Roughly 1.4 million federal workers have either been furloughed and are working without pay as the US enters day 23 of the government shutdown. Washington, DC food banks and religious groups are organizing food distribution for those workers, some of whom are willing to wait for hours on line for groceries amid the crisis.

The shutdown began on October 1, stemming from a standoff between Democratic and Republican lawmakers over upcoming cuts to public healthcare within the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”. It is now on track to be among the longest government shutdowns in US history.

The Democrats contended that the Republican budget bill will undermine essential programs such as Medicaid – the nation’s largest public health insurance program, which provides coverage to over 70 million people. Democratic lawmakers insisted that safeguards for these programs be included in a short-term spending measure, and when Republicans refused, Congress failed to pass a funding bill to avert a government shutdown.

The Trump administration has placed the blame of the shutdown on Democratic lawmakers, labeling it as the “Democrat shutdown”. “TOP DEMOCRATS CHEER OVER Americans’ pain, weaponizing suffering in their twisted political power grab,” the White House wrote on X.

However, the reality is often not as the White House paints it. Since the shutdown began, Trump has instructed the Office of Management and Budget to eliminate 4,000 jobs across eight federal agencies, although a federal judge’s order halted a wave of layoffs. Amid the shutdown, the administration has cancelled or frozen nearly USD 28 billion primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts, and states. On the first day of the shutdown, Trump froze USD 18 billion in federal funds to projects in New York City alone.

“What this means is that when the government reopens with a new continuing resolution in place, it will not be a grand reopening but a significantly diminished one,” writes congressional scholar Donald R. Wolfensberger in The Hill.

The ongoing shutdown poses significant challenges for low income people who rely on government services for survival. Several states have warned that if the shutdown continues until November, they will be forced to suspend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which provides food assistance to 42 million people. These states include Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York. Similar concerns have been issued for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program, known as WIC, which provides food aid to 7 million people – meaning that the continuation of the shut down could jeopardize food access for millions.

The threat to food stamps has alarmed many. “Food banks were already struggling to keep with demand. Then, Trump slashed USD 1 billion from crucial USDA programs supporting them. Now, thanks to his shutdown, millions of Americans in at least 25 states will lose access to food stamps on November 1,” wrote former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on X. “The perfect storm of cruelty.”

“The government shutdown is an expression of a historic showdown under way over what’s left of the social safety net in America. The Trump administration aims to cut, eliminate or privatize any program that serves the common good, and fire the public servants responsible for administering them,” Walter Smolarek, editor of Liberation News, told Peoples Dispatch. “Trump and the Republican Party are ultimately the ones responsible for the shutdown. They could end it at any point, all they would have to do is agree to back off of Medicaid cuts and keep subsidies in place that address the extraordinarily high cost of health insurance.”

But according to Smolarek, the Democrats “have failed to incorporate any sort of mass mobilization into their shutdown strategy, so [Republican] Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been content to simply try to wait them out.”

The post As US government enters week four of shutdown, millions of low income families could lose food assistance appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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