Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Tuesday urging his colleagues to support a bill he is sponsoring that would fund the SNAP program through the shutdown.
The Department of Agriculture said federal food aid will not go out on Nov. 1.
“Saturday will be another grim milestone,” Hawley wrote. “That is the day about 42 million Americans will lose federal food assistance.”
Hawley’s legislation is known as the Keep SNAP Funded Act and would provide “such sums as are necessary to provide uninterrupted benefits” under SNAP.
Hawley said the shutdown “has already touched countless lives, and not for the better,” highlighting the toll of the funding lapse on key services and how it has forced thousands of federal employees to work without pay.
“But letting federal food assistance lapse would introduce an entirely new stage of suffering,” he said.
Hawley called passing a “clean” funding measure to reopen the government the “best solution.” But if the stalemate continues, he said “Congress at the very least needs to pass my bill to ensure food assistance continues uninterrupted.”
The Missouri Republican pointed to what he’s heard from his constituents, including a retired teacher who wrote to him about her grandchildren who rely on the food aid to buy groceries, and a woman who said she and her disabled husband likewise need the assistance.
“There is no reason any of these residents of my state — or any other American who qualifies for food assistance — should go hungry,” Hawley said. “We can afford to provide the help.”
Hawley bemoaned the politics of the shutdown, saying “Republicans blame Democrats, and Democrats blame Republicans, but all these people have food to spare.”
“But this isn’t about politics at all in the end. It’s about who we are,” he said. “The character of a nation is revealed not in quarterly profits or C.E.O. pay, but in how it treats the small and forgotten — the last, the least, the lost.”
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