As the longest government shutdown in history continues, the Trump administration informed U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. of Rhode Island that it would pay out 50% of the SNAP benefits in November to the 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps.
This announcement comes just days after McConnell ruled that the administration could not halt the SNAP program.
In response, governors have begun issuing statements in response to the ruling. For example, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said in a press release: “The Trump Administration just admitted what we have known all along – this funding was available this entire time and the President could have been using it to prevent American families from going hungry. Families should never have been put through this, and it shouldn’t have taken a Court order to force President Trump to feed American families like every president before him.”
Yet it is still unclear how and when the partial SNAP benefits will be made available, as states await guidance from the USDA and the looming food crisis remains very much a reality.
In other words, the crisis was not averted.
To be very clear, what the world is witnessing right now isn’t just another political game. It is the latest move in the administration’s War on Food Security, or the ability of many Americans to access safe and nutritious food.
This war began when Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 on July 4 of this year, effectively transforming food into a political weapon. The law severely cut food stamps and terminated the SNAP-Ed program, which provided food and nutrition education to millions of low-income individuals.
Less than a month after Congress passed the act, state officials felt the brunt of this careless move. In Illinois, for example, the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign issued a press release announcing the elimination of the Illinois Extension-led SNAP-Ed program after over three decades of life-changing work across the state.
By the numbers, Illinois Extension cut over 200 jobs (approximately one-quarter of its workforce) and put in jeopardy almost 2,000 statewide partnerships that play a critical role in the food security and health of 1 million residents annually.
But the elimination of SNAP-Ed was just a battle cry.
In September, the USDA announced it would stop the annual National Household Food Insecurity Survey, ending 30 years of data collection that captures the prevalence of hunger in America.
According to the USDA, the report was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous,” promoted as a “fear monger” and failing to “present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”
Such framing of the report was immediately met with staunch opposition, especially by Georgia Machell, President and CEO of the National WIC Association.
In a press release, Machell wrote: “We are alarmed by USDA’s decision to cancel the annual food security survey. . .It is deeply troubling that the Trump administration would cancel this annual survey, particularly in the wake of deep cuts to the social safety net in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
In recent weeks, the government shutdown has catapulted millions of Americans further into this war on food security. More recently, in response to the shutdown, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service Director quietly informed state agencies that any plans to disseminate food stamps in November should be halted “until further notice.” This places one in eight Americans who participate in the SNAP program at risk of suffering from high levels of hunger.
Now, as November rapidly approaches, the reality of this nation without a food stamp program is within reach.
This horrific moment in American history is not an isolated incident or temporary disruption that resolves itself at the whims of the federal government. It is the latest escalation in the government’s war on food security.
Some Congressional representatives are opposing the moves. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recently filed legislation to continue food stamps despite the shutdown. Ten GOP senators support this bill.
In response, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) introduced a Democrat bill to keep food aid benefits flowing. He writes, “Putting food on the table is not a partisan issue. Every American deserves to eat.”
To be sure, this is not the first time that government officials have waged a war on food security, as observed in the Mississippi civil rights movement. What makes this moment different is that the scale: the food security of millions of Americans now hangs in limbo.
Devastating cuts to SNAP, the total annihilation of the nation’s most extensive nutrition education program, and now food stamp chaos are colliding as part of an ongoing political standoff.
Americans cannot simply sit back and relax while watching the U.S. Hunger Games unfold in political theater. It is urgent to recognize that this ongoing attack on the ability to be food secure is a matter of national security—a crisis that will continue whether the government shuts down or not.
Bobby J. Smith II is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, author of the James Beard Award-nominated book, Food Power Politics, and Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.