Fruit is displayed at an Anchorage grocery store. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
WASHINGTON — The near-certain freeze on key federal nutrition programs will put particular pressure on tribal communities, according to advocates and U.S. senators of both parties.
American Indian and Alaska Native communities are scrambling to fill anticipated gaps in food security and assistance created by the lack of funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, during the ongoing government shutdown.
Sarah Harris, the secretary of United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. and United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund, a nonprofit and an associated advocacy group for 33 federally recognized tribal nations from Texas to Maine, told the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee during a Wednesday hearing that uncertainty over the availability of SNAP and WIC benefits is forcing tribal nations to cover the shortfall.
“Given the emergent nature of all of this crisis, tribes are scrambling, and so they’re spending their own time and resources to provide the most basic of human needs — food — for their citizens,” Harris said.
Harris gave an example of her nonprofit’s president, Penobscot Indian Nation Chief Kirk Francis, who was working with his tribal council to reallocate $200,000 to bridge the nutrition funding gap for November alone.
“This includes asking tribal hunters to donate loose meat so that elders can be fed,” she said.
A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that food insecurity among American Indian and Alaska Native households is “significantly greater than for all U.S. households.”
Federal ‘failure’ squeezes tribal nations
Congress failed to fund SNAP and WIC, two major U.S. Department of Agriculture initiatives — and nearly every other discretionary federal program — for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
USDA has said it will not tap into its multi-year contingency fund to keep the program that serves 42 million people afloat in November — an about-face from its Sept. 30 shutdown plan that said it would use such funds during the shutdown.
Lawsuits are underway to force USDA to use its reserve fund.
WIC serves nearly 7 million people and offers “free healthy foods, breastfeeding support, nutrition education and referrals to other services,” according to USDA. The program got a $300 million infusion from USDA to keep it running through October. But as November approaches, advocates are calling on President Donald Trump’s administration to provide additional emergency funds.
Some states are working to cover the funding shortfall for SNAP recipients. Tribal nations are as well, Harris said Wednesday.
“We must further subsidize to provide for the failure of our federal partners to meet their trust and treaty obligations,” she said.
“It’s also important to recognize, too, that tribal nations, we already face long-standing and continuing challenges with providing access to healthy and nutritious food for our citizens, and the challenges contribute to health and educational and overall wellness disparities across all of our tribal communities,” Harris added.
Deciding between ‘fuel and food’
Ben Mallott, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives, said that without SNAP and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, “our communities and tribal citizens will have to decide between fuel and food.”
LIHEAP helps assist low-income families with energy costs and is managed under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The program has faced funding uncertainties and disruptions due to the shutdown.
Mallott, who leads the largest statewide Native organization in Alaska, noted that “in some of our communities, elders are there alone and might not have family to help them with food security.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Senate committee, said concerns about “food versus fuel” are “very real when we talk about food insecurity.”
The Alaska Republican also pointed to a major typhoon that hit her state earlier in October and its impacts on food supply.
“We have heard and seen the pictures of the loss from the Typhoon Halong, and you see devastation within the village,” Murkowski said. “But the part of it that is really heartrending is when you see freezers that have been stocked with subsistence foods … all that had been gathered that would take these families through the winter that now is lost because there’s no power in these villages, and so their food source for the winter is gone.”
Coupled with the reliance on SNAP, Murkowski said “this is a point that for many in Alaska is tangibly real and tangibly frightening, and so, everything that we can do to make sure that SNAP and WIC funding is able to proceed, I think, has got to be a priority for us.”
Impacts on tribal nations in Minnesota, Nevada
Other senators on the panel highlighted the consequences of funding for nutrition programs running out for Native communities in their states.
Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said that 200 families living in the Duck Valley Indian Reservation would “lose access to essential food support.”
In response, the “tribe is preparing to rely on traditional practices such as hunting elk to feed their members,” adding that “it’s important to highlight how serious of an issue this will become,” she said.
Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, said she’s hearing from tribal nations in her state about people switching from SNAP to another USDA program, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR.
“I’m hearing from Minnesota tribes that there’s kind of switching happening right now, as people are trying to figure out where is the best place to be able to get stable sources of nutrition assistance for folks on tribal lands,” she said.
FDPIR provides food “to income-eligible households living on Indian reservations and to Native American households residing in designated areas near reservations or in Oklahoma,” according to USDA.
Households are not allowed to participate in both SNAP and FDPIR in the same month. The agency said average monthly participation for FDPIR in fiscal 2023 included 49,339 people.
“People are in the midst of sort of trying to figure out how to change their benefits,” Smith said.
She added that this came on top of massive cuts to SNAP in Trump’s signature tax and spending cut package he signed into law earlier this year.