressed household budgets—71% of Texans and 78% of families with children are having to choose between buying enough nutritious food and affording other essentials. In many families, the nonprofit reported, parents skip meals so their children can eat. And that was with SNAP fully operational. Without it, the tradeoffs only become more severe.

Some of those families were in line at HOPE when the food pantry opened its doors on the first Monday after the Nov. 1 deadline passed. The line that stretched down the block included familiar faces to Harrison, but also many she did not recognize.

Dustin Guerra told Sojourners he was laid off from his residential painting job two weeks ago and hasn’t been able to enroll in SNAP yet. He lives with his mom and takes care of his elementary school-aged niece and nephew. His mom’s SNAP benefits will be delayed, so he started making the rounds to food pantries to provide for the family. He often goes without meals, usually about once per day, he said through tears, to make sure that the food is there when the kids need it. The whole situation has been humbling, he said, and has felt unjust.

“We’re the richest country in the world,” he said. “We should have money for places like this.” He pointed to corruption, lawmakers making laws that benefit themselves and their friends, as the problem. When asked if there were any elected leaders who were effectively working on the people’s behalf, he gestured at the line, asking rhetorically: “Do we have food stamps?”

Not only was the government failing its citizens, he said, but as a Christian, he believes that God made food abundant on Earth. So much of the food he cannot afford or access are gifts from creation itself, and he doesn’t understand how a Christian society can exist if there are people who cannot afford food.

“It’s not of God for us to starve.”

Churches cannot solve hunger, and trying to—or even just trying to meet urgent local food needs—will monopolize their resources, Adam Buzard said.