I am a food stamp student. My future depends on Congress

Most Sundays, I take two trains and a bus just to shop, not because I choose to, but because a few stores near my college campus accept my EBT card.

In Washington DC’s VIACKERPORGH SOPTIGHY PARK, there aren’t many food shops. Up the hill and down Connecticut Avenue, there are two over-the-top markets that I only visit when I’m in dire need of basic essentials like bread and milk. But for my regular weekday rush on Sundays, I take the red line to DuPont Circle and catch a bus to the Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue. They are one of the only places nearby that accept my ebt card.

When the news about the government shutdown broke, my first thought went to other people before it got to me. I thought about my cousin, a TSA agent at Neterk Liberty Airport, and how, because of this closure, she won’t be able to pay rent and support her two children. He’s proposing bills that won’t wait for Congress to make up its mind. After that, I thought about the most intimate aspects of my life: My EBT balance and the grocery list I’m going to name on Evikini. It took me three weeks to discover that I too felt the fullness of this terrible condition.

The current shutdown began after trust makers failed to fulfill a government funding deal, leaving apps like Snap in limbo.

I applied for Snap benefits in March 2025. After a long process, my EBT Card arrived in the mail, and my monthly benefit of almost $230 was my cost of being a full-time, first-generation college student.

Nationwide, more than 40 million Americans rely on SNAP checks, including hundreds of thousands of college students like me who fall under aid programs designed for families, not young adults.

I work three jobs and haven’t had a meal plan since my sophomore year of college. So when politicians start talking about ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘temporary measures,’ I see those as euhemisms to skip meals and reduce my education. For me, the closure is not an abstract argument; Instead, the statistics are close.

Do I stretch this month’s budget to the last cent and hope for a financial miracle? Do I buy cheap, healthy nutritious food and pray it will catch me? I skipped my classes and took another job change, knowing that what I lost in my education could delay my matriculation in my dream program? These questions are immediate, and visceral.

When the benefits stop, my decisions are brutally simple. I can pay rent or eat. Pay for my graduate school plans, or fill my belly. Those costs are measured not only in dollars but also in the small, dwindling hopes that come from a perpetual scarcity mindset.

I tend to get nervous.

This semester, I took another job, now I am filling three positions while taking 18 credits. My weeks are spent in my practice and planning, and my evenings and weekends are spent working at the front door of a night club. But there’s a distinct pleasure in publicly worrying about food. I have to learn to walk the line between asking for help and avoiding the pity I was raised with to stray. I also have to learn that shame is contagious, and that silence keeps the problem from being seen by decision makers who are far removed from the reality we are dealing with. After all, they still get their paychecks.

In November, I have to start making painful decisions about where to spend money and what are my priorities. Food is still high on my list, while the future of the program I rely on is uncertain. I was asking the policy makers to remember that when they turn off the lights on government programs, they also turn off the student’s ability to go to class the next day with a full head and a full stomach. It’s hard to focus on democratic discourse when you’re running on caffeine and anxiety.

There are thousands of students like me who are juggling jobs, classes, food insecurity, and now the shutdown that threatens to pull the rug out from under us. The silence surrounding our anxiety makes it worse. But here we are, and our future is on the line.

So I will continue to work my jobs. I will continue to study in class. I will continue to show. But I will continue to tell this story. Because if my experience can make invisible concrete, maybe the next time politicians think about cutting safety nets, they will remember the faces behind the numbers.

I don’t know exactly what November will bring, but I do know the urgency of hunger. And I find it hard to be respectful of that fact.

Dru strand is a Howard University major in journalism. He also serves as a digital burnerlism intern for aarp and a cross-section editor for the Hilltop, Howard University’s newspaper.