Everything changed for Lisa Oglesbee in January, after a spinal condition left her husband in a wheelchair. Without his physical strength, she could not manage the job they had shared, cleaning commercial pizza ovens. And she could not look for another one yet, not when he needed her help to move around the house.
When the government shut down on Oct. 1, she started to worry that his application for disability benefits would take even longer than they had been warned. Then, she began to hear that their federal food benefits — around $350 a month, she said — would not come in November.
“I think they don’t care — it’s not them, it’s not their family,” Ms. Oglesbee, 42, said of lawmakers in Washington, holding back tears as she waited in line this week at a food pantry in Winnsboro, a small town in northeast Louisiana. “I hope I’m wrong about that.”
With nearly unanimous support from the Legislature, Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, said on Wednesday that the state would use about $147 million in emergency funds to keep food assistance flowing temporarily for older residents, those who are disabled and households with children, starting Saturday.
It was not immediately clear whether or when the state’s intervention might be available to help other recipients. Mr. Landry said that thousands of “able-bodied” adults without young children would most likely need to turn to charity or, if unemployed, find jobs.
The Trump administration has said it would not disburse benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in November because of the shutdown, reversing its own policy that had allowed some funding to be reprogrammed during emergencies.
“Without that, I don’t know how we would eat,” Ms. Oglesbee said of SNAP benefits. She added, “I didn’t realize how hard it was to get help, and I guess apparently, to keep help.”
The threat of food assistance disappearing for 42 million Americans, even for a month, has exposed how threadbare the nation’s social safety net has become at a time of persistent inflation and deep federal funding cuts. Filling the void in the coming weeks will strain many food banks and other organizations that were already stretched thin.
Louisiana has one of the nation’s highest proportions of residents receiving SNAP, about one in five.
The crisis could be particularly acute in northeastern Louisiana. Nonprofit and social services groups say that poverty and hunger rates there are often higher than those in the rest of the state. Calls to 211, which connects people with social services, spiked by 40 percent this week in connection with the shutdown, according to the United Way of Northeast Louisiana.
“You have a perfect storm happening even in the absence of this shutdown,” said Jan Moller, the executive director of Invest in Louisiana, a policy research group. “When you add the uncertainty now created by the shutdown, you have a recipe for a real disaster.”
About a dozen parishes, or counties, make up northeastern Louisiana, bounded by the Delta regions of Arkansas and Mississippi. Small, mostly rural communities are spread out over miles of farmland. Glimpses of rusting farm equipment, boarded-up windows and for-sale signs hint at how high prices and economic disinvestment have left many struggling to afford basic necessities.
Ashley Armstrong, a farmer in Bastrop, La., has been buffeted in recent months by rising equipment costs and canceled contracts stemming from federal cuts. But she has continued to offer a sizable discount to SNAP recipients who buy her produce, and to donate leftover produce to her church.
Of federal lawmakers, she said, “I feel like they’re not really taking into consideration the everyday American and what these policy changes entail for their lives.”
At the Food Bank of Northeast Louisiana, leaders have begun to stagger distribution in anticipation of more need, and are competing to buy food to supplement donations. One pantry that works with the food bank took in nearly two dozen new applications for help in one morning this week.
“We cannot fill the full gap and we know that,” said Jean Toth, the food bank’s executive director. Tears welling in her eyes, she added, “It’s emotional.”
Inflated prices mean that for some families, the monthly SNAP allocation — about $356 per household, on average — is barely enough to cover staples like bread, milk and canned goods. When word of the looming lapse began to spread last week via text messages and social media, many families had already used up their October benefits.
“I run short at the end of the month,” said Jennifer Winn, 38, who estimated she gets around $1,100 in monthly SNAP benefits for herself and five children in Monroe and had gone without meals to ensure the children could eat.
In the coming weeks, she predicted, “It’s going be more chaotic because people are tired, they’re stressed and they’re crying out for help. And they don’t know where to get it from.”
Even if families get their November benefits through state funding, it is unclear what would happen should the shutdown continue into December. Complicating matters, the shutdown may require some staff members in local offices that administer SNAP benefits to be furloughed in the coming days.
Mr. Landry, speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, blamed the shutdown on Democratic leaders in Congress, who have resisted agreeing to end it until Republicans agree to extend expiring health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans.
But in northeast Louisiana this week, most people interviewed pointed to what they saw as a broken system in Washington that felt deeply removed from their own day-to-day realities.
“I feel that the government is making the poor people poorer, which I think is unfair,” said Demi Dyer, 33, who just moved with her family from Missouri to West Monroe, La.. She said she was worried that her SNAP application would take longer to be processed in her new state because of the shutdown. “We’re all human, we all struggle, we have all gone through stuff like this.”
Some residents expressed frustration with President Trump’s unfulfilled promise to lower prices, as well as with assumptions that some of those dependent on food stamps had not been trying to find work.
“I may have even been guilty in the past of the same, maybe, of looking at people — ‘Well, they need to get a job,’” Ms. Oglesbee said. “And some people do have jobs and still just don’t make enough money around.”
Some residents of the region said they felt disillusioned to the point of not voting, because it didn’t seem to matter.
“We need more people that care about folks,” said Dusty Ward, 39, who had been carefully rationing a month’s worth of food with his wife, Stephanie.
At Grace Place Ministries in Monroe, La., where dozens of people had lined up on a blustery cold morning for a hot meal, some grimly wondered whether the loss of a month’s benefits would drive the desperate to steal to stay fed. Prayer, for some, seemed like the only answer.
Others wondered if the lapse was a sign of the end times foretold in the Bible, or that all hope in government should be abandoned. Individuals and community groups that had stepped up before — after natural disasters, and during the pandemic — were preparing to do so again.
“Maybe our country’s just hitting rock bottom in a way, and now it’s going to shift responsibility,” said Misty Loe, the executive director of Grace Place, comparing it to those who reach their lowest moment before improving. She was bustling around, slipping a box of cupcakes to toddlers who had come with their mother and overseeing new volunteers as they served hot dogs, fruit, salad and chips.
“Ultimately, I do hope that the government goes back to stepping in where they need to — step in, step in and help feed,” Ms. Loe said. “Unless we really are going to reorganize how we do everything.”
Referring to those who need the help, she added: “But I would hope that we would give them a lot more warning than this.”
Tony Romm and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
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