Misha Dancing Waters has always been driven to help people. For the past nine years, the Wisconsin native has had a job that allows her to do just that. As an economic support specialist in Dane County, she helps families in need receive critical benefits, from nutrition assistance to health care.
Since the pandemic, as more families have been pushed to the brink, the demand for her services has gone way up. Now, it’s about to get much worse.
On Nov. 1, funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which delivers food assistance to 42 million Americans, will end. So will funding for Head Start, which provides early learning programs for low-income families.
The reason? The administration and its yes-men and women in Congress are using working families as bargaining chips, refusing to end the government shutdown by lowering health care costs and funding public services.
Instead, they’re holding out, protecting massive tax giveaways for billionaires that were included in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.”
The pain that working families are feeling from the shutdown – critical public services grinding to a halt amid a cost-of-living crisis – are about to get worse, warns Dancing Waters.
“People are becoming desperate,” says Dancing Waters, of the shutdown’s effects. “This is taking a lot of money out of working-class families’ pockets. Over and over, I hear people telling me they don’t have enough to pay for everything, and that’s with food stamps in the picture. They are still barely getting by.”
Dancing Waters paints a frightening picture of what will happen to families in her community when funding for SNAP and Head Start runs dry.
“So many people use these services, people don’t realize. Our local grocery stores could have food rotting on the shelves. It scares me.”
She says that families will be forced to turn to food pantries, which are already stretched thin and struggling to meet the rising demands of her community. And as Head Start centers are forced to close, that means working parents will have to choose between a paycheck and caring for their kids.
“[Parents] will need to stop working to care for their kids,” says Dancing Waters. “But without food stamps, they won’t be able to keep food on the table at all. It’s a one-two punch that will put working families in a hole that will take years for them to get out of, if they do at all.”
That is why Dancing Waters is urging Congress to act now and end the shutdown, lower health care costs and fund public services.