Parts of Easthampton, an old mill town in western Massachusetts, look like relics of industrial New England — the old workers’ rowhouses, for instance. In other parts, it seems like a place in renaissance, with converted factory buildings spruced up and reinhabited by art galleries, restaurants, shops. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks on Friday and Saturday nights, especially during monthly art walk evenings. But on Monday mornings, when the downtown feels shuttered, another sort of crowd, one in search of food, not art and entertainment, gathers on a side street outside a 19th-century brick building. A sign out front identifies it as the Easthampton Community Center and Food Pantry.
The center distributes free groceries on Mondays and Wednesdays, but Monday is usually busier, because many people it serves have run out of food by then. By 9 a.m. on a Monday in June, a line of people with shopping bags extended from the sidewalk across the parking lot to the first of the food stations alongside the old building. There, clients are greeted by volunteers with friendly faces and helpful voices, offering milk and eggs, a selection of breads and pastries, frozen meat, fruit and vegetables. Inside, another team of volunteers assembles bags of canned and packaged food, some for adults, others for children.
The director of the well-organized commotion is Robin Bialecki, a white-haired woman of 71. Ms. Bialecki started as a volunteer 25 years ago and has managed the operation for the last 17. She’s the only paid employee; she works every day except Christmas and makes $32,400 a year. She had planned to retire, but has stayed on to help everyone through what now seems like the unraveling the country’s defenses against unnecessary illness and hunger.
The number of families served by the center has risen to more than 5,000 from about 1,000 before the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, Ms. Bialecki and her volunteers distributed 2.5 million pounds of food at the center and nearby places like a homeless encampment. Now, dozens of new families arrive every week, and Ms. Bialecki tries to calm panicky clients who ask her what President Trump’s domestic policy law will mean for them. Recently, one of the regulars, an older woman, grabbed Ms. Bialecki by the shoulders, shaking her, saying: “We depend on you! And you’re not going to have enough food!”
The woman had reason to worry, as do the roughly 50 million other Americans who use food bank pantries like Easthampton’s.
Mr. Trump’s law, signed on Independence Day, is the latest and largest of all the cyclical attempts to reduce the size and cost of America’s so-called safety net — to winnow the various social programs established by President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program. Among other things, the law begins to dismember the federal program once known as food stamps, now known, in an age of prolixity, as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The program distributes money for food — an average of $187 a month per person. About 42 million Americans rely on it, including 85 percent of Ms. Bialecki’s clients.
Cutting SNAP will dramatically increase the pressure on food banks. Their pantries represent a model of decency, of coherent community efforts on behalf of people in need. Their offerings aid families suffering emergencies, but although they supplement SNAP, they don’t fill nearly as many stomachs. According to Feeding America, which oversees food banks across the country, SNAP provides nine times more food than all of its 200 food banks combined. Moreover, because SNAP money goes mainly to people who live in urgent need, the funds are quickly spent, injecting economic activity into local economies. Each $1 in SNAP benefits adds as much as $1.50 to the country’s gross domestic product, a helpful buffer during economic downturns and recessions.
Political conservatives have long disliked SNAP. Many of them argue that it’s poorly run and discourages Americans from providing for themselves. And yet the need for SNAP is obvious, dire and nationwide. There is no county in America, no matter how wealthy, where the only hungry people are those on diets. The most recent data available estimates that 47.4 million Americans suffered from the threat of hunger at some point in 2023. Among these people, 13.8 million were children. Almost 7 million households experienced what’s referred to as very low food security, meaning they sometimes had to go without a meal, or even a day’s worth of meals, and often didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. Disproportionate percentages of Black and Latino Americans shared in the misery.
The problem isn’t new, but the domestic policy act will make things worse. According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than two million people will lose their SNAP benefits. At the same time, the law’s changes to Medicaid will save about $1 trillion over 10 years, partly through already complicated work requirements, which are known to stymie enrollments — an old party trick. The law will add 11.8 million Americans to the 26 million who currently lack health insurance.
In all, the new domestic policy law will take about $1.2 trillion from social programs over the next decade. Its supporters like to say that their reforms will reduce fraud and waste and save social programs for the future, but part of the intent is clearly to save money for other purposes — such as adding more than $100 billion to help squads of men in masks cleanse America of undocumented immigrants. The Republican Congress also chose to extend the large tax cuts of Mr. Trump’s first term. Mainly for that reason, the law will end up adding about $3.4 trillion to the country’s huge deficit over 10 years, according to the C.B.O.’s estimate.
There is an array of opinion about government safety nets. What should they encompass? Should they even exist? Watching people wait in the food line in Easthampton, I found myself thinking that if our current safety net were destroyed, this landscape would turn truly dystopian.
Almost no one in Monday’s line looked destitute. For many, if not all, standing in line for food is a humiliating act. Most of the older women were carefully dressed, as if to ward off disgrace. Indeed, most of the people in line were better groomed than the volunteers in their work clothes. According to online trolls and even some locals, many of these people are illegal immigrants taking food from Americans. Not that it would matter to Ms. Bialecki. (“Hunger is hunger,” she says.) But most of the center’s clients are American citizens: mostly white, including some Latino, and some Black. One client, unemployed because his company moved out of state, still blamed himself. “I can’t feed my kids,” he said to Ms. Bialecki. “I’m a failure.”
It is easy to make wrong assumptions about the center’s clients. A bystander once watched a woman drive off from the center with a load of groceries in an expensive late-model S.U.V., and told Ms. Bialecki that he disapproved. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she replied, “but that woman’s husband just left her with four kids and no money.” Anyway, she added, that woman’s car would soon be repossessed.
Ms. Bialecki knows many stories of that kind, stories about the breadth of vulnerability in America. She knows just about every client in the lines. Some come with canes, some in wheelchairs. Some suffer from mental illness or drug and alcohol addiction. Many have jobs, but not ones that pay enough to cover the rising costs of just about everything essential, especially housing, transportation, food and child care for two-income households and single working mothers. Others in the line have lost jobs, or lost wages because a child got sick or their car broke down. Many are seniors who worked their whole lives, but Social Security simply won’t stretch far enough, especially for the older widow whose son, daughter and six grandchildren recently moved in. Some people lost their jobs during the pandemic and are finally working again, but are earning less than before.
To many Republicans, the domestic policy law — which Mr. Trump calls the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (such a triumphal phrase, like a schoolyard boast), represents a victory in a long-running attempt at “entitlement reform,” at repairing, if not eliminating, the programs that comprise the nation’s social safety net. But this so-called reform does nothing to lessen the hardships of the people those programs were created to assuage.
There is a great deal of suffering in the United States. The Census Bureau estimates that 36 million Americans live under the absurdly low level of income known as the poverty line. And according to a study from 2019, about 30 million Americans who work at full-time jobs don’t make what’s called a living wage, a salary that provides for basic needs and something more for life’s inevitable contingencies. A rich country with such a harsh economy needs to supply some palliatives, at the very least.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration cut aid to food banks, putting many of them under extreme strain. But the cuts to SNAP in the domestic policy bill — nearly $200 billion over 10 years — pose an even greater threat.
And there’s another twist: For 60 years, the federal government has fully funded SNAP benefits, while states have managed the difficult task of policing the program’s complex rules. Many have done so imperfectly. Come 2028, those states with an error rate of 6 percent or more will have to pay between 5 to 15 percent of the cost of their own SNAP program. They can also reduce or even cancel it. Perhaps this is the aim of the “big, beautiful bill’s” mind-numbing numbers and bureaucratic mumbo jumbo: to get states to kill SNAP and take the heat.
The work rules, new and bolstered, also serve an ideological purpose. They reassert the age-old distinction between the poor and the “deserving” poor. I prefer the alternative suggested by Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. He declares that if everyone got what they deserved, no one would escape whipping. Better, he says, to treat others according to our “own honor and dignity.” Then the less a person deserves, the more credit to us.
Robin Bialecki works hard to mitigate the suffering around her. She’s made efforts for those with special dietary needs. The center’s basement is filled with donated clothes and the attic with toys for the several hundred children of the neediest clients. Each child receives a holiday present and a birthday meal of their choice, along with a cake mix and their favorite frosting. For some residents of western Massachusetts, her efforts are most of what remains of any safety net.
Ms. Bialecki’s job is becoming more difficult. On distribution days, the center usually closes from noon until 3 p.m., but on Monday, July 1, just a few days before the “big, beautiful bill” became law, the line was so long and unrelenting that Ms. Bialecki and her volunteers served up groceries for 10 hours straight. More than 450 families came through that day. It was as if they were stocking up on food for a hurricane.
A few days later, in a cheery voice, Ms. Bialecki said that what she’d been telling herself for months might finally be true: Maybe now things really couldn’t get worse. “Every day I am in awe of the fact we can’t get this madness stopped,” she said.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who rallied votes for the bill, once said: “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” Perhaps he should reread the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. There, Jesus warns his disciples of what he will tell the world’s ungenerous people, on Judgment Day: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”
The damned ask, when had they failed to do all that for him? Jesus replies, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me.’”
Tracy Kidder has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, as well as the Bronze Star for his military service in the Vietnam War. Among other books of nonfiction, he is the author of “The Soul of a New Machine,” “Mountains Beyond Mountains” and, most recently, “Rough Sleepers.”
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