If the feds cannot come to a deal, the government shut down would have an almost immediate impact on WIC, the program that supports low-income pregnant women and new mothers with kids up to 5 years old.
Tom Vilsack, the United States Secretary of Agriculture confirmed this on Monday.
"The WIC program that I talked about today which is for nearly seven million moms and children, that program expires or stops immediately when the shutdown occurs," Vilsack said.
Without this federal grant program, who is to fill in for potential gaps?
"Nonprofits exist to step up when the community needs them when government and private sector don't support," Second Harvest Heartland's Director of Community Partnerships, Angelica Klebsch said. "The emergency food network is set up precisely for this reason."
Klebsch said getting food to potentially even more people will not be easy.
"It's challenging to know that this additional strain could be coming because we're already operating at our maximum capacity," Klebsch said. She added this past Summer has been hard on the community. "We're already sending out food in historical numbers. So we will respond we will find ways to do it but it's frustrating to have to raise the alarm on top of what we're already seeing."
Without WIC, about 105,000 Minnesotans would be getting by without additional support. The USDA, which is in charge of WIC said it might have enough contingency funds to support WIC for 'a day or two.'
Plus, depending on how long the government shuts down for, if it does...
"It's going to affect a lot of different kinds of people," Klebsch said. "We can immediately think about folks who are federal employees themselves, who are going to be affected, but also folks that are relying on government services as well."
Second Harvest says it got through the 2019 government shutdown, and said it is preparing to do so again this year if need be.
"We are absolutely hopeful like everyone else that the government shutdown won't happen," Klebsch said. "And yet historically, we know that these decisions will come down to the wire, so we're doing everything we can to prepare now in case it does happen."
SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka Food Stamps) according to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, would continue for at least the month of October if the shutdown happens.