Across Oregon, grocery store prices are rising. More people are lining up at food pantries. Thousands struggle daily with the cost of putting food on their tables.
Now, hundreds of thousands of people could be left without food stamp benefit payments in November if the federal government shutdown continues.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make ends meet,” Nan Ahseln, who visited a pantry in Portland on Tuesday, said while volunteers loaded her cart with fresh produce, bread and canned goods.
More than 750,000 Oregonians enrolled in the government-run Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps — will not receive benefits after the end of the month, Gov. Tina Kotek announced Monday. More than half are children, seniors or people with disabilities.
Congress has yet to appropriate the funds for the program. The shutdown has both political parties pointing fingers at each other, leaving social safety programs in limbo.
Already stretched, food bank staff are warning that any disruptions to SNAP will leave more families hungry. This week, they’re stocking shelves, preparing for a surge in visitors.
On Wednesday, Portland and Multnomah County leaders urged the federal government to “release contingency funds” to prop up the food stamp program, calling the situation “wholly unacceptable.”
“I don’t know what people are going to do,” said Scott Cooper, the executive director of NeighborImpact, which provides anti-poverty services in Central Oregon. “It isn’t like you can just go eat grass or something. There’s no substitute for food.”
Strapped food pantries prepare for surge in visitors
Portland’s Northeast Emergency Food Program gets close to 3,500 visitors to its free grocery pantry each week. On Tuesday, people lined up at the doors half an hour before they opened.
Inside the basement of a former church, volunteers played salsa music and offered up dried beans, fresh fruit and vegetables, frozen meat and a warm smile.
Ryan Sherman, a program coordinator at the pantry, said he’s seen an uptick in visitors within the last month. He’s preparing to see more if the federal government shutdown persists.
“We’re expecting numbers to just go through the roof,” he said. “It’s going to force a lot of people into the food pantry system who haven’t been here before.”
Nan Ahseln had already learned her benefits might not be paid in November through the evening news.
Other visitors at the pantry, like Kodi Frasier, a mom of two, had yet to learn what could be coming. Frasier said she’d only received an email telling her what the balance on her account is. Her benefits cover about half of her family’s monthly food budget.
“We’ll rely on food pantries even more,” she said. “I mean I’ll only go maybe once or twice a week. But last week I went five times a week.”
In Central Oregon, more than 23,000 households receive SNAP benefits.
NeighborImpact’s Cooper is proactively reaching out to churches and school district superintendents, trying to get people to help by opening kitchens and filling children’s backpacks with peanut butter, cereal and other dried goods as the SNAP freeze looms.
In southwest Oregon’s Josephine County, one in five residents participates in the SNAP program. Food pantry workers there are gearing up for longer lines, longer hours and the sudden pressure from people losing their federal food assistance.
“We are shoring up as much food as we possibly can, which is slightly challenging right now because we’re operating at a deficit,” said Josephine Sze, executive director of the Josephine County food bank. “It’s a little scary, because our network is a little stressed as it is.”
SNAP halt could ripple through Oregon’s economy
The longer the delay in benefits lasts, the more pain it will bring to the Oregon economy. When an Oregonian with SNAP benefits spends a dollar at the grocery store, it has a multiplier effect, according to the Oregon State Treasury, creating $1.50 to $1.80 in economic activity in the state.
In Oregon, 6.4% of in-store grocery purchases use federal food benefits, according to the data firm Numerator. If the delay lasts more than a few days, retailers such as Walmart, Safeway and Albertsons will see a hit in sales — but it will hurt small neighborhood stores the most. Small retailers could trim orders from suppliers if they anticipate a drop in demand.
“That’s the behavior that starts to set off alarm bells that this is going to start to echo and reverberate through the larger Oregon economy,” said University of Oregon economist Michael Kuhn.
Normally, SNAP benefits stimulate spending on food, which causes grocery stores to order more products, he said. Eventually, the store needs to hire more people to sell that food, making communities overall more economically productive.
“Once retailers start to say, ‘Oh, that demand [from SNAP] isn’t going to be there, so now I need to start cutting orders,’ we start to cut into that multiplier,” Kuhn said.
But family budgets will be the first to feel the pinch, he said. If benefits are delayed for more than a few days, it could put pressure on other services, he added, and damage the credit of families moving funds around to pay for food. The effects on individuals and the economy will worsen the longer benefits are withheld.
Food pantry visits rise
The number of visits people made to food banks in Oregon and Southwest Washington increased from about 860,000 in 2019 to 2.5 million in 2024.
The Oregon Food Bank Network distributed 125 million pounds of food in 2025, according to the Oregon Hunger Task Force, a group of food assistance advocates. That’s equivalent to 105 million meals, the task force said in a statement Tuesday, “yet demand continues to rise.”
Rick Gaupo, the president and CEO of Marion Polk Food Share, has observed this trend first-hand.
“We’re seeing a record number of visitors coming to local pantries,” he said. In Marion and Polk counties, the organization saw about 10,000 visits to local pantries each month before the pandemic. “We’re hovering around 18,000 visits per month right now.”
Gaupo also expects to see more people if SNAP benefits come to a halt. But, he said, that’s a political choice.
“The shutdown is a policy battle,” he said. “But SNAP does not have to be.”
Politics with hungry families on the line
The federal government has already made it more challenging for some people to stay on SNAP.
The tax and spending cut bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, spearheaded by President Donald Trump, added new work requirements for SNAP recipients, including in rural parts of Oregon that were previously exempt.
It was the latest in a series of major changes to the nation’s food safety network. The Trump administration also moved to slash millions of dollars from federal programs that deliver truckloads of food to pantries throughout Oregon, resulting in a drop in supply since February.
Cooper, the executive director of NeighborImpact, said people in Central Oregon have helped the pantry restore nearly half of his organization’s 28% decline in food supply. Should the shutdown continue, Cooper said he’s worried about burnout among his staff, adding: “I’m very concerned about my organizations throwing up their hands and saying nothing works.”
“There aren’t a lot of good solutions,” he said. “Other than everybody doing a little bit, and making some dent but not solving the problem.”
Recently, he said, churches, school districts and other local groups have appeared keen to help the region cope with the upcoming freeze on the SNAP program. However, he said, “The value of food stamps in Central Oregon is $7 million a month. I’m not likely to replace $7 million.”
“I think it’s really important for people to understand that we will not solve this problem,” he said. “And people will be hungry.”
Trade-offs loom for Oregon families
Some policy experts say the federal government does have the authority to allocate funding to pay for partial benefits during the shutdown. But the Trump administration has opted not to do so.
When OPB reached out to the USDA for more clarity, the agency replied with an automatic email response.
“Due to staff furloughs resulting from the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, the typical monitoring of this press inbox may be impacted,” read the USDA email. “As you await a response, please remember these delays could have been avoided had Senate Democrats supported the clean Continuing Resolution to fund the government.”
Meanwhile, preparations for the SNAP halt are underway in Josephine County. If the shutdown continues through the month, Sze, the food bank director, says many residents will have to make tough financial decisions, weighing whether to pay for food, medication, after-school programs or rent.
“Food is the first thing to go,” she said. “Because it’s easier in the moment to go without food than it is your home, or your utilities, or care for your children or medication. And so it’s these horrible trade-offs that people are having to make every day already. Now there’s that added pressure.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.