PHOENIX – As holiday season nears, and with nearly a million Arizonans about to lose federal food aid, your neighbor may need help like never before.
The Trump administration told states last week that it would no longer fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps or SNAP, for the duration of the government shutdown.
In response, half of the states, including Arizona, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pull from an $8 billion contingency fund to continue funding the program, which serves 42 million people nationwide.
In Arizona, 951,000 people rely on monthly payments that average $181 per person, and those recipients are bracing for a disruption in their food access.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Kris Mayes implicitly criticized Gov. Katie Hobbs by saying she was “underwhelmed” at the state’s response. She said the governor should call a special session to tap into the state’s rainy day fund to keep SNAP benefits flowing to low-income Arizonans while the federal case remains in litigation.
“If this is not a rainy day, I’m not real sure what is,” Mayes said.
The next day, Hobbs announced she would release $1.8 million from a pandemic-era relief program to blunt the effects of the SNAP funding freeze.
Of that, $1.5 million will go to food banks across the state. Another $300,000 will be deployed to “Food Bucks Now,” a new emergency program Hobbs created that will provide $30 vouchers to buy food at participating food retailers. That’s enough to cover 10,000 such vouchers.
In total, the $1.8 million amounts to just $1.90 per person. In a normal month, the average daily benefit is nearly $6, according to the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Without monthly SNAP funds hitting their EBT cards on Saturday, SNAP recipients will be forced to rely on local food banks that are already strained.
“SNAP is meant to cover 70 to 80 percent of the household’s groceries for the month,” said Terri Shoemaker, executive vice president of Arizona Food Bank Network, noting that for every meal provided by food banks, SNAP provides five.
“There are already a lot of SNAP recipients who visit the food banks,” she said, “but the volume of what they need will be more and certainly there will be people who will be visiting food banks for the first time ever.”
Without SNAP, food banks expect to see unprecedented demand.
“Even if you are the best resourced retailer on the face of the planet and somebody says: ‘Next week we are going to have five times as many customers,’ that would be a very daunting task to do,” Shoemaker said.
In the 60-year history of SNAP, funding has never lapsed before, despite numerous government shutdowns – only one of which lasted longer than this one, which began Oct. 1.
“Arizonans should not ever, ever be used as a bargaining chip,” Mayes said at a press conference on Tuesday, echoing Democratic allegations that freezing SNAP payments is a choice Trump didn’t have to make. “It’s especially cruel to do this in November, the month of Thanksgiving.”
Brandy Baker is unhoused and is staying on a corner near Key Campus, an emergency homeless shelter in Phoenix. She said she relies on SNAP.
“I won’t have money for food. The money I get from Social Security, it goes towards a hotel for a week or two, just to get off the streets, out of here for a little bit,” she said.
The CEO of Key Campus, Amy Schwabenlender, worries about how the loss of SNAP will affect homelessness in Phoenix. “We know people need SNAP and other things that are provided through the state and when one of those things are cut, it makes it more challenging for people to move out of homelessness,” she said.
With food banks stretched thin, Shoemaker said there are many ways Arizonans can step up, and not just through donations or volunteering.
“Support each other – friends, family, colleagues, people down the street, neighbors, anybody you can,” Shoemaker said. “Food banks are going to be very busy helping people who do not have anybody to turn to.”
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