DATE:
November 4, 2025
11
TO:
Board of Supervisors
SUBJECT
Title
CALLING ON THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO KEEP SAN DIEGANS FROM EXPERIENCING A HUNGER CRISIS AND WAIVE BOARD POLICY A-72 (DISTRICTS: ALL)
Body
OVERVIEW
Across the country, more than 42 million Americans, one in eight people, rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to afford groceries each month. These are working parents, seniors, and children who depend on modest food benefits to make ends meet. Now, because of Washington's dysfunction, they are being told to go hungry.
The ongoing federal shutdown has halted new appropriations for SNAP, threatening to suspend benefits beginning November 1, 2025. Without immediate intervention by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), millions of families nationwide will lose access to the food assistance they rely on to survive. This crisis is entirely preventable. The USDA has confirmed it holds roughly $6 billion in contingency reserves, funds explicitly designed to sustain SNAP when federal operations are disrupted. Yet the agency has refused to release them. This is not a question of logistics or budgetary caution, it is a question of priorities. Inaction will result in the Trump Administration taking food off the tables of working families.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities makes clear that the federal government has not only the tools but the legal responsibility to continue providing SNAP benefits during a shutdown. The Administration could use its transfer authority, the same mechanism it already used to deliver emergency funds to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, to supplement existing contingency reserves, which alone are insufficient to cover full benefitsi. The USDA has both the means and the mandate to act. Each day of delay is a choice, and every hour of inaction pushes millions of families closer to hunger.
The impact in San Diego County will be immediate and devastating. Nearly 400,000 r...
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