GOP leaders to hungry NC kids during the 2025 holidays: “Bah, humbug!”

Running a food bank is incredibly challenging work – financially, physically, emotionally – during even the best of times. And that’s because food banks are engaged in what is essentially impossible work.

Even when they’re operating at peak efficiency – and most do work miracles on shoestring budgets – food banks can only address a small fraction of the hunger problem that plagues our country. Like tiny sponges trying to soak up a river of need, food banks do remarkable and important work for thousands upon thousands of people, but in the end, there is only so much they can do with the limited resources they have.

And things have gotten much worse of late, just in time for the holidays.

Ron Pringle confronts this sobering reality every day. Pringle, a former Air Force chaplain, is the President and CEO of the Raleigh-based Inter-faith Food Shuttle. And as he made clear in a recent interview, this past year has been the toughest he’s experienced during more than two decades of a career spent helping people in need.

“I’m in conversations with food banks all over the country. And, you know, in my 25-plus years, I haven’t seen a year like this,” Pringle said.

The reason is simple: the confluence of soaring prices for basic goods – the national “affordability crisis” – and big cuts to public food assistance.

Thanks to our nation’s crazy, upside-down economy and threadbare safety net, tens of millions of Americans are “food insecure.”

In North Carolina, 1.4 million people – that’s about one-in-eight – relied on federal SNAP food assistance benefits in 2024. Of that number, more than 66% were in families with children and more than 34% were in families with members who are older adults or are disabled.

Indeed, it’s an amazing and scandalous fact that 25% of children in our state live in food-insecure homes.

Unfortunately, as you’ve no doubt heard, SNAP benefits and aid to anti-hunger nonprofits like food banks have been on the Republican policy chopping block in Washington and Raleigh.

Topping the list of damaging cuts were those enacted as part of President Trump’s so-called “one big, beautiful bill” this past summer. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the cuts in the bill – the largest in U.S. history to food aid – will reduce SNAP funding by $187 billion (about 20%) through 2034. The Center estimates that, as a result, “about 4 million people, including children, seniors, veterans, and individuals with disabilities, will see the food assistance they need to afford groceries terminated or cut substantially.”

And then there are the new work requirements that just took effect and that now require SNAP recipients aged 18 to 64 to work or volunteer at least 80 hours per month, be in a training program, or earn at least $217.50 per week to continue receiving benefits for more than three months in a three-year period.

It’s the last thing someone living on the very edge needs: to be treated like a parolee having to document one’s life in a confusing bureaucratic process every month. States that tried such an approach previously spent as much (or more) on the expanded monitoring bureaucracy as they saved in reduced benefits.

But, of course, it’s not just the direct assistance people receive – the average for North Carolina households in 2022 was the princely sum of $287 per month – that will be slashed; funding that flows to nonprofits (like food banks) is also being cut at the federal and state levels. As Pringle observed, “For the first time in decades, the food banks in North Carolina are not in the state budget.”

The result: forced cuts to innovative and essential programs like the Food Shuttle’s “BackPack Buddies” program that provides healthy weekend meals for children and accessible pantries for their families. And so it is that Pringle now faces impossible chores like having to decide things like which elementary and middle schools will no longer have an on-site pantry for students in need.

Of course, all of this would be one thing if we lived in a time like the Great Depression in which even the upper middle class and well-off were suffering, but that is decidedly not the case – especially for the super-rich.

According to the most recent Forbes magazine report, the 400 richest people in the United States in 2025 are worth $6.6 trillion. Amazingly, their combined wealth increased by $1.2 trillion during just the most recent year.

Think about that for a second. Merely by capturing the one-year wealth increase of 400 individuals, the United States could fund the entire national SNAP budget that benefits more than 40 million people for the next 10 years.

The bottom line: As Christmas 2025 arrives, the politicians in the Trumpified GOP and their oligarch masters are doing their best impression of Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge when it comes to the wellbeing of their fellow Americans. One wishes that a terrifying ghost or two would invade their upcoming holiday dreams to help restore some basic human decency.