Nearly half of SNAP households have someone with a disability. (Photo by Dragos Condrea/iStock Getty Images)
The social safety net, including health care and food benefits, has been under attack this year, threatening the stability of millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands in West Virginia.
The longest government shutdown in history has led to food aid, officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, becoming part of the national conversation over the last month.
The federal government provides funding to states to operate SNAP for individuals and families in need. Throughout October, news media and public advocates expressed alarm about the likelihood that the program would run out of funding at the end of the month. States led by Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration to force it to operate reserve funds to maintain SNAP funding. The court directed the administration to do this for the entire country. Still, it looks like President Donald Trump is planning to do this in a subpar way.
(Once again, West Virginia is benefiting from court orders telling the Trump administration it must or cannot do something, even as Attorney General JB McCuskey refuses to lift a finger to protect its constituents from the president’s job, program, funding cuts or other illegal actions.)
But this isn’t the first time the federal government has targeted SNAP this year. This summer’s reconciliation package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, included provisions that will lead to one An estimated 3 million people being kicked off the SNAP rolls. Those provisions include onerous reporting requirements and the elimination of exemptions for veterans, parents and people in areas with high unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government will reduce SNAP spending by $187 billion over the next decade.
It’s not just Congress and the president who have attacked SNAP and other aspects of the safety net like Medicaid this year. Our own neighbors in West Virginia are also getting involved.
Against my better judgement, I spent too much time on Facebook. I saw a post from a local reporter on a community page asking him to speak to people who feared losing SNAP benefits because of the shutdown. Be prepared for the barrage of mean comments questioning the morals, laziness and health of people receiving SNAP.
These comments are often based on faulty, negative stereotypes and miss some things. First, there’s the fact that the average SNAP benefit honestly isn’t very high. In West Virginia, the average enrolled household is receives $258 per month. Then there is the idea that the typical person receiving SNAP is a mooch or a “welfare queen.” Nearly half of SNAP households have someone with a disability. Someone has to care for that person, which can make it arduous to maintain a stable, well-paying job and not need SNAP benefits. In West Virginia, we “take care of ourselves” and that should extend to the people in our own households.
Fox News recently published an article about TikTok videos featuring people complaining about their many children potentially losing their SNAP benefits and why that would be a burden because the parents don’t want to work. It turns out that these videos were AI and Fox News had to do this correct the story. This resonated with people, even supposed journalists, because the myth of the undeserving welfare recipient is so sturdy and pervasive.
SNAP is not partisan. Maybe some people still think that a person of color in the inner city is the average SNAP recipient. But millions of white people or people in conservative states or rural areas rely on SNAP to put food on the table. Despite this truth, President Donald Trump and others have tried to call SNAP a “Democrat program” to justify freezing funds now and cutting them later.
The importance of SNAP to all Americans and our communities is so clear that Republican Senator Josh Hawley joined other Republicans in introducing a bill to keep SNAP operational during the shutdown.
While attention is focused on the drying up of SNAP funding, few are asking why one in six Americans rely on SNAP funding and tens of millions rely on Medicaid. It’s not because people refuse to work. In West Virginia we have a perfect storm of terrible factors. Wages are low. Good jobs are challenging to find. Housing conditions are substandard, as is access to quality healthcare. When finding a job, reliable transportation can be an obstacle.
Instead of condemning people who rely on the social safety net, we should re-examine the structures that make it so straightforward for millions of people to live in poverty.
