Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will expire at the end of the month, impacting as many as 42 million people—16 million of them children.

And if you’re thinking that this is just an unfortunate, unfixable product of the government shutdown, think again.

The Department of Agriculture has about $5 billion in contingency funds it could use, even during the shutdown. It would cover about two-thirds of the whole month of benefits. But, according to the administration, those funds are only for emergencies “like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice.”

Starvation is apparently not an emergency.

So the administration won’t spend those contingency funds, nor will it reimburse states if they pick up the slack.

Unsurprisingly, the

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