Shutdown Resolution Unleashes An Old SNAP Headache

By
Billy Costigan
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In the final calculus, it wasn’t a budget crisis or national emergency that brought the longest government shutdown in American history to its knees—it was air travel. Not food insecurity. Not closed federal offices. Not even national parks left unkempt. What finally broke the system was the realization, creeping in over 43 days of inaction, that without federally funded air traffic controllers, Americans can’t fly.

And for all the political theater, that single point of failure revealed something much deeper about the nature of government, the weakness of the Republican response, and the structural absurdities no one in Washington seems willing to address.


The question isn’t just why the government funds air traffic controllers—it’s why we treat it as a sacred federal function in the first place. Canada’s already privatized it. So have other nations. But in the United States, not only is air traffic control a federal responsibility, it’s one that still runs on paper strips in many towers, despite two decades and $15 billion poured into a modernization project that’s now years behind schedule and 20% over budget.

This is what the shutdown laid bare: a bloated federal program that fails on its own terms, and a Republican Party that still won’t touch it. The shutdown revealed a simple truth—most of what the federal government does is irrelevant to daily life. Almost none of it is noticed when it stops—except the parts that are purposefully rigged to fail loudly, like air travel. If the FAA hadn’t buckled, the shutdown might still be ongoing.

Instead of seizing that leverage, Republicans folded. And not just on aviation reform.


What did they emerge from this standoff to celebrate? SNAP benefits being restored. Food stamps. The one program that, according to USDA data, serves a population that’s 72% overweight or obese. Where 44% of recipients are obese, and only 2.5% are underweight. A program that, in its current form, actively subsidizes soda, cookies, and processed junk, rather than basic nutrition. A program that routinely overlaps with WIC, another taxpayer-funded food program with nearly identical goals. A program so rife with fraud that dead people are receiving benefits, and half a million Americans are double-dipping under the same name—and that’s just from the 29 states that turned over their data. The rest, predictably, refused.

Yet that’s the ground Republicans chose to defend. That’s the victory they claim.

Rather than taking this moment to reform, reduce, or abolish programs bleeding the Treasury dry, they let it pass with barely a shrug. Instead of questioning why tens of billions are spent on nutrition programs for people who demonstrably aren’t malnourished, they pivoted to celebratory messaging about how important those payments are.

Worse, they didn’t even raise the alarm on the fact that upwards of 60% of SNAP fraud is going to illegal alien households—the very issue Republican voters have been screaming about for years.

This was a test. Not just of federal durability, but of political courage. And the GOP failed.


They didn’t push to privatize air traffic control. They didn’t demand audits of welfare programs. They didn’t speak about H1-B abuses, the judiciary, or even the basic principle that funding the government shouldn’t mean funding incompetence and fraud. Instead, they let the shutdown collapse under the weight of missed flights and angry travelers.

And when it did, they had nothing to show for it—no wins, no vision, no reforms.

Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers still talk about expanding healthcare to cover illegal immigrants, bailing out student loans, and turning federal programs into permanent entitlements. Republicans, in contrast, patted themselves on the back for restoring a broken welfare program and turning the lights back on at the FAA.

That’s not strategy. That’s surrender with better PR.

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