I’m guessing that many of us breathed a small sigh of relief when SNAP benefits resumed in December, after the 43-day federal shutdown. The nonprofit Feeding America estimates that 47 million Americans deal with food insecurity on a daily basis. That’s 13 million American children who go to bed hungry, millions of adults who work in low-wage jobs, senior citizens and people with disabilities who can’t afford adequate food. Of all the hardships vulnerable Americans faced during the shutdown, hunger has to have hit the hardest. 

Feeling better about SNAP may have helped us feel a bit less guilty over the holidays, but we shouldn’t get complacent, because current policy trends indicate a grim long-term picture. Andrew Fisher, author of “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups,” recently explained in an essay for the MIT Reader how the administration’s 2026 budget (OBBBA or “One Big Beautiful Bill”) will worsen the hunger problem. The bill cancels the USDA’s Local Food Purchasing program, which provided around $1 billion in food donations to schools and food banks each year, as well as the annual $500 million provision for the purchase of surplus food for food banks, hurting farmers as well as families in need. In response to the outcry over the damage these cuts will cause, the USDA announced that it will stop collecting statistics documenting hunger and food insecurity and discontinue its annual reports. 

Fisher traces the evolution of what he calls the “anti-hunger sector” from its bipartisan roots in the 1970s, when the Food Stamp Program was introduced in coordination with a revival of Depression-era farm supports, to the highly politicized rhetorical attacks on the poor that emerged during the Reagan years, when a million Americans lost their food assistance benefits.  Fisher’s thesis, in part, is that the Food Stamp Program (which became the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) necessitated an alliance between anti-hunger activism and the corporate food industry, which benefited through the subsidized purchase of their products. 

As political winds shifted and federal support was reduced, charitable organizations and a privately funded “anti-hunger” movement took up the burden of funding food assistance, but preserved the alliance with the corporate food industry, which, in his words, is “heavily reliant on worker and environmental exploitation.” 

His central point is that, in addition to providing food through charitable outlets, the anti-hunger movement needs to address the underlying economic causes of hunger by fighting for a living wage, working to preserve and strengthen the role of labor unions, and advocating for regulations that would have stemmed the flow of American jobs offshore. By focusing on food relief as an emergency measure, the movement has effectively subsidized low-wage employment, letting employers off the hook and unintentionally creating a permanent class of working families unable to afford food.      

Mariana Chilton is professor of health management and policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities.  A leading researcher in the field of childhood hunger, her most recent book, “The Painful Truth about Hunger in America,” describes food insecurity as an exercise in fear and coercive power, rooted in historical patterns of racism and social injustice.  In her view, food insecurity in the U.S. is an intentionally manufactured phenomenon, calculated to keep people desperate enough to work for subsistence wages and demoralized enough to remain quiescent. Chilton’s work focuses on the psychological and spiritual trauma hunger causes to individuals and to communities. 

Reading about the work of Andrew Fisher and Mariana Chilton confirmed my own sense of a pattern in the current administration’s domestic policies: the intention to manufacture scarcity in all the essentials of life—food, housing, energy, education and health care—to keep people fearful and incapacitated. The OBBBA includes federal budgets cuts to rental assistance and HUD programs, to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), solar energy programs and tax credits for rooftop and large-scale solar as well as solar manufacturing, programs that support public transportation, federal support for higher education such as student loans and Pell Grants, and more than a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act federal subsidies. 

Many of these program cuts have been timed to take effect after the 2026 midterm elections. If we don’t awaken to the full dangers of this trend, we may end up like the hapless oysters in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” who think they’ve been invited to a picnic:

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,

  “You’ve had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?”

  But answer there came none – 

And this was scarcely odd, because

  They’d eaten every one.