Tony Romm

It's a pretty wide swath of the population that relies on this critical federal safety net program.

But there are some restrictions to it.

Generally speaking, to get on SNAP, you have to make or earn an amount of money near the poverty line.

Mm-hmm.

For people who qualify, the average benefit per person is about $187 a month, which is critical to helping these people buy groceries, but doesn't go all the way in meeting all of their nutrition needs.

And so that's why SNAP is part of this bigger picture of food pantries and other services that help address the issue of hunger here in the United States.

And in short, the way it works is that the federal government approves money for SNAP, and eventually that money makes its way to states and onto benefit cards that millions of Americans use.

SNAP has been in the crosshairs of Republicans for some time now.

It even predates this administration because there's a belief among Republicans that many of the people who receive those benefits don't actually need them or don't deserve them.

And so we've seen a number of instances in which Republicans have led efforts to restrict who can be part of SNAP and the kinds of benefits that people can receive.

And we saw this most recently in the context of the debate around the president's tax package.

where one of the ways Republicans offset the massive cost of that bill was to cut SNAP, to impose new work requirements on recipients, which helped save Washington some money, but also created a situation in which millions of people may lose access to benefits as a result.

And so in many ways, what we're seeing right now is that play out on a much larger scale.

Because while President Trump has been willing to move around various pots of money within the budget during the shutdown to ease some of its impacts, he's largely done that for programs that he personally cares about or those that may be essential to his political agenda.

But in others like SNAP, where Republicans have long sought to cut, this administration has not been as generous and hasn't been as willing to move money around.

And indeed, that's why this administration is only providing partial payments.

It's because a court has told them to.

In some ways, this is about political retribution.

If you rewind the clock back a few weeks, when President Trump was asked about the shutdown and how he was going to handle it, he said that he was going to go after, quote, And President Trump at the time didn't really explain what he meant.

He didn't identify anything specific.