Of Course The Children Are Hungry

Speaker Johnson and the GOP's Appetite for Cruelty is on Full Display in Every American School Cafeteria

I found myself walking along the bike path in the Lehigh Valley, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what was coming. We all knew it was coming, really. The moment the Republicans took SNAP. It’s what they seem to do now—find the most vulnerable, the ones with the least power to fight back, and make them pay. Children. The elderly. The disabled. The people who can’t mount lobbying campaigns or write big checks to political action committees. It’s gutless, and it’s cruel, and it’s exactly who they are.

This is America in 2025, and the Republican Party—that grand old institution that once at least pretended to care about governing—has decided that its latest crusade involves threatening to eliminate SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans. Not because the country is broke, mind you. We’ve got plenty of money for tax cuts that predominantly benefit billionaires, plenty for defense contractors posting record profits, plenty for corporate subsidies that amount to billions. But food for hungry children? For elderly people who built this country? For disabled Americans who can’t work? Suddenly, the coffers are bare and we must all tighten our belts. Well, some of us must tighten our belts. Others are buying their fourth vacation home.

Let’s be brutally clear about what we’re discussing here. Forty percent of SNAP recipients are children. Children. Not lazy welfare queens from Reagan’s racist fantasies, not able-bodied men refusing to work, but actual children who have committed no sin beyond being born into families where wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living. These kids didn’t ask to be political pawns. They didn’t ask to become collateral damage in Mike Johnson’s latest performance of fiscal rectitude. They just need to eat so they can, you know, grow. Learn. Survive. Apparently, in the world’s wealthiest nation, this is now too much to ask.

Millions of seniors on fixed incomes who spent their lives working, paying taxes, playing by the rules, now reduced to calculating whether they can afford both their blood pressure medication and a week’s worth of groceries. These are people who raised families, who built communities, who voted and volunteered and did everything their country asked of them. And now, in their seventies and eighties, when they should have some measure of security and dignity, they’re terrified about whether they’ll be able to eat next month. The Republicans look at these people—these grandmothers and grandfathers who gave decades of their lives to this country—and see line items to be eliminated. It’s sociopathic.

The working families on SNAP are perhaps the cruelest joke of all. The majority of SNAP households include someone who works. They’re the people we relied on during the pandemic—the grocery store clerks, the home health aides, the day care workers, the delivery drivers. We called them essential. We applauded them. And then we went right back to paying them wages so depressed that full-time employment doesn’t cover rent and food. Now the same Republicans who fought against raising the minimum wage, who gutted union protections, who enabled the gig economy’s race to the bottom, want to eliminate the program that keeps these workers’ children from going hungry. The message is clear: your labor is essential, but your life is disposable.

What must it look like from the outside, this American spectacle? I travel extensively, and I can tell you exactly what it looks like—it looks like madness. In Portugal, people would ask me with genuine confusion how America functions with their guns, greed and Trump. I shook it off, but now find myself wondering the same. Of course they have their own political dysfunction, certainly, their own struggles with austerity and populism. But the idea of simply cutting off food assistance to millions, including vast numbers of children, while maintaining an $800 billion defense budget and tolerating a tax code that lets billionaires pay lower rates than their secretaries? It’s incomprehensible to most. They see a society that has lost any coherent sense of priorities, that values ideology over human life, that treats the suffering of children as an acceptable price to pay for... what, exactly? Fiscal discipline that never seems to apply to corporate subsidies or military spending? Proving some point about personal responsibility to people working two jobs who still can’t afford groceries?

The view from abroad is damning. America, the colossus that preaches democracy and human rights, that positions itself as the global beacon of freedom and opportunity, can’t manage to feed its own children. The contrast is searing. We have tech billionaires building rockets to Mars while kids go to bed hungry. We have celebrities spending millions on birthday parties while elderly Americans ration their meals. We have politicians flying first class to conferences where they’ll discuss the importance of family values while voting to eliminate the program that helps families feed their children. The hypocrisy isn’t just stunning—it’s obscene.

And then there’s Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, a man who has built his entire political identity on evangelical Christianity and “pro-life” values. Let’s sit with that for a moment, shall we? Johnson, who claims to follow Jesus Christ—a man who literally multiplied loaves and fishes to feed the hungry, who commanded his followers to care for “the least of these,” who said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven—is perfectly comfortable watching millions of Americans face hunger. The disconnect would be remarkable if it weren’t so utterly predictable. On display it conjures something else altogether. Something beyond vile and contrived.

The evangelical leadership that has captured the Republican Party loves to trumpet its pro-life credentials. They mobilize millions to protect the unborn. They pass draconian abortion restrictions in state after state. They speak endlessly about the sanctity of life, the vulnerability of children, the moral obligation to protect the innocent. And then, when it comes to actually feeding living, breathing, already-born children, they go silent. Or worse, they actively support cutting the programs that keep those children alive. It’s not hypocrisy—that word is too gentle.

Jesus fed people. He healed the sick. He embraced the outcasts and the poor. He reserved his harshest words not for sinners but for religious hypocrites who laid heavy burdens on others while refusing to lift a finger to help them. If Christ returned tomorrow to a Republican congressional caucus meeting, he’d be throwing tables before the opening prayer was finished. But Johnson and his ilk have fashioned a Christianity that Jesus himself wouldn’t recognize—one where the measure of righteousness is sexual purity and fetal protection, not care for the hungry or shelter for the homeless. It’s Christianity as cudgel, as tribal marker, as political weapon, utterly divorced from anything resembling actual Christian ethics.

The cruelty here isn’t incidental. Even if Republicans ultimately preserve SNAP benefits, even if this turns out to be political theater that ends with the status quo, the damage is done. For weeks or months, millions of Americans have lived in agonizing uncertainty. Parents have lain awake doing impossible math, trying to figure out how to feed their children if benefits disappear. Elderly people have felt the terror of potential destitution. Disabled Americans have contemplated what happens when survival itself becomes impossible to afford. This anxiety, this fear, this psychological torture—it has real consequences. Stress kills. It exacerbates chronic conditions, triggers mental health crises, creates trauma that lingers long after the immediate threat passes.

And Republicans know this. They’re not stupid; they’re strategic. The anxiety is a feature, it is the ask. It’s a demonstration of power, a reminder that the vulnerable exist only at the sufferance of those who control the government. It’s hostage-taking with human lives—leverage to extract political concessions, to force compromise on unrelated issues, to prove that they can inflict suffering at will. The spectacle of millions of Americans terrified about how they’ll eat next month serves Republican purposes perfectly. It keeps people desperate, afraid, too busy surviving to organize or resist. It’s governance as sadism, and the Trump-era Republican Party has embraced it with enthusiasm that would shock Machiavelli.

I keep thinking about what this moment reveals about who we’ve become. Not who we claim to be—we’re endlessly eloquent about American exceptionalism and national greatness—but who we actually are. We’re a country with more than 700 billionaires, where CEOs make 400 times what their workers earn, where pharmaceutical companies post record profits while insulin remains unaffordable, where private equity firms buy up hospitals and nursing homes and squeeze them for maximum returns while care deteriorates. And in this country, in this moment, one of our two major political parties has decided that feeding hungry children is optional.

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The social contract is in tatters. The unspoken agreement that undergirds civilization—that we’re all in this together, that society exists in part to protect the most vulnerable, that a rich nation has obligations to its poorest citizens—has been repudiated by the Republican Party with remarkable explicitness. They’re not even bothering to dress it up anymore in talk of temporary hardship or teaching people to fish. They’re just openly comfortable with hunger, with suffering, with children going to bed with empty stomachs while lecturing everyone about personal responsibility and traditional values. The mask hasn’t slipped—they’ve taken it off entirely and dared anyone to do something about it.

What’s most chilling is how normalized this has become. We’ve had one crisis after another, each revealing new depths of Republican callousness—family separation at the border, COVID-19 relief fought at every turn, voting rights gutted, healthcare access restricted, environmental protections eliminated. The outrages pile up so quickly that we’ve lost the capacity for sustained horror. SNAP cuts are just the latest atrocity in an endless parade of cruelty, and part of the Republican strategy is exhausting our capacity for outrage. If everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. If suffering is constant, it becomes background noise.

But this particular cruelty lands differently because it’s so fundamental, so elemental. We’re not talking about complex policy trade-offs or competing economic theories. We’re talking about food. About eating. About whether a wealthy society will allow its children, its elderly, its disabled, and its working poor to go hungry. It’s the most basic test of civilization, and we’re failing it spectacularly while the party of “family values” cheers.

The damage to America’s standing in the world is real and lasting. Soft power—the ability to lead through moral authority rather than military might—has been hemorrhaging since 2016, but this accelerates the decline precipitously. How do we lecture other countries about human rights when we’re starving our own children? How do we promote democracy abroad when our own democracy produces outcomes this monstrous? How do we position ourselves as a model for the world when the world watches in horror as America debates whether elderly people deserve to eat?

China doesn’t need to lift a finger to undermine American influence globally. We’re doing it ourselves, providing infinite ammunition to anyone who wants to argue that American-style capitalism and democracy lead to barbarism. Every hungry child, every terrified senior, every disabled person wondering how they’ll survive—each is a data point in the case against taking America seriously as a moral leader or aspirational model. Our adversaries are gleeful. Our allies are appalled. And we’re too locked in our own dysfunction to care.

The most tragic part is that none of this is necessary. America can afford to feed its hungry. We’ve always been able to afford it. SNAP costs about $127 billion annually—less than 3% of federal spending, a rounding error compared to defense or tax expenditures. The money exists. The resources exist. What doesn’t exist is the political will, the basic human decency, the minimal moral imagination required to look at a hungry child and think “I should help” rather than “their parents should have made better choices.”

This is a choice. Not an inevitable result of economic constraints or demographic pressures or global competition. A choice. A deliberate decision by people with names and faces and offices, people who could decide differently tomorrow if they wanted to. Mike Johnson could decide that feeding children matters more than tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republican caucus could decide that pro-life means protecting life after birth too. Evangelical leaders could decide that Christian values actually mean something beyond tribal signaling and sexual policing. They won’t, of course. But they could. And their refusal tells us everything we need to know.

The world is watching this unfold, and even if the Republicans reverse course, even if they decide that the political cost is too high and restore SNAP benefits, the damage is permanent. We’ve shown our hand. We’ve revealed that in America, the richest country in human history, feeding hungry children is negotiable. We’ve demonstrated that elderly people who worked their entire lives can be threatened with starvation as a budget negotiating tactic. We’ve proven that disabled Americans who cannot work are viewed as disposable. The rest of the world has seen exactly who we are, and they won’t forget it. Neither will the millions of Americans who’ve spent weeks or months in terror, wondering how they’ll survive.

Josh Powell is a healthcare writer, consultant, and former CEO of a leading multidisciplinary surgical center in New York. Most recently, he served as Project Manager for Columbia University’s NIH-funded HEALing Communities Study, addressing the opioid epidemic through evidence-based interventions.

His book, “AIDS and HIV Related Diseases,” published by Hachette Book Group, established him as an authoritative voice in healthcare. Powell’s insights have appeared in prestigious publications including Politico and The New England Journal of Medicine. As a recognized expert, he has been featured on major media outlets including CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS.

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