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Scarlett Ahmed has started counting the number of people sleeping outside the Queens Career Center in New York City when she arrives at work in the morning.
“It was already bad,” she said. “But this? This will just add to it.”
Ahmed, a career center supervisor and an executive board member of New York’s Public Employees Federation, is referring to the devastating disruption in benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The break in benefits—resulting from the longest federal government shutdown on record—has a seismic impact, reaching even programs and departments that don’t receive SNAP funding, like Ahmed’s career center.
“People come in hungry,” Ahmed says. “We’re the ones who have to tell them where to access those benefits. Now we have to figure out if there is anywhere left to go.”
It is also personal for Ahmed. She remembers growing up with food stamps, and her mother, who lives in Florida, currently depends on SNAP and community-based organizations like Meals on Wheels to fill her pantry. Chaos and uncertainty surround federal anti-hunger programs as SNAP benefits yo-yo between conflicting start-and-stop court orders, the Trump administration is telling states not to pay full November food stamp benefits, and Meals on Wheels’ federal funding is put on hold.
“SNAP has been a godsend,” Ahmed says. “I don’t have to worry that my mother doesn’t have what she needs. But next month? Who knows? Everything could be on my credit card.”
A bridge to stability
Vivian Falto, a longtime employee at the New York State Education Department and a PEF executive board member, remembers SNAP as a life preserver during a storm.
“When I came to New York to teach in 1995, the Education Department gave me a grant to get my master’s degree, but I wasn’t paid for months. I was working every day and paying subway fare, but there was no paycheck,” she says. “I finally said, I can’t go all day without lunch and then get home at 11 p.m.”
SNAP bridged the gap so she could eat and buy her first pair of winter boots.
“They hurt my feet so badly,” says the native Puerto Rican. “But I was warm.”
That’s what SNAP is, she says. It’s a stabilizer when times are turbulent, and she has seen it time and time again with students whose families live in shelters to escape violence.
“People think SNAP is a way of life. It isn’t—it’s what brings you back to balance in a moment of need. In a domestic violence shelter, SNAP gives women a little sense of stability because they can feed the baby. SNAP isn’t permanent. It’s a bridge,” she says.
Public employees under pressure: ‘Our government has to do its job’
Ahmed says she can see the emotional toll on public workers mounting.
“When people come to the career center, they are already struggling. Now they see the government failing them, and it’s common to take it out on the frontline staff,” she says. “That’s a health-and-safety issue for my coworkers.”
Ahmed has considered organizing a food drive or volunteering with community organizations, but those thoughts leave her with her own frustration.
“It shouldn’t depend on whether I can volunteer more,” she says. “Our government has to do its job.”
[By Melanie Boyer]