Late last year, when US lawmakers decided, at the last minute, to fund the government instead of shutting it down, they also agreed to phase out “extra” money for people who have difficulty affording food.

There’s a lot to lament in that sentence. For one thing, agreeing to keep the government open should never be an eleventh hour decision. The fact that it’s routinely a game of chicken is an abject failure on the part of Congress.

That’s a discussion all its own. For our purposes here, note that there’s something truly vexing about the idea of elected officials, most of whom are some measure of rich, agreeing to take literal food out of low-income voters’ mouths as part of closed-door discussions to avert a scenario where the government isn’t funded and thereby can’t operate.

Long story short, changes to SNAP benefits enacted during the pandemic lapsed this week, forcing an estimated 30 million Americans to reevaluate their plans for — and I don’t know any other way to put this — eating.

I should note that the December spending agreement did include a deal to make permanent a program that provides free lunches to students from low-income families when school isn’t in session, which is obviously a good thing. But rather than simply funding that program without strings attached (and yes, that’s just as simple as it sounds because no, the US government doesn’t need to “find” dollars by virtue of being able to conjure them into existence at will), those meals were “paid for” in part by the end of the emergency SNAP benefits.

Those benefits contributed to the lowest ever reading on the government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure and a 46% drop in a related measure of childhood poverty, which also reached record lows 2021.

As of this week, SNAP participants will no longer be eligible to receive the maximum monthly benefit. What, exactly, does this mean? Well, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, it means the following:

Every household in states [that were still paying emergency allotments] will receive at least $95 a month less; some households, who under regular SNAP rules receive low benefits because they have somewhat higher, but still modest incomes, will see reductions of $250 a month or more. The average person will receive about $90 a month less in SNAP benefits.

As the same analysis went on to note, those emergency allotments kept more than four million people above the poverty line during Q4 of 2021, with the effect of reducing state-level poverty by 10% and childhood poverty by 14%.

SNAP benefits are now expected to average $6.10 per person, per day this year. Do note: That figure would’ve been just $4.75 were it not for a recent adjustment to the Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to set SNAP benefits.

This comes at a time when grocery inflation is still running in the double digits in the US.

Some conservative pundits insist the expiration of the extra benefits doesn’t matter. They typically cite aggregate measures of food insecurity in states where the benefits were already allowed to lapse.

Of course, such assessments, even if true, ignore the fact that aggregates are comprised of real people. For some of those real people, the benefits matter a lot.

For example, the New York Times briefly detailed the plight of a single mother with a five-year-old child. She’ll now have more than $100 less to spend each month on food.

For her, that effectively means “losing a week’s worth of groceries.” Her rent recently went up $200 which, by the same math, means losing two more weeks of groceries. There are only four weeks in a month.

Insult to injury for low-income households is the GOP talking point that these benefits, along with other pandemic fiscal aid, are responsible for high grocery prices.