As it now stands, approximately 42 million Americans will lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program when its funding runs out Saturday. Most are children, seniors and the disabled. Some are able-boded adults who just happen to work jobs that leave them short of what they need to survive.

Private charity can fill a small part of the gap. So, too, can the efforts of individual states, more than two dozen of which are suing the administration to try to force it to release emergency funds to continue to pay for food stamps. But the overall scale of hunger in the United States is too large for any one institution to deal with the lapse in benefits — the federal government must act.

The federal government must also do something to address a catastrophically large increase in

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