Missouri’s Josh Hawley, SNAP, and the life-threatening hypocrisy of government shutdown politics

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley speaks to reporters after joining challenger Lucas Kunce in the middle of the floor of the governor’s ham breakfast at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia. (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent)

Stop the presses, everyone! A MAGA Republican from Missouri’s congressional delegation actually cares for the well-being of children and adults going hungry? Oh, false alarm, it’s just Christian nationalist Josh Hawley.

Sen. Hawley, a Republican, is back at proving himself a hypocrite and a sycophant. I lay on the rhetoric so firmly, here, because Sen. Hawley announced he is currently working to fund food assistance benefits. I zoom in on Sen. Hawley specifically because he is aggressively reposturing on the issue after he voted to cut the same funds when he supported President Donald Trump’s marquee One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — the president’s first major domestic policy package this term.

But as the current federal government shutdown trudges toward potentially becoming the longest in our country’s history, tens of millions of American residents—especially Missouri residents—are facing the economic and social impacts of funding lapses for key safety-net services and other public goods.

The most recent case in this shutdown can be seen as Trump’s Department of Agriculture warned that SNAP benefits scheduled for Nov. 1 disbursements have all “run dry.”

Barring the fact that this is a bullshit claim, the use of SNAP and the food access and nutritional stability of the nation’s families draws a new line in blame game politics characteristic of wider “policy” debates taking place under Trump’s current tenure in the Oval Office. Hawley is simply the latest lawmaker from both parties pretending to be the ‘good guy’ who is doing all that he can.

He wrote a guest essay for The New York Times outlining his frustration with colleagues in both parties for not adopting a resolution that finally authorizes federal government funding. Hawley wrote, “Saturday will be another grim milestone. That is the day about 42 million Americans will lose federal food assistance.”

He referred to Nov. 1, when that same population of 42 million will wake up and see absolutely nothing in their benefit accounts for food and key nutritional staples.

Hawley neglects to mention that he played a role in implementing drastic changes to the SNAP program that would have begun at the start of the new fiscal year, Oct. 1.

While he may be in the editorial pages of the Times pontificating on the ethical duty of being a statesman, his conduct in previous acts significantly undercuts his credibility.

OBBBA passed the U.S. Senate with a final vote of 51 to 50 on July 1, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tiebreaking vote in favor of passage. Hawley and his colleagues in both the Senate and the House Republican Party caucuses celebrated the passage of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” with the Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota saying the measure is “making life better for hardworking Americans.”

Sens. Thune, Hawley, and their colleagues did not “make life better for hardworking Americans” on the front of SNAP and federally funded food and nutrition assistance programs. P

olitiFact at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies rated claims by Republican leaders that SNAP would not be cut due to the OBBBA’s adoption back in May of this year as false. GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson was fact-checked on the claim, where he told the news media back in May, “We are not cutting SNAP […] We’re working in the elements of fraud, waste, and abuse. … SNAP, for example, listen to the statistics; in 2024, over $11 billion in SNAP payments were erroneous.”

While OBBBA does have elements to rein in fraud and “improper” SNAP transactions, further expanded cuts leave out millions of Americans who are classified as no-income or low-income. Not only is SNAP fraud by individuals only a small percentage of the overall related fraud, while SNAP benefit trafficking by organized crime organizations is the more significant concern; there is a critical differentiation, too, between waste associated with “improper” payments and actual fraud.

PolitiFact staff writer Loreben Tuquero noted, “Based on different provisions of the bill, analysts estimate roughly 1.3 million to 11 million people losing SNAP benefits.” Tuquero cited several studies and analyses on OBBBA, including one from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The CBO analysis of the OBBBA’s short- and long-term financial impacts found that the overall bill would put the United States into deeper debt and harm global economic growth. An estimate by the CBO also noted that 3.2 million people will reduce their participation in SNAP on average each month over the 2025-2034 projected period. Note that OBBBA added reforms to SNAP and similar programs, including a work requirement baseline for who they call “able-bodied adults.”

The nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted in September that 4 million people will lose access to benefits, especially these so-called “able-bodied adults” who are almost all considered to be members of vulnerable populations, including people who are systematically homeless, military veterans, and young people who age out of foster care systems.

As a sidebar, for instance, young people aging out of foster care are more likely than young adults from stable and present households to face homelessness, job insecurity, academic struggles, and drug abuse.

I digress as to why Hawley is full of it. By simply pulling the official voting records, we can prove that Hawley etched his name in history — along with his colleague from Missouri, Sen. Eric Schmitt — by voting to cut SNAP via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And now, for him to recast himself as a “savior” of the tens of millions of Americans who are about to lose access to food — including the 656,600 recipients right here in Missouri, which is about 11 percent of the state’s population.

He isn’t. By proposing his Keep SNAP Funded Act, Hawley and his predominantly Republican co-sponsors in the Senate are doing a true disservice to the people they represent. Democrats are floating similar legislation, led by Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, to fund SNAP at higher levels needed to meet the demand of the tens of millions of people who need food access. And it is worth noting that, like Hawley, the sponsors of the Missouri senator’s SNAP funding bill also voted for OBBBA, further cutting funds from the benefit that has helped millions of Americans for years.

On the other hand, Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate have voted at least 13 times against a Republican-backed funding proposal to end the government shutdown and finally fund the SNAP programs.

That is a fact.

A case can be made that Democrats in Congress forced the government shutdown because of the Trump administration and the Republican Party’s refusal to support extending health insurance subsidies authorized under the Affordable Care Act. And without those subsidies, health care costs would soar for the 22 million Americans on subsidized plans — a plan unpopular for voters who identify as Republican or lean Republican, according to KFF — sold through state healthcare exchanges. But we are seeing Republicans continue to worsen the crisis, especially regarding the release of SNAP funding.

Consider the recent actions of Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, and her cabinet department.

Last week, Axios obtained a letter from the Department of Agriculture stating that it cannot use earmarked “contingency” funds to ensure November benefit payments will go out on time.

Then, a few days later, Secretary Rollins is on CNN justifying her office’s inaction, despite having apparent authority to tap those funds to keep SNAP and other food assistance programs running. There is a clear justification for Rollins to use her legal authority to release contingency funds to help fund SNAP, as the Agriculture Department already did when transferring $300 million to help fund the WIC program, which aids women, infants, and children.

This is also a central argument in a new lawsuit against the Trump administration, urging the government to fund SNAP benefits during the government shutdown.

Note that Sen. Hawley voted to confirm Rollins.

Ever the Trump apologist, Rollins founded the America First Policy Institute to give the MAGA movement a flagpole in the conservative think tank community. AFPI served as a partner organization to Project 2025, which was coordinated by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025’s central policy treatise, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, explicitly advised then-nominee Trump that a potential return to office would allow his Department of Agriculture to claw back SNAP benefits for about 9 percent, or more, of monthly recipients.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Despite all that is going on, Rollins, during her CNN interview over the weekend event, stooped to the classic far-right, antisemitic conspiracy-baiting of calling in Jewish philanthropist George Soros to pay for SNAP. Before confirmation earlier this year, Rollins was called “inexperienced, anti-science, and extremist.”

Her department’s website even goes darker by using undocumented immigrants and transgender people as scapegoats for the government shutdown and the lapse in SNAP benefits. First noticed by award-winning LGBTQ+ rights journalist Erin Reed via her “Erin in the Morning” newsletter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s official website blames Senate Democrats for the lapse in SNAP funding, which is only half true. A fact-check by the right-leaning Newsweek confirms this. Still, in the proper form of Newsweek’s visible transphobic, right-wing shift in editorial bias, they overlook the other overtly false and bigoted statements stemming from an official government website. The message on the website, very clearly, falsely asserts: “Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued on November 1.” It also falsely adds, “We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures, or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

This blatant transphobia and the infusion of lies perpetrated by the Department of Agriculture isn’t surprising. And speaking conclusively, you cannot blame this government shutdown on immigrants, trans people, radical leftist ideas, or other products of right-wing echo chamber, circular logic.

You can affirmatively blame people like Trump, Rollins, Johnson, their Democratic counterparts and colleagues, and hypocritical man-child Josh Hawley.

But the immediate solution is to fund the goddamn government before more people go hungry, get sick, lose their stability, or die.