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**NOVEMBER 14, 2025**

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The Shutdown Is Over. SNAP’s Struggles Aren’t. [link removed]

Today

**The American Prospect** reports on three aspects of SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program received by 42 million Americans. The longest-ever government shutdown is over, but its reverberations for millions of Americans continue. Emma Janssen **reports on the difficulties** [link removed] of bringing the logistically complicated SNAP system back online after the government reopened. The program relies on the federal government, states, and private companies to function in concert, making it no easy to task to turn it back on quickly.

Some SNAP recipients may continue to face delays—and when you’re talking about food, a delay of even a day or two can be catastrophic. Before the shutdown ended, SNAP benefits were, to put it mildly, all over the place. A large minority of states had issued November benefits to all of their recipients. A handful of states had issued partial benefits, and now need to send out the remaining funds. Some states didn’t issue benefits at all, and will need to send them all out as soon as possible, which could overwhelm the already tenuous system.

States are also facing an increasingly hostile USDA, which spent the shutdown threatening to retaliate against states that didn’t follow their confusing and, in the view of critics, illegal dictates during the shutdown. No matter how the USDA moves forward, the consequences of turning SNAP off, on, off, and then back on again will keep reverberating through the families that rely on SNAP to put food on their tables.

**Read Emma Janssen’s story here** [link removed]

**.**

**Naomi Bethune tackles the racist trope** of the “**welfare queen** [link removed].” A **term popularized** [link removed] by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party in the late 1970s, the welfare queen stereotype has never quite dropped from the minds of Americans. Claims of widespread abuse and fraud in federal benefit payments have existed as long as the welfare system has, but it wasn’t until after the civil rights movement that this behavior was pinned exclusively on Black women.

In the present, the stereotype was employed to rationalize the pause in SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, and it proved effective. It’s almost like a virus, says Ange-Marie Hancock, professor of political science and gender studies at The Ohio State University. “Part of how stereotypes are positioned in our brain is that they are kind of chronically accessible. And so once they are learned, they are very difficult to completely eradicate.”

In other words, although the fact that the welfare queen stereotype has been debunked, and in many cases, discredited, its position in the minds of many Americans remains the same.

**Read Naomi Bethune’s story here** [link removed].

**Finally, Gabrielle Gurley reports** on the **mayors on the front lines** [link removed] of speeding food to desperate residents. Unlike the congressional representatives who spent the last 43 days in legislative politicking, it’s almost impossible for mayors to avoid their constituents, especially when survival and hunger are at stake. Many people may not understand what’s happening in Washington, but they understand very clearly that the benefits they receive regularly have disappeared.

“I have folks who have SNAP benefits that come to my office all the time: What they are going to want to know is when the funds will be loaded,” Errick Simmons, the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, said Monday at a Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative virtual press conference. They’d gathered to explore how the coalition of more than 100 communities in the corridor running from Minnesota to Louisiana had been responding to the shutdown.

The shutdown deal may have started the clock on getting money back in the hands of the people needing assistance to pay for food. But the reopening of the government is just the beginning of a whole new waiting game that compounds the phenomenal stress of being poor in one of the richest countries in the world.

**Read Gabrielle Gurley’s story here** [link removed].

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**Harold Meyerson** will discuss the end of the government shutdown.

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