“Neighbors need food NOW,” the homepage of Second Harvest Food Bank of South Louisiana reads.
Amid uncertainty around SNAP funding, food banks across the U.S. are scrambling to pick up the slack for the 42 million Americans who rely on the program for food assistance.
SNAP payments have been paused since Nov. 1 due to the government shutdown. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore full funding for the program by Nov. 7. The administration quickly appealed the ruling and on Friday sought an emergency block on the order.
While the larger legal battle continues, several states have said that they’ve started to process full food stamp payments, the New York Times reports.
CNBC Make It spoke with leaders at several food banks about how they’re responding to the challenges caused by SNAP cuts and the government shutdown.
Brian Greene, the president and CEO of Houston Food Bank, describes the situation as “a rolling disaster.”
SNAP payments are typically distributed on a staggered monthly schedule in Texas, Greene says, which means that each day since the beginning of November, another 125,000 Texans run out of EBT funds.
As the shutdown drags on, a growing number of furloughed federal workers in Houston are turning to food banks for assistance, Greene says.
“Every day that this keeps going, the damage gets worse and worse,” he says.
Facing ‘a great increase in need’
According to Leslie Bacho, CEO of Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, the effects of the SNAP disruption are already becoming clear.
Within its service area of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, more than 168,000 people rely on CalFresh, the state of California’s version of SNAP, Bacho says.
On Monday alone, over 1,500 unique users visited the bank’s online food locator tool, which connects people to nearby food distribution sites, according to Bacho. That’s nearly double the usual volume.
Their hotline has also experienced a 200% increase in requests for referrals, she says.
“We’re in the process of ordering additional food and really trying to ramp up for what we think will be a great increase in need,” Bacho says.
Jon Toups, the CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank of South Louisiana, says his organization was “stretched thin” even before the SNAP delays.
The Louisiana legislature has stepped in to help provide reserve funds for SNAP users, he says, but USDA cuts earlier this year had already caused supply shortages for food banks.
There’s “no question” that there’s been an uptick in demand for food assistance in the past week, Toups says, and “we’re seeing an awful lot of anxiousness.”
For every meal that food banks provide, SNAP provides nine, Toups says, creating an even larger chasm of need for banks to fill.
“The shutdown is putting an additional strain on the food bank network when we can least afford it,” he says.
How food banks are responding
About 425,000 Houston households rely on SNAP, Greene says, and in order to meet their typical level of need, Houston Food Bank would have to double its output.
They’re currently using all available resources — Greene gave the bank’s procurement team the go-ahead to “spend what [they] need to spend” — in an effort to increase output by about 50%.
Right now, Houston Food Bank is in “disaster response mode,” Greene says.
They’ve set up special distribution sites specifically targeting federal employees and SNAP users in parking lots across the city, including at Houston’s NRG Stadium.
Houston residents line up in their cars for a special free food distribution by the Houston Food Bank at the NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, on Nov. 1, 2025.
Mark Felix | AFP | Getty Images
It costs around $15,000 to set up one of these “supersites,” according to Greene, and they’re “pulling in more volunteers and paying a lot of extra expenses,” he says.
At Second Harvest Food Bank South Louisiana, Toups requested to use a “pretty significant” amount of the bank’s reserve funds to purchase more food, he says.
He’s also working to spread the word about the food bank’s situation.
“Our community has really stepped up. We’ve seen an uptick in donations, not only financially speaking, but with their time, which is a huge piece for us,” he says.
Still, staff are “overrun right now,” he says: “I almost feel like I’m asking them to work 24/7 right now to stay out in front of this.”
“We will always do the best we can do,” Toups says, but their current situation “is not sustainable.”
Second Harvest Silicon Valley is in “drop everything mode” working to allocate 15% more food to each of their distribution sites, Bacho says.
Crucially, while the charitable food system is already “very, very strained,” the last thing Bacho wants is for people in need to worry that banks will run out of food.
“Whether that involves going into our reserves, whether it involves raising more from our community or from our greater partnerships with our counties, we’re going to do everything we can to meet that increase in need,” she says.
Still ‘just at the beginning’ of crisis
Both Toups and Greene liken the current situation to the aftermath of a natural disaster — but in those situations, “the federal government was there to help,” Greene says.
“In this case, the federal government is the cause, not the solution,” he says.
Right now, local giving is keeping many food banks and aid organizations afloat, according to Greene.
“If philanthropy holds up, we can keep doing this for quite some time,” he says, but “in a crisis, philanthropy shoots up, but it comes right back down.”
There are a few ways that people can support food banks right now, according to Toups.
Primarily, food banks need monetary donations. That’s the “most efficient” way to help, he says, “because it allows me to actually use that money to go do exactly what’s needed at that moment in time.”
Volunteers can also help food banks with tasks like sorting donations, packing boxes and distributing food, he says.
At the end of the day, though, “we’ve got to get back to some level of normalcy,” Toups says.
Right now, “we’re just at the beginning of this crisis,” according to Bacho. As more days pass without SNAP funding, the demands on food banks will only increase, she says.
“We need this man-made problem in Washington, D.C. to resolve itself,” Toups says.
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