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hunger
How to Defeat the Pro-Suffering, Pro-Hunger Policies of Trump's GOP
Food insecurity has long been a feature of Republican politics, not a bug.
Nov 16, 2025
Once upon a time, in what increasingly feels like the fairy tale world of the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans agreed that hunger was immoral. This consensus was embodied by the collaboration to champion the Food Stamp Program between Senate Agriculture Committee leaders and political icons, namely Republican Robert Dole and Democrat George McGovern. They had essentially revived a farm support program launched under FDR during the Great Depression, turning it into a cornerstone of the anti-hunger struggle and eventually an entitlement program, in which anyone who qualified for benefits could receive them regardless of Congressional appropriations.
While America never evolved into a welfare state like many of our European allies, through food stamps and other nutrition programs, we were able to hold the line on the lowest common political denominator: that in the midst of abundance no one should starve. As the poor balanced precariously on the knife edge of poverty, the food stamp program helped to prevent people from falling into the abyss of unfettered capitalism. And it did so not by giving the poor cash to spend as they chose but through vouchers redeemable for food at grocery stores. In the process, the food stamp program also created a powerful ally in the food industry, for which these benefits came to comprise a significant portion of their sales. This partnership became a double-edged sword, protecting the program during times of crisis, while strengthening an industry heavily reliant on worker and environmental exploitation.
By the 1980s, much of the progress made in previous decades was under challenge. Ronald Reagan threw one million people off the food stamp program rolls, reviving the Calvinist trope that the poor were lazy, scamming, and otherwise undeserving of public aid. Globalization led to stagnating wages, faltering labor unions, and disappearing manufacturing jobs. In response, the anti-hunger sector — comprising advocacy organizations, churches, food banks, and other community-based groups — responded predictably to meet the food need through expanding food charity exponentially. In subsequent decades, as the Clinton Administration’s welfare reform legislation arguably further drove the expansion of the charitable sector, the anti-hunger sector also sought to increase benefits and remove barriers to participation in the food stamp program.
However, what the anti-hunger community largely failed to do was to develop an analysis of the underlying causes of the crisis and the long-term alliances to build power. In other words, anti-hunger groups could have mobilized their community to increase wages, facilitate unionizing, or regulations that would limit businesses’ ability to offshore jobs. Instead, they focused on food provisioning and bolstering nutrition assistance programs. And they partnered with corporate America, which donated food and money, served on their boards of directors, and lobbied together. In essence, the anti-hunger community had triangulated, positioning itself as neither on the right nor the left but as a morally-centered and centrist sector.
As a result of their efforts — which were compounded by the desperation of the Great Recession and the Covid-19 crisis — the food stamp program (now known as SNAP or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program) participation swelled to some 42 million persons. SNAP evolved into a work support program, subsidizing low-wage employment, with over three-quarters of SNAP households having at least one employed adult.
Fast forward to November 2025, when the administration had been fighting tooth and nail not to fund SNAP during the government shutdown. But the conventional wisdom among the media explaining this resistance has been incomplete.
First, the press highlighted the cruel and callous nature of the administration, given that the immorality of hunger amidst abundance no longer motivates policy. The media pointed out MAGA’s belief in a dog-eat-dog world, bifurcated into winners and losers. These beliefs are the “roid rage” version of the Reagan-era meme of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen.
Second, the media called out the administration for using the poor as pawns in the political battle over the government shutdown. They interpreted the administration’s actions to be of a more tactical nature — that is, as leverage to defeat the Democratic Party in the shutdown battle (which was arguably successful).
While both of these observations hold much water, they are missing additional context. Consider the following:
- Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” threatens the integrity of the SNAP program, forcing states to shoulder more of the costs, reducing future potential benefit increases, and tightening exemptions for work restrictions. According to the Food Research and Action Center, these changes will “increase hunger, push more families into deep poverty, and shift costs onto already strained state budgets.”
- The Administration ended $1 billion of food donations to schools and food banks through the termination of the Local Food Purchasing Act.
- USDA cancelled the purchase of $500 million of surplus foods, known as bonus commodities, for food banks. For decades, these commodities had been purchased to stabilize farming sectors and distributed to charitable organizations.
- In the international realm, the elimination of USAID and $128 million of food aid annually will “threaten decades of progress in reversing malnutrition.”
- Last month, the USDA announced it would no longer issue its annual report on the state of food insecurity, despite having done so since 1995. This report has been widely touted by academics as the gold standard in measuring hunger, and has been deployed by numerous other countries.
When viewed together, these actions certainly highlight an administration and political movement devoid of a moral compass on the matter of food insecurity. Yet, if we consider these shifts in conjunction with their other policies — such as ending collective bargaining for federal employee unions, restricting minimum wage in federal contracts and for certain workers, and virtually dismantling the National Labor Relations Board — it becomes evident that Trump’s pro-hunger policies are part and parcel of a decades-long shift in the balance of power to from labor to capital, harking back to at least the 1980s. Profoundly, Trump’s policies reflect a desire to reverse the social gains of the progressive and civil rights movements of the 20th Century.
In economic terms, anti-hunger programs such as SNAP, school meals, or food banking (which only provides one-ninth of the food of the SNAP program) have a complex relationship to wages. When benefits are tied to work requirements, these programs, along with Medicaid, enable businesses to avoid paying fair wages and provide health insurance, bolstering corporate profits. On the other hand, robust social assistance can drive up pressure to increase the minimum wage, as stronger safety nets theoretically keep more people, such as single mothers, out of the labor force (hence the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tightening of work requirements).
So, what’s Trump’s endgame for nutrition programs? He appears to be at odds with much of the American public, which does not buy into the cruelty of driving more people to desperation. Certainly, hunger has become a political football, highlighting his transactional nature. He appears to hold the erroneous but commonly held belief that the recipients of nutrition assistance are people of color, and if they’re not going to vote for him, then why should he help them?
Yet, to understand the deeper threat to this country, we also need to see the patterns behind his polices for what they are: an assault on progressive policies that reduce inequality, all as a means of shifting the balance of power even further towards plutocracy. Trump’s policies are not new; they follow the same neoliberal logic of the past 45 years, which has led to the rise of food banks. What is new is the brazen disregard for the poor, the callousness, and the disregard for the immorality of hunger. The veneer of care has been stripped off, the soft power of food aid trashed in favor of naked political gain.
This pro-hunger, pro-suffering movement will only be defeated when we build a mass movement — one that empowers the anti-hunger community to mobilize its tens of millions of donors and recipients, not to retreat into Bush’s “kinder gentler nation,” but to demand a new America defined by an equitable distribution of wealth.
This story was reprinted with permission from The MIT Press Reader. It was written by Andrew Fisher, the author of “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups.”
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500+ Experts Worldwide Call for Global Panel to Address ‘Inequality Emergency’
"Clear and proven steps can be taken to reduce it and build more equal societies and economies," wrote economists and other experts, "which are the fundamental foundation stone of a successful future for us all."
Nov 14, 2025
Emphasizing that economic inequality is "a policy choice," more than 500 economists and other experts on the global wealth gap are endorsing a call made earlier this month in the first-ever G20 report on inequality: The "inequality emergency" must be confronted by new international body inspired by the United Nations' panel on climate change.
The creation of an International Panel on Inequality (IPI) was a central recommendation of the landmark report set to be presented next week at the G20 Leaders Summit in Johannesburg, and renowned economists including 2024 Nobel economics laureate Daron Acemoglum, Thomas Piketty, Isabella Weber, Ha-Joon Chang, and Jason Hickel were among those who signed a letter Thursday urging the creation of the committee.
The inclusion of economists, climate scientists, epidemiologists, historians, and experts from a range of other disciplines "reflects a key fact," said the signatories. "High levels of economic inequality have a negative impact on every aspect of human life and progress, including our economies, our democracies, and the very survival of the planet."
"Just as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has played a vital role in providing neutral, science-based, and objective assessments of climate change, a new International Panel on Inequality would do the same for the inequality emergency," reads the letter, which was also signed by global economic leaders including former US Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and former World Bank top economists and leaders.
Since its inception nearly four decades ago, the IPCC has provided governments with the most up-to-date scientific information about planetary heating and its impacts. Its assessments have informed the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which subjected wealthy countries to emissions targets for the first time; and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which has required countries to develop and implement plans to draw down planet-heating emissions.
An IPI, said the experts on Thursday, "would provide policymakers the best, most objective assessments on the scale of inequality, its causes and consequences, and consider potential solutions."
"We believe this is in the interests of policymakers from across the political spectrum, who see the importance of this issue and the need to base responses to it on data and evidence and sound analysis," reads the letter. "We know that scholars and experts across the world would readily contribute their time voluntarily—as thousands do for the IPCC—in support of such a necessary and vital international initiative. We are ready to assist in this process."
The letter followed the release of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Inequality's landmark report, which was presented to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this month ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit.
The Extraordinary Committee, which is led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and also includes inequality experts such as Winnie Byanyima of Uganda and Jayati Ghosh of India, warned that in the last quarter-century, the wealthiest 1% of people around the globe have captured more than 40% of all new wealth—$1.3 million on average—while the bottom 50% has seen its wealth grow by just 1%, or about $585, in constant US dollars.
One in four people around the globe—roughly 2.3 billion people—face moderate or severe food insecurity, meaning they regularly skip meals. The report found that the problem is getting significantly worse, with the number of food-insecure people rising by 335 million since 2019.
The report found that 80% of all countries—accounting for roughly 90% of the global population—have high levels of income inequality, making them seven times more likely than more equal countries to experience democratic decline.
“We are at a dangerous moment in human history," said Piketty, co-director of the World Inequality Lab and World Inequality Database. "Rampant inequality is dividing nations and communities, threatening our social fabric, human rights, and the very essence of democracy. A global effort to tackle inequality is needed—and rigorous analysis of its causes, drivers, and solutions is the first step."
"Governments need to live up to the G20 Summit’s promise of ‘solidarity, equality, sustainability’ and urgently establish an International Panel on Inequality," he added.
Countries with low levels of inequality included Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—places that also consistently rank high on global reports on happiness and that were found to have low levels of "health, social, and environmental problems," according to the report.
The countries with low levels of inequality have "generous universal transfers and social insurance, supplemented by targeted assistance," the report says.
“High inequality is the result of decades of a failed economics that has primarily benefited the richest in our societies," said Chang, research professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London. "Not only is there a lot of evidence showing that higher inequality produces more negative economic and social outcomes, there are quite a few examples of more egalitarian societies growing much faster than comparable but more unequal societies.”
The signatories of the letter emphasized that inequality "is not inevitable."
"Clear and proven steps can be taken to reduce it and build more equal societies and economies," they wrote, "which are the fundamental foundation stone of a successful future for us all."
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National 'Billionaires Eat First' Campaign Aims to Make Trump and GOP Pay for Aid Cuts
Organizers of the new campaign said Republicans are slashing nutrition assistance and other programs "after giving Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires a massive tax break."
Nov 13, 2025
A nationwide campaign announced Thursday aims to rally Americans against US President Donald Trump and the Republican Party's unpopular effort to demolish what's left of the country's social safety net to help fund tax breaks for the ultrarich.
The Billionaires Eat First campaign officially launches Friday with events in the nation's capital and Montgomery, Alabama, where local leaders, advocates, and impacted families will gather to spotlight the harms of the GOP's cuts to federal nutrition assistance. Over the summer, congressional Republicans approved the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Trump administration used the prolonged government shutdown to throttle food benefits for millions.
During the shutdown, which ended on Wednesday, the more than 900 billionaires in the United States saw their combined wealth grow to a record $8 trillion as tens of millions of low-income people watched the Trump administration illegally withhold their nutrition benefits.
"Trump and congressional Republicans are taking food off the table for kids, seniors, and veterans, while families already struggle with high grocery costs," said Leor Tal, campaign director of Unrig Our Economy, the coalition that organized the new campaign in partnership with local organizations.
"And they’re doing this after giving Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires a massive tax break," Tal added. "Families need to feed their loved ones; billionaires don’t need yet another tax break. It’s wrong."
Unrig Our Economy said that the Billionaires Eat First events will feature speeches from local leaders and people directly affected by the Trump-GOP SNAP cuts. The campaign is also a mutual aid effort, with volunteers expected to donate hundreds of thousands of meals to local food banks ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
"Across America, kids, seniors, and veterans have lost vital food assistance. Why? Because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress chose to give billionaires and big corporations massive tax breaks, while cutting SNAP benefits in their tax law, and heartlessly withholding SNAP benefits during the government shutdown," the campaign's website states. "We’re standing up to say: it’s callous, it’s cruel, and it’s wrong."
In addition to Friday's events, the campaign will have stops in West Virginia and Pennsylvania on Saturday, and Louisiana, New York, and Arizona next week.
The campaign was announced hours after Trump signed funding legislation that ended the government shutdown—though the impacts of the standoff are expected to linger, with SNAP benefits still in chaos and health insurance premiums set to rise further as Republicans refuse to back an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year.
Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, implored the Trump administration and states to quickly deliver full November benefits to those who have not yet received them.
"It remains shocking that the administration did everything it could during the shutdown to keep much-needed food assistance from reaching those in need," said FitzSimons. "The administration went as far as the Supreme Court to keep SNAP benefits out of the hands of those in need. This unnecessary and harmful decision left millions of Americans hungry and in limbo."
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