The House and Senate talked past each other for 43 days only to finally emerge with an agreement that restarts government funding but fails to address key health care and appropriations issues—threatening more Capitol Hill drama in the weeks to come. The major consequence of this callous legislative politicking was the nasty shredding of the social contract that sent tens of millions of desperate Americans off searching for food and assistance from their local community leaders.
Unlike some members of Congress trying to keep the lowest of low profiles anytime they’re back in their ZIP codes, mayors don’t have time to engage in pity parties or rounds of backslapping over whose brinkmanship failed or won out.
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 (MRCTI) 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.
Six out of the ten Mississippi River states have more than 10 percent of their populations who currently depend on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. There are also more than 250,000 federal employees in the river corridor.
After January 30, the country could be exposed to a whole new round of disruptions if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree to new funding levels.
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.
The end of the shutdown doesn’t mean that benefits flow immediately. Depending on the details in the fine print of the agreement, coalition members surmised that funds would begin to work their way to SNAP recipients, as well as to federal employees who have missed paychecks, in the next ten days.
Simmons underlined that SNAP disbursements will occur “state by state.” Red states like Mississippi, and particularly ones that have work requirements, he said, “operate differently” than California, which, of course, has different procedures than New York. Mississippi began distributing partial reimbursements earlier this week.
“The practical response, I would hope, is that everyone speeds this funding up just as this government has sped up funding to Argentina and funding to other efforts; making sure we operate in a form of compassion and expediency is critical right now because we got holidays coming up,” Simmons, a Democrat, added.
The Hill reported that 19 states and the District of Columbia have managed to issue full benefits for November. Another 18 issued partial benefits, while 13 others did not issue any funds to tide people over.
Congress agreed on new full-year funding until September 2026 for the legislative branch, military construction, and the Department of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture Department, which administers SNAP. The continuing resolution also funds the nine other federal departments at prior-year levels, but only until January 30, 2026. Not only will cities and towns have to wait for the funds to work their way through the system, but the shutdown reprieve may only be temporary.
After January 30, the country could be exposed to a whole new round of disruptions if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree to new funding levels for the nine other departments.
The individuals and families who’ve had to turn to their communities for food to tide them over have had a brutal, eye-opening introduction to how inside-the-Beltway politics can trickle down and leave individuals and families without the dollars to feed themselves or buy necessities.
Many communities will provide assistance right through the winter holiday season, but these charitable systems face strains. Colin Wellenkamp, the MRCTI’s executive director, explained that food banks along the Mississippi corridor aren’t as prepared as they’d normally be for Thanksgiving, because they’ve been too busy working to feed people who’ve lost benefits and jobs during the shutdown.
The Trump mega-bill resulted in the largest cut to SNAP in the Great Society program’s 61-year history.
Memphis, Tennessee, designed a challenge grant initiative that netted $1.5 million to feed families. The city council also pulled together a $2.5 million loan fund. The city has a poverty rate of about 23 percent. “We have roughly 147,000 individuals in our community receiving SNAP benefits,” said Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat. “Relative to these resources from the federal government, we know that the need is still high.”
Several communities had placed moratoria on utility shutoffs. Larry Dobrosky, St. Charles City, Missouri’s director of administration, noted that the city would not do any water and sewer disconnections or levy any late fees during November and December. Greenville, Mississippi, has also paused water disconnections.
St. Charles asked its 500 employees to raise $25,000 over the next two weeks. The city council plans to offer a $100,000 match with funds going to water utility relief and Thanksgiving turkey and Adopt-a-Family holiday assistance programs.
Local leaders were mostly dismayed by Washington’s dysfunction. “I have to say that government shutdowns should never happen,” said Brad Bark, the mayor of Muscatine, Iowa. “People on both sides of the aisle need to work together to make this work. We’re all a team called United States of America and that’s red, white, and blue, right?
“This should never happen again,” the Democrat repeated.
As impressive as this marshaling of community resources has been in the region, the 2025 shutdown only previews the bigger crisis on the horizon. This week in a Harvard Kennedy School Q&A, Sara Bleich, a public health policy professor in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former Biden Agriculture Department official, noted: “We are seeing that lines for food banks are getting incredibly long as demand goes up, and the charitable food sector does not have the capacity to fill the hole that is being left by the federal government. For every meal that food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. Charities do not have the capacity to make up for the shortfall.”
These shortfalls will only increase. The Trump mega-bill resulted in a mammoth 20 percent funding cut to SNAP, nearly $190 billion over the next decade, the largest ever in the Great Society program’s 61-year history, along with expanded work requirements for certain adult recipients, and an increase in the states’ administrative costs from 50 to 75 percent.
SNAP funds will start moving at least for the next year, but the program has already been hollowed out with the worst cuts expressly designed to push more expenses onto states well after the midterms—in 2027—when local leaders will be forced again to try to stitch up the even larger tears in America’s social contract.