
Tens of millions of Americans depend on the food-stamp program known as SNAP. Without federal assistance, many of them do not know how they will provide for themselves or their families. “The Daily” visits one of the communities most reliant on food aid. The Trump administration has agreed to restore some of the funding for SNAP, but there’s still uncertainty about how much money will come through, and when. Tony Romm, who covers economic policy and the Trump administration for The New York Times, discusses the fight over SNAP as the government enters its second month of shutdown. Guest: Tony Romm, a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The New York Times, is based in Washington.
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David. I'm David Marchese.
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And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
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And we're the hosts of the Interview from the New York Times.
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David and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world, which means.
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We know when to ask tough questions.
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And when to just sit back and listen.
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And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world.
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And we'll get some great stories from them, too.
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It's the Interview from the New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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From.
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The New York Times. I'm Rachel Abrams and this is the Daily. You get benefits on the first.
D
Yeah, yeah.
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And what happened today? They just didn't load.
D
It says that they will arrive, but.
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They will be late. The Trump administration has agreed to restore some of the funding for the food program known as snap. But there's still uncertainty about how much money will come through and when. What would that normally look like?
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Today it would be like $7.80.
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Is there an account balance?
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I have 12 cents.
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Tens of millions of Americans, one in eight rely on SNAP. Without federal assistance, many people do not know how they will provide for themselves or their families.
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I adopted my grandson. He's 2, and it's terrifying thinking I can't feed him. Now that that's been frozen.
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I literally have nothing in the house.
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It's not everybody's fault that Congress can't make a decision on a bill. So they shouldn't punish the low income family, the needy people, because that's what we rely on.
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Today. We hear from people in one of the communities most reliant on food aid. And from my colleague Tony Romm about the ongoing fight over SNAP as the government enters its second month of a shutdown. It's Tuesday, November 4th. Are we getting going?
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Looks like we're gonna start rolling now.
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Last Friday, Daily producers Olivia Natt and Anna Foley went to Kermit, West Virginia, a rural town of about 300 people.
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How about Tammy? Apples and meat.
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Same thing.
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One per family.
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Up to two families per car.
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There was a mobile food pantry set up outside a Baptist church. Volunteers loaded items including eggs, potatoes, plums and cucumbers into people's cars. Got bread here for you, honey.
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Honey, that's good. Thank you.
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West Virginia is one of the top recipients of SNAP benefits in the country. About 16% of West Virginians get food assistance through SNAP. And even with the extra help, a lot of people rely on food pantries, especially at the end of the month, and especially this month when there hasn't been much clarity about whether benefits were coming or not. Hi there, my name's Olivia. I'm with the New York Times. Walking down the line of cars, Olivia and Anna spoke to people about what they were planning to do next.
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You some kind of news or something?
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I am. Okay, y' all want to talk? I think you're here, Mike. My name's Anna. So could you start by telling me your name and you know, where you're from, how long you've lived here, A little bit about yourself. My name's Roy Messer and I'm from Kermit, West Virginia. My name's Theresa Hodge. I live here on Stone Cove, right down the hall. My name is Brianna Lockhart. I was a stay at home momma for a while, but just recently went back to work because of the shutdown that's going on.
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And what brings you guys out here today?
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Well, right now times are rough. I mean, they took the food stamp so you gotta do what you gotta do, feed your family. I'm picking up from me and I brought my cousin with me so she.
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Can get me got some meat.
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Yeah, that's what they said it was supposed to be.
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Meat and some food.
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I've seen the list. And they have turkey and eggs.
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That'll work. At least I'll be able to have something for Thanksgiving. What can a box of food do? Like what is the impact for your family?
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Well, that's going to be able to effectively feed my family for an extra week. You know, we're going to be in a struggle to make sure that it's either going to be food or bills. Because even though my wife works full time, we still depend on SNAP benefits to help get us through buying extra meat and stuff like that. Since there will be no stamps, this.
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Food bank will be the only food I have to go in my house.
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How much money do you receive, if you don't mind me asking?
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Snap 136. I think it's like $2.92. I get a whole $63.
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How far does $63 go for you?
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Two bags and you might get a box of crackers maybe. You know, even with your food stamps, usually about two weeks before the months comes back up, you're scamming tight. You run the food banks trying to get help, you know, just plain and simple. Can you describe like what a dinner would look like, like with your SNAP benefits? And then if you can imagine, you know, if you don't have the SNAP benefits. What a dinner looks like in that situation, too, with the SNAP benefits, we all have a good Southern meal, like fried chicken and green beans, mashed potatoes, all the good stuff, rolls, all that. But without, it's more like hot dogs and ramen noodles and stuff like that. And that's just not healthy. It's really not.
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When did you find out that you probably weren't going to be receiving benefits for November?
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About two weeks ago, when the government got shut down, we kind of had an idea that, you know, like, if people aren't going to get paid their salaries, then government assistance is going to be the last thing they're worried about.
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And, you know, when that realization kind of struck you, how did that make you feel?
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It made me feel less important to my lawmakers than what I used to feel. I served our country in the Navy, and it's like, I feel like my family, as veterans, doubly gets looked down upon because we just get cast aside.
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We're angry. We're angry because, you know, we do count. To be honest, I have a lot of hatred, like, and Trump was one of those that I was all for. But now I feel like he's more about the money and helping the rich and, like, not caring about the people that really do need help. The Democrats down there, they don't need to be getting their payday, but they're all rich people, so it don't, you know, it don't hurt. Their kids and grandkids ain't gonna go hungry. You know what I mean?
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What are your plans for making ends meet this month?
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Hunting season's coming in, so that helps out a lot. You can't really depend on the government really for nothing, so you gotta eat more squirrel and deer. If I had children, I'm gonna tell you something. I'm gonna feed them babies. Whatever it takes to do it, I'm gonna feed them.
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You think people might get really desperate.
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They are now. We're going to be against each other over something as simple as a loaf of bread before it's over. There's already people that have to decide.
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Between food and their medicine.
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Have you ever had to make a choice like that?
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Couple of times. A couple of times. And it wasn't for this food bank about two months ago. If it wasn't for this food bank, me and my little grandson would have starved for about 10 days. We eat mashed potatoes and macaroni for four days out of this food bank, and I wouldn't have had nothing to eat with that little boy. If I hadn't, and most of the time I didn't eat it all because I'd make sure he had something. I'm so sorry. And yes, it's very upsetting. You can understand that, right? And I think it's a sad state of affairs when poor people that are not able to work anymore and I work and believe me, my whole life can't even get away to eat.
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Coming up, my colleague Tony Romm explains the standoff in Washington that's delayed SNAP funding. We'll be right back. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer center, we know that a cancer diagnosis touches more than one life. It touches entire families. Make a gift to MSK in honor or in memory of someone you love. Your donation fuels groundbreaking research and compassionate care for patients and their families all over the world. Honor their legacy. Give hope to others. Your impact can be doubled for a limited time. Donate now@msk.org honor2x my name is Carlos.
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Prieto, and I'm one of the people that help make the Daily as part of our reporting on immigration, we heard from this woman crossing one of the most dangerous stretches of land on the whole planet to get to the United States. I knew that she was from Venezuela, which is where I'm also from, but what I found out is that not only was she from the same city that I grew up in, but she was also from the same neighborhood. She was describing parks and plazas and streets where I spent a lot of my childhood. She was a woman that I might have encountered at some point in my life. It made me feel an extra responsibility to find a way for our listeners to feel like they understood her, her and her story. What makes the Daily Special is that we try to understand every story with that level of closeness so that our listeners can really connect with the humans in the middle of a news event. If this is the kind of journalism that you like and that you care about, the best way to support it is by subscribing to the New York Times.
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So, Tony, we just heard from people that our producers interviewed at a food pantry in West Virginia, and we heard a lot of confusion and a lot of worry. Could you explain what is going on with SNAP funding right now?
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SNAP is in a very difficult place, and the concerns that you're hearing out of West Virginia are concerns that we're hearing nationally as this shutdown now lapses almost into its sixth week. SNAP is a program that serves about 42 million people across the country. And even though it's a permanent fixture in law, lawmakers have to put money into that program every year. But because the shutdown gone on so long, SNAP has exhausted its normal budget. And so that's left this program at a bit of a crossroads.
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You've been following some legal challenges to the administration's position that it wouldn't or couldn't release any SNAP funding. What is the status of those challenges?
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We've seen a number of cities and states and nonprofits file lawsuits against the Trump administration over the way that it has handled SNAP during the government shutdown. And this all stemmed from a decision that the administration made just a few weeks ago. Initially, USDA said it was going to tap a special set of emergency funds to pay SNAP benefits if the shutdown dragged into November. This is a pot of money that was roughly about $5 billion or so as of late October that's supposed to be used in instances where SNAP doesn't have enough to cover benefits for everybody. And that's a lot, but still not enough to hit the roughly $8 billion or so that it needs every month to keep those benefits flowing. But sort of ab. The administration said it wasn't going to use this money after all, and that created this huge fiscal financial cliff that we were seeing for the program as we entered November. And so cities and states and religious groups and others filed lawsuits against the administration, essentially to force the release of funds. In both cases, federal judges have found serious issues with the way that the Trump administration has handled the SNAP program. But only one of those courts, at least so far, has ordered the administration to spend that money and told the administration that it had until Monday to essentially say how it was going to do so. We finally got that information from the administration, and the short of it is that the Trump administration's just going to tap only the small set of emergency funds that it has for snap, and not some of the other money it has laying around across government. And as a result of that, it's going to make partial payments to people. But those partial payments may be perhaps half of what families are expecting to see in the month of November. And it's not even clear when that money might reach the millions of people who depend on snap. So while in some ways it was a bit of a victory for people who subscribe to this program, it's a little unclear if it's actually going to provide the kind of relief that these families truly need.
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Is there any precedent for any of this? Has anything like this happened before?
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No, no, we've. We haven't seen anything like this with the SNAP program. I mean, there are fights around federal safety net program all the time. But, you know, both sides admitted while they were in court that there had never really been anything like this.
B
So I can imagine that this is really confusing to the 40 million people that rely on this funding to feed themselves or their families. Can you remind us who are these folks? What does the money get used for, and how exactly does the program work?
A
So SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and it's the largest anti hunger program that the federal government offers. There are about 42 million or so people who receive benefits under SNAP every single month, which amounts to about 1 in 8Americans. And these are people located all over the country. They live in rural and urban areas. They live in Democratic and Republican leaning communities. Many of them are children, some of them are veterans, they're seniors. It's a pretty wide swath of the population that relies on this critical federal safety net program, but there are some restrictions to it. Generally speaking, to get on snap, you have to make or earn an amount of money near the poverty line for people who qualify. The average benefit per person is about $187 a month, which is critical to helping these people buy groceries, but doesn't go all the way in meeting all of their nutrition needs. And so that's why SNAP is part of this bigger picture of food pantries and other services that help address the issue of hunger here in the United States. And in short, the way it works is that the federal government approves money for snap, and eventually that money makes its way to states and onto benefit cards that millions of Americans use.
B
How did SNAP end up in the crosshairs of the administration to begin with?
A
SNAP has been in the crosshairs of Republicans for some time now. It even predates this administration because there's a belief among Republicans that many of the people who receive those benefits don't actually need them or don't deserve them. And so we've seen a number of instances in which Republicans have led efforts to restrict who can be part of SNAP and the kinds of benefits that people can receive. And we saw this most recently in the context of the debate around the President's tax package, where one of the ways Republicans offset the massive cost of that bill was to cut SNAP to impose new work requirements on recipients, which helped save Washington some money, but also created a situation in which millions of people may lose access to benefits as a result. And so in many ways, what we're seeing right now is that play out on a much larger scale. Because while President Trump has been willing to move around various pots of money within the budget during the shutdown to ease some of its impacts, he's largely done that for programs that he personally cares about or those that may be essential to his political agenda. But in others, like snap, where Republicans have long sought to cut, this administration has not been as generous and hasn't been as willing to move money around. And indeed, that's why this administration is only providing partial payments. It's because a court has told them to.
B
Basically, what you're saying is that during the shutdown, the administration has found ways, sometimes questionable, sometimes temporary, but nevertheless has found ways to pay for other things that needs to fund, like the military, for example, other federal employees. So this feels a little bit more deliberate. And I just sort of wonder what purpose withholding SNAP serves politically.
A
In some ways, this is about political retribution. If you rewind the clock back a few weeks, when President Trump was asked about the shutdown and how he was going to handle it, he said that he was going to go after, quote, Democrat programs. And President Trump at the time didn't really explain what he meant. He didn't identify anything specific. But what we have seen since the President made that threat is a very deliberate effort across the administration to cut funding streams that they associate with members of the political opposition. And even President Trump sort of acknowledged this just a few days ago when he said that the SNAP program was one that largely benefited Democrats, that most of the people on the program were Democratic voters. We know that that is not indeed the case. But throughout all of this has just been this very clear effort to go after areas that Democrats like in a bid to pressure them into coming to the negotiating table.
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How does this fit into sort of the larger agenda of the Trump administration vis a vis? Cutting the government, shrinking the government, cutting programs.
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Yeah.
A
In many ways, this fight, this crisis around SNAP is just a microcosm of everything that President Trump has been trying to do with federal spending since he returned to office. You know, on one hand, this is about rethinking the size and the reach and the role of government in Americans lives. And you can see that in the programs that the President has looked to cut. That's cuts to federal health and education and science and research and other programs. And the reality that his budget for the 2026 fiscal year, if Congress were to adopt it, would set domestic spending at its lowest level in modern history. But beyond that. But the other really dynamic facet of all of this is that President Trump and his top Budget advisor Russell Vogt have gone to great lengths to recalibrate the budget without the approval of Congress, which has that power of the purse under the Constitution. They have closed entire agencies and laid off droves of workers and halted billions of dollars in federal spending enacted by Congress without getting lawmakers support. And so the SNAP program just really sits in the middle of all of that because it shows the way in which the president wants to rethink those federal safety net programs and the cuts that he aspires to make, but also the ways he's willing to use presidential power to achieve them.
B
So now that the administration has said that it will comply with a court order and find a way to fund the SNAP program at least partially, how quickly does that mean that people who receive SNAP benefits will actually see that money in their accounts?
A
Yeah, that's the big question. And in short, we just don't know yet, because the Trump administration previously told the court that by providing partial payments, it could take potentially weeks or maybe in some cases months before the federal government and the states could get these benefits out to the millions of people who depend on them. This could have been avoided, potentially, if the government had chosen to provide full payments and had tapped other sources of money to backfill that shortfall. But the Trump administration opted not to do that. And as a result, millions of people still find themselves facing the same uncertainty today that they did a few days ago about when that next SNAP payment is going to arrive.
B
Which makes me wonder, just to go back to West Virginia for a minute, a state that Trump won handily in the last election. People are angry and people are confused. They don't understand why they're losing their benefits. And so it sounds like the political calculation is that this will ultimately benefit the Republicans more, especially in these shutdown negotiations. But do you think that that is correct? What is your assessment of the political calculation that's been done?
A
Yeah, I think they bet that A, it will be the kind of thing that pressures Democrats and to negotiating, and B, that absent that the president can accomplish what he proposed to do as part of his 2026 budget even without having Congress vote on it. Whether that translates into a victory in the eyes of the American people remains to be seen. I think there have been times where people have blamed the administration for the cuts across government and the ways that that's affected their daily lives. But there's also been times where I think people just blame what's happening on just the general mess of Washington. And the result isn't that they see it as the work of one party or another, but just another chip away at their confidence in the work of government. And so I think that's in many ways one of the lasting repercussions here. It's just another instance where people look at Washington and think, this place isn't doing anything for me and I can't count on it for help when I'm in my greatest need. And so in many ways it really just distills how bad things have gotten here in the nation's capital and the real people who might be hurt in the process when the two parties can't talk to each other.
B
Tony, thank you so much.
A
Thanks for having me.
B
We'll be right back.
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Here's what else you need to know Today, Kimberly Clark will buy Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, for $40 billion, a signal that the consumer products giant is betting that the painkiller can weather a barrage of attacks from President Trump and his administration. The president and others have made unproven claims that the use of Tylenol and other acetaminophen products during pregnancy can lead to autism. And President Trump weighed in on the race for New York City mayor on the eve of Election Day. In a social media post, he endorsed former governor Andrew Cuomo in his uphill battle to defeat Assemblyman Zoran Mandani, the Democratic nominee, and he vowed to limit federal funds going to New York City if Mamdani wins. Today's episode was reported and produced by Olivia Natt and Anna Foley with help from Mooj Zaidy. It was edited by Patricia Willans with help from Paige Cowett and fact checked by Susan Lee. Contains music by Marianne Lozano and Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to David Farenthalt, Rachel Culbertson and the Facing Hunger Food Banking that's it for the Daily I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
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Date: November 4, 2025
Host: Rachel Abrams (The New York Times)
Guest: Tony Romm (NYT reporter)
Field Reporting: Olivia Natt & Anna Foley
In this episode, The Daily delves into the impact of the ongoing government shutdown on millions of Americans who rely on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. Direct voices from Kermit, West Virginia—a rural town with high reliance on food aid—illustrate the deep uncertainty, anger, and hardship created by the loss of benefits. The episode examines why SNAP funding has become a political battlefield, the mechanics behind the funding deadlock, and the broader implications of federal austerity.
[00:43–08:48]
[05:50–08:48]
Interview with Tony Romm
[10:55–22:45]
[15:36–18:42]
[20:05–22:45]
“I adopted my grandson. He’s 2, and it's terrifying thinking I can't feed him. Now that that's been frozen.”
— Local resident, [01:20]
“Can you describe…what a dinner would look like, like with your SNAP benefits? …With the SNAP benefits, we all have a good Southern meal…But without, it's more like hot dogs and ramen noodles…That's just not healthy.”
— Interviewee, [05:36]
"We’re angry because, you know, we do count. To be honest, I have a lot of hatred…Trump was one of those I was all for. But now I feel like he’s more about the money and helping the rich and, like, not caring about the people that really do need help.”
— Community member, [06:31]
“If it wasn’t for this food bank…me and my little grandson would have starved for about 10 days…most of the time I didn’t eat it all because I’d make sure he had something.”
— Local resident, [07:53]
“No, we haven’t seen anything like this with the SNAP program…both sides admitted while they were in court that there had never really been anything like this.”
— Tony Romm, [13:50]
“It’s just another instance where people look at Washington and think, this place isn’t doing anything for me and I can’t count on it for help when I’m in my greatest need.”
— Tony Romm, [22:14]
This episode starkly illustrates the real-world consequences of federal dysfunction for some of the country’s most vulnerable people. It shows how abstract political standoffs in Washington create concrete hunger and hardship in communities like Kermit, West Virginia, and exposes the underlying calculations and motivations driving SNAP cuts. The uncertainty and desperation voiced by those reliant on SNAP deepen the episode’s emotional impact, while Tony Romm’s analysis reveals how this crisis encapsulates larger shifts in the shape and ethos of American government.