Today, the United States marks its 41st day of a federal government shutdown that has seen federal employees unpaid, air travel disrupted and millions of poor Americans losing food assistance.
To be sure, this is not the first time that the government of the reigning global superpower has deliberately ceased to function – although the current shutdown recently bagged the dubious distinction of being the longest in modern US history.
And this time around, the political spectacle is beyond dystopian.
In short, the suspension of government transpired as a result of a budgetary disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over draconian healthcare cuts favoured by President Donald Trump. This is the same Trump, of course, who fancied the US wealthy enough to propose a defence budget for fiscal year 2026 of more than $1 trillion.
Following the shutdown, the Trump administration decided that poor and hungry Americans should pay the price, and on November 1, the nation’s crucial Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) came to a halt for the first time since the programme’s creation in 1964.
Nearly 42 million Americans – or one in eight people – rely on SNAP to eat. According to the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US Department of Agriculture, children accounted for 39 percent of the programme’s participants in the fiscal year 2023.
When I visited the ERS website on Sunday, I encountered the following very professional alert at the top of the screen: “Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse.”
The message continued in slightly smaller print: “President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel and clothe the American people.”
It could be funny, if only it weren’t so macabre.
Last week, the administration was forced to reverse its starvation campaign after a ruling by two federal judges that the freeze in SNAP benefits was unlawful. The resumption of food aid was, however, only partial – and came accompanied by an appeal to the Supreme Court to intervene in favour of mass hunger.
These days, the top US judicial body rarely encounters a sociopathic initiative that it doesn’t endorse. And in this case too, it did not disappoint.
On Friday, The Associated Press news agency reported that the Supreme Court had “granted the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to temporarily block a court order to fully fund SNAP food aid payments amid the government shutdown, even though residents in some states already have received the funds”.
Indeed, it is harder to think of a more pressing “emergency” than having to use the vast resources at one’s disposal to ensure that one’s own citizens do not starve.
Given the Israeli military’s contemporary use of enforced starvation as a key component in its US-backed genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it may seem like a crass exaggeration to invoke such terminology in a domestic American context. But intentionally depriving people of the sustenance required for survival amounts to starvation plain and simple – whether it’s as a weapon for genocide or simply as the latest iteration of the ongoing US war on the poor.
On October 31, the day before the SNAP freeze, CNN ran an article headlined, “‘I feel guilty eating a meal’: Low-income families prepare to lose access to billions in federal aid,” which quoted an Ohio mother who spoke of preemptively going without food on her children’s behalf.
Describing her family’s suffering on account of the federal shutdown, the mother opined: “It’s no longer a Democrat thing. It’s no longer a Republican thing. It’s our lives.”
And while the Democrats may come out looking like the more polite party against the present backdrop of Trump’s unrepentant derangement, it’s helpful to recall that the war on the poor has long been a bipartisan one. In the 1990s, for example, Democratic President Bill Clinton oversaw “reforms” to the US welfare system that ultimately caused the number of Americans living in extreme poverty to skyrocket.
At the end of the day, both parties are firmly committed to upholding the plutocracy on which the US itself is founded – since you can’t sustain the tyranny of an elite minority if everyone is created equal with equal rights, including the right to adequate food.
Rich Americans like to howl about the existential perils of taxing their wealth. But for the tens of millions of people now set to be deprived of necessary nourishment, the existential peril is real.
Last night, eight Senate Democrats voted with Republicans as a first step to temporarily end the shutdown and resuscitate the government until January. Another vote in the House of Representatives is needed and then Trump’s signature, which could take days. If passed, the bill would extend SNAP through September but fundamentally resolve zero issues. The hungry remain in limbo, and healthcare remains up in the air.
Over recent weeks, some observers cast the possibility of mass starvation as “collateral damage” of partisan bickering. And though the war terminology is no doubt apt, the poorest sectors of US society are far from just provisional “collateral” casualties of the federal government shutdown.
They are the intended targets of a capitalist system engineered to keep them down
