The shutdown is pushing federal workers to food banks—just as SNAP is set to expire

Pastor Oliver Carter is in a strange predicament. For the last few years, he’s run a food bank serving the needy through No Limits Outreach Ministries, his church in a Maryland suburb just outside of Washington, DC. Now, his family is among those struggling to make ends meet.

His wife, Pamelia, works for the US Department of Agriculture. As a result of the government shutdown, she is one of more than 700,000 federal employees who have been furloughed—or forced to take a temporary, unpaid leave of absence—since October 1. Her last paycheck was about half of its usual amount, and her most recent one was $0. That’s what she will receive until the government reopens.

“Thank God for the food bank,” Carter says, noting his family’s piling bills. “Because that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”

As we talk, hundreds of furloughed federal workers have lined up on a sidewalk outside the Hyattsville church. Even though food distribution won’t begin until noon, people began arriving in the brisk 40-degree weather with folding chairs and blankets as early as 7:30 AM. There’s only enough frozen meat—the most sought-after item—for the first 50 to 100 people of the nearly 500 who will likely appear. Everyone else will get shelf-stable items, like tuna pouches and peanut butter.

Near the front, a woman who was furloughed from the Department of Health and Human Services tells me that she’s been applying for second jobs to pay her daughter’s tuition and provide for her aging mother. She says she’d also apply for food stamps, but as of Saturday, the program won’t have any funds.

These struggles are replicated all over the country and embody the string of compounding food crises created by the government shutdown. While hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers are going without pay, food stamps (formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) are due to run out on Saturday. Normally, the federal government would use contingency money to keep SNAP going, but the Trump administration said last week it had no intention of doing so. (More than 20 states sued over the suspension of benefits on Tuesday, arguing that not making use of the available funds is illegal.) Virginia and New Mexico have announced plans to temporarily fund SNAP beneficiaries with electronic transfers, but the vast majority of the 42 million Americans who rely on the program—including 14 million children and 1.2 million veterans—will lose their modest grocery assistance by the end of the week.

But there’s another wrinkle, too. As individuals look for help putting dinner on the table, the food banks themselves are also down resources because of previous budget cuts.

“There’s absolutely more need, but less food,” Carter tells me in his cluttered church office, located in a small strip mall. “It’s bad.”

Coincidentally, while DC-area federal workers lined up at the food bank in Hyattsville and at pop-up tents organized by José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen at the Navy Yard in the Southeast corner of the city, dozens of nonprofit leaders, members of Congress, food industry experts, and other stakeholders were convening at George Washington University for a previously planned food and agriculture policy summit.

There, keynote speakers and panels explored big-picture topics like food waste and sustainability. But in between sessions, attendees were also pondering more imminent problems.

“There’s the stuff happening on the plenary floor, and then there’s [the conversations] happening in the hallway corridors, where you have a lot of people who are preparing for a very different, challenging landscape next week,” explains Alexander Moore, the chief development officer at DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that has prepared full meals for homeless shelters and other food-insecure groups since it was created in 1989.

Moore says nonprofits like his are already operating at capacity. DC Central Kitchen, for example, serves 17,000 people daily and operates around the clock seven days a week. And that is when government programs were still functioning. Anticipating increased demand once SNAP funding runs dry on November 1 and about 137,500 DC residents lose their benefits, the nonprofit is preparing to serve up to 500 additional meals per day.

“It’s hard to fathom this severe a blow to food security,” Moore says, adding that the last time things felt as dire was when the pandemic began.

Food banks are still recovering from earlier crises, too. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration canceled $500 million worth of food shipments from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). In DC, that resulted in 780,000 fewer meals, according to a spokesperson for Capital Area Food Bank, which distributes pallets of food to smaller food banks in the area, like Carter’s. In March, the Trump administration also ended the Local Food Purchase Agreement Program, a $1 billion outlay that enabled food banks and schools to purchase food from local farmers. Together, these two initiatives had been vital in helping food banks procure fresh produce and meat. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox News that the latter program, which began during COVID, “was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”

Back in Hyattsville, Carter has started to plan for the near future should the government shutdown extend into the holidays. Without SNAP and other programs, he has decided to reach out to grocery stores and local farmers, asking for anything they might be able to give.

Recently, he received six frozen turkeys from a donor. They are a drop in the bucket compared to the growing demand, but still cause for celebration. He leads me to the dual-purpose church worship room and food bank storage space to show them to me. A nearby freezer sits empty, ready to accommodate future donations, big or small. After all, Carter will have thousands more struggling people to feed over the next few weeks, especially as the holidays approach—including his own family.