Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments to states will pause starting in November. State officials announced the freeze last week.
Dixie Shanks is picking up groceries at the Columbia Falls Food Bank. Her family of three has used SNAP before to keep up with rising food prices.
“You can’t spend less than $100 going to the store every time, just for a little bit of stuff,” she says.
Grocery prices are up a little over 3% compared to last year, according to state data. Prices haven’t really come down from their pandemic highs. They’re just increasing at a slower pace.
Shanks’s husband Cory made too much money working at restaurants this summer to stay on the program. But that job ended after the summer tourism season.
The family planned to rely on SNAP to get through the winter. They were unaware they might not get benefits because of the shutdown. Cory says that could mean tough choices at the grocery store.
"Fruit and everything is outrageous, so you have to do the processed food.”
He hopes he can sell extra wood and plow more driveways to make do.
The Montana Food Bank Network expects demand on local food banks to rise the longer the shutdown persists.
Kiera Condon with the Food Bank Network says it’s a political move to freeze SNAP benefits. She says the federal government has six billion of the eight-billion dollars it needs for November.
“So they can give some benefits and they could give a lot more guidance on how those contingency funds can be used,” Condon says.
She says programs like hers are lobbying the Trump administration to find other funding to keep the program afloat. Condon says no one should go hungry because of political gridlock.
