Opinion | Band-Aids on a tornado: SNAP cuts are tearing through Minnesota families

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As a pediatrician at Hennepin Healthcare, I spend my days listening to families’ stories — about milestones met and struggles faced. Lately, after checkups, I can’t get the image of a tornado out of my head. Not the kind we drill for every spring, but a human-made storm fueled by policy choices that are tearing through families’ stability.

Over the last several months, there has been a disorienting whirlwind of policy changes and cuts that make it harder for more patients to survive and thrive. The storm started with tariffs and inflation driving up prices. It got worse when the shutdown forced 18,000 federal workers in the state to face “furloughs, reassignments, work without pay and threats of being fired.” And this funnel cloud touched ground and became the destructive tornado it is today with cuts to health care subsidies and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at the federal level.

As a result, many Minnesotans will see their health care premiums rise by over 50%, and even more will see their SNAP benefits reduced or completely cut.

What would happen to your monthly budget if the cost of health care and food doubled overnight? For many of the young families I serve, it means they are going to be choosing between paying rent or buying food for their children. It’s easier to go a day without food than without a roof. So that’s what most people do.

The impacts of food insecurity are immediate and long-lasting, even if the experience of insecurity is brief. Research shows the serious mental and physical harm that food insecurity causes across the life span, starting prenatally. These harms include poor health, exacerbations of chronic conditions, anxiety, depression, poor child growth, hospitalizations and more. In turn, treatment and management of these harms lead to enormous and avoidable health care and educational costs incurred to society.

SNAP is the largest tool we have to address food insecurity in this country. Without it, more than 440,000 Minnesotans, including 152,000 children and many of my patients, risk going hungry. The record-breaking government shutdown — and subsequent decisions by the federal administration to withhold emergency funding for SNAP — has meant that for the first time in the program’s long history, including during previous government shutdowns, families did not receive November benefits as scheduled. This lapse and uncertainty have caused confusion and pain for my patients who use SNAP to feed their families. And those of us on the front lines of care helplessly watch it all happen to good people and their innocent kids.

The pain of missed SNAP benefits this month is an early sign of what’s to come.

Many Band-Aids have been put on this preventable whirlwind of federal changes: Amid the November SNAP pause, Gov. Tim Walz announced $4 million of emergency funding into the state’s food shelf system. But Minnesota’s emergency food system, already overwhelmed, cannot take the place of SNAP. And philanthropy cannot come close to making up the gap, because for every meal provided by the charitable sector, SNAP provides nine.

To be clear, this need for a Band-Aid was human-made. The federal administration’s refusal to disperse November SNAP benefits and the changes to SNAP passed by Congress this year are fueling an unnatural disaster.

Food insecurity in the U.S. is felt by families in every city and every state, including here in Minnesota. While the world looks to us for innovations in farming and food production, families in every corner of our great state face extreme barriers to meeting their basic need for food. No child or family should experience hunger, especially in a state with such abundance.

State leaders and our loving business and philanthropy community must continue to find Band-Aids to mitigate the worst impacts of this crisis, now and forthcoming. But Band-Aids cannot solve the compounding affordability crisis straining my patients and thousands of families across Minnesota. Large-scale solutions, such as protecting and investing in SNAP, are necessary to address this large-scale issue.

Minnesota feeds the world. We must first feed our children.