SNAP Stops

Plus: Predictions for Mamdani's mayorship, ICE leadership changes, and more...

Government shutdown collateral damage: Unless Congress strikes a deal to both reopen and fund the federal government, certain benefits will cease to be doled out starting this Saturday, November 1.

Among them: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, or SNAP, the food stamps used by some 42 million Americans annually, with an average benefit of $187 per recipient per month.

The administration says it will not devote emergency funds to keeping benefits going. A disclaimer at the top of SNAP's website reads rather candidly: "Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance."

I was just googling to find out what the eligibility is for SNAP and discovered @USDA is not fucking around. pic.twitter.com/eTTbTUWLz3

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) October 27, 2025

A memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that contingency funds "are only available to supplement regular monthly benefits when amounts have been appropriated for, but are insufficient to cover, benefits."

"The contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program, which provides food purchasing benefits for individuals in disaster areas, including natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice," adds the memo. "For example, Hurricane Melissa is currently swirling in the Caribbean and could reach Florida. Having funds readily available allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to mobilize quickly in the days and weeks following a disaster."

And transferring funds from elsewhere "would pull away funding for school meals and infant formula" like "the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, and Child and Adult Care Feeding Program," as well as "the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)." It's not even clear to WIC recipients how long those benefits will continue.

"For nearly six million households that rely on a program that helps low-income Americans pay for energy costs, it means facing expensive heating bills and the possibility of utility shut-offs in the winter," reports The New York Times. Ditto for the roughly 65,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs nationally.

Different strains of "welfare queen" discourse have predictably circulated as a result of the SNAP cuts. And there are some extremely bad and entitled takes circulating on TikTok, including welfare recipients basically saying they'll now steal instead of paying for food. But the discourse should not distract from the plights of people who really will be harmed by a reduction in benefits, who are worried about how to feed their families, who feel spurned by a Trump administration that finds funding by any means necessary (including possibly illegal ones) to pay active-duty military but not welfare recipients.

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Scenes from New York: Predictions for the future have now entered "how bad will it be, really" territory:

I think Mamdani will go further than BdB — particularly on policing.

My predictions:

•The gang database does not survive his mayoralty;
•We go at least 6mos with the jails on Rikers closed and fewer than three of the borough-based facilities completed (cutting the jail…

— Rafael A. Mangual (@Rafa_Mangual) October 27, 2025

And this right here is a rather good analysis of "Mamdani as class avatar" for a very specific class of people:

(I don't blame anyone for not reading all this, but) yeah, I think Mamdani actually is coherent as a class-politics avatar of the sort of downwardly mobile (creative) elites you see struggling to hang on in the very expensive western half of Brooklyn who work in industries that… https://t.co/VwE5aYUO5H

— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) October 27, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• "President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said the United States would be giving her country 'a few more weeks' to make trade policy changes to avoid the 30 percent tariffs that were set to go into effect on Saturday," reports The New York Times. "The White House has asked Mexico to remove what it calls 54 barriers to trade that aren't tariffs, such as disputes about intellectual property."
• "Milei's triumph laid bare the weakness of the Peronist opposition," writes Juan Pablo Spinetto for Bloomberg. "Even after adding its various factions, Peronism trailed La Libertad Avanza by nine percentage points in the Lower House race—and by 14 points in the Senate. Its once-dominant grip on the upper chamber, held for 42 years through 2021, will weaken considerably when the new Congress is sworn in December. Fuerza Patria, the main Peronist affiliation, even lost narrowly in Buenos Aires province—just weeks after a landslide win that had seemed to put Milei's government on the ropes." This result "underscores the urgent need for Peronism to reform—to accept a minimum of market rules and economic rationality—or risk further irrelevance."
• "New York Gov. Kathy Hochul boasted this month that the state is sending tax rebate checks between $150 and $400 to low- and middle-income taxpayers. What she didn't tell you is that the state is automatically raising income taxes every year through inflation bracket creep," reports The Wall Street Journal. 
• "The Trump administration has begun to purge Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in offices in five major U.S. cities and fill some of those top posts with senior Border Patrol agents who will take over interior immigration enforcement in those regions, according to five sources familiar with the plans," reports The Washington Examiner.
• New levels of bitchiness heretofore unseen in American politics:

Maybe if you channeled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn't have come in fifth. https://t.co/gkiEyZ8JGX

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 27, 2025

Good thread from journalist Megan McArdle on why Ocasio-Cortez doesn't know what she's talking about:

More broadly, this is why Democrats keep losing on this issue: they make sick dunks for each other without thinking about how they come off to normies. People with kids in serious sports know, as AOC apparently doesn't, just how much commitment it takes.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) October 27, 2025