LANSING — At 1 a.m. Thursday morning, Symone Wilkes, a Detroit resident and mother of two young sons, received a loud alert on her phone. It was her MI Bridges app — the site through which state benefits are provided — alerting her that her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as SNAP, would not be sent to her in November due to the federal government shutdown.

“What went through my head at that moment is like, ‘Wow, they’re really gonna do this to families that’s trying to feed their children,'” she said. “It just made me just go into a panic. I actually had an anxiety attack.”

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services formally announced later Thursday morning that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has instructed them to cease payment of SNAP benefits for the month of November due to the ongoing federal shutdown.

Now, concerns like Wilkes’s are front of mind for many of the approximately 1.4 million people in Michigan receiving SNAP benefits, about 43% of whom are families with children and 36% with members of the family who are older adults or disabled.

Symone Wilkes, a Detroit resident and mother of two young sons, 3-year-old Dylan and 8-year-old Dyson, is worried how she’ll feed her two young sons if her SNAP benefits are paused due to the ongoing government shutdown. | Photos from Symone Wilkes

By definition, SNAP benefits do not allow recipients to save up for emergencies such as this.

“Benefits really aren’t all that much money,” Elinor Jordan, a public benefits law attorney at the Michigan Poverty Law Project, explained. “Every little bit is deducted. The families cannot have any cushion or their SNAP benefits would be reduced based on that cushion.”

So, as Wilkes said, “What do they expect us to do?”

State Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) said that the change is “going to trigger all the folks at the state and the local governments, and then community action agencies and nonprofits, to start to scramble for what they can do to try to make sure that folks who are depending upon SNAP for food aren’t going without, aren’t literally starving.”

As Irwin suggested, some might expect food banks and food pantries to fill in these gaps. However, Phil Knight, executive director of the Food Bank Council of Michigan, explained that food banks are meant to “supplement, not substitute” food assistance.

“Asking charity to be the safety net to the government safety net? It’s just back-ass-ward to me,” he said.

Jordan experienced this firsthand when her family was volunteering at their church’s food bank over the weekend — before the SNAP pause was officially announced, but as it was becoming more likely that it might happen as the federal government shutdown stretched on.

With about 90 families still in line, she said, the food bank ran out of food.

Volunteers work at the Greater Lansing Food Bank’s warehouse in Bath, Mich. | Photo by Anna Gustafson

Knight noted that the changes to SNAP will not change the purpose of Michigan’s food banks, and that they will continue to do everything that they are able.

“The mission of the Feeding America food banks here in Michigan doesn’t change,” he said. “We’re always going to come alongside our neighbors, because we’re convinced they are people worthy of investment, not necessarily a problem to be solved.”

“But I’m just trying to temper expectations, that when you pull $15 billion a month out of a national economy and expect charity to step in and nobody miss a beat,” Knight added. “That’s unrealistic.”

Many advocates were highly critical of President Donald Trump and his administration for making the decision to cut funding.

“As this rogue administration prioritizes tax breaks for billionaires, they’re simultaneously stripping away basic healthcare, food, and social services from those who need them most,” wrote Danielle Atkinson, the executive director of Detroit-based Mothering Justice, in a statement.

“This administration is targeting the single parents already stretching every dollar, the seniors choosing between groceries and medicine, and the workers earning too little to make ends meet in an economy stacked against them,” Atkinson continued. “Now, because of political games being played in Congress, they’re being told to wait. Lawmakers working in support of pausing SNAP will be responsible when our kids go hungry.”

And Rep. Sharon MacDonell (D-Troy) wrote to the Michigan Advance, “With President Trump claiming that the federal shutdown gives him authority to unilaterally cancel ‘Democrat programs’, I have little doubt that his administration is pausing SNAP payments because it wants to, not because it has to.”

Others called on him to activate contingency measures — including over $5 billion in funding that was appropriated in 2024 and 2025 to act as a reserve fund for SNAP specifically, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The group estimated a month of full benefits to cost around $8 billion.

“This pause and benefits is entirely avoidable. The federal government has both the authority and the tools to keep SNAP funds flowing,” Julie Cassidy, a senior policy analyst at the Michigan League for Public Policy, said.

“We shouldn’t be making this false choice between funding food assistance and making sure people can still afford their health insurance premiums,” she added, with Affordable Care Act credits being a major piece of Congressional Democrats’ resistance to the budget.

Partisan finger-pointing offers little comfort

As the shutdown stretches on, elected officials in both parties pointed fingers at the other side of the aisle to blame for the lack of a federal budget.

State Sen. Jonathan Lindsey (R-Coldwater) wrote to the Advance, “Of course I can’t speak to why Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have shut down the government.”

Lindsey also added concerns about SNAP funding more broadly — concerns that are shared by high-level Trump officials, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on what food is eligible to be purchased with SNAP.

“It looks like the silver lining here is that the billions of SNAP dollars, which all come from taxpayers, will not be spent subsidizing junk food for a period of time,” Lindsey wrote.

And after posting resources, including lists of food banks, on her Facebook page, state Rep. Angela Rigas (R-Alto) added a line — in response to a commenter’s suggestion — reading, “Tell Senator Elissa Slotkin and Senator Gary Peters to vote to reopen the federal government!”

Meanwhile, Rep. Natalie Price (D-Berkley) said she didn’t accept the contention that Democrats were responsible for the current situation.

“This is fully the Republicans making the shutdown, and they need to stop trying to place blame. I think Michiganders are smarter than to buy that,” Price said.

Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress as well as control the White House.

“Hopefully, the Republicans who run Congress and who are sitting in the office of the President get a budget done and get these funds out to the people who need them,” Irwin added.

Lawmakers working in support of pausing SNAP will be responsible when our kids go hungry.

– Danielle Atkinson, executive director of Detroit-based Mothering Justice

But the long-term effects of the shutdown and the resulting SNAP pause are more than political. By law, Cassidy explained, all the benefits not received at this time should come to SNAP recipients once a budget is signed and SNAP funding is flowing again.

Jennifer Garner, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan, explained how any lapse in SNAP funding, especially if it becomes extended, can have lasting economic and health impacts..

“When we are in times of uncertainty like this, when we don’t know what our food resources are going to look like in the weeks and months to come, it is not unreasonable to hedge your bets by focusing on shelf-stable foods that will last a long time,” she said. “And so that’s where compromises nutritionally can come into play.”

Without SNAP funding, recipients will have less capacity to purchase fresh foods — including through programs like the Double Up Food Bucks program, which allows SNAP dollars to be spent in places like farmer’s markets.

“We’ve been working hard over the past decade to create these bridges between SNAP participants and direct to consumer markets, and that benefits local farmers, and that specifically benefits farmers who are selling produce, growing and selling produce, which is important to support that segment of our agricultural economy,” Garner explained. “When SNAP is paused, folks can’t engage in models like that.”

That hurts farmers, as well as local grocery stores and local retailers.

“For every dollar spent in food assistance, there’s $1.80 generated in economic activity, and a lot of that goes to our local communities, our Michigan businesses,” Price said. “This is an irresponsible, harmful decision that goes against the things that the administration claims they’re doing with these cuts.”

But for Knight at the Food Bank Council, despite any difficulties ahead, he remains encouraged by the people visiting his food bank.

“They’re resilient, they’re smart, they’re dealing with a lot of things in life with less resources than most of us,” he said. “To be very candid, they have my admiration.”