Wendell Britt does not know where he will sleep tonight. It might be a park bench, a pavement, a shelter – “You go to a shelter and they take your fucking phone” – or, if he’s lucky, a friend’s house. “Wherever I lay my head,” he says, wearing a Chicago Bulls cap.
The 55-year-old also does not know where his next meal is coming from either – but he does have a lifeline. “Food stamps help me get food in my stomach,” he said this week. “They help a lot of people.”
This is Congress Heights in Washington DC, a predominantly black neighborhood just five miles southeast of the White House, where last week Donald Trump’s administration unveiled a budget proposal that would slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), as food stamps are officially known.
Losing food stamps altogether would be devastating to Britt, who spent 17 years in prison for robbery and drug-related offenses and is trying to go back to work as a barber. “If I’ve got no food, nothing to eat, I’m just out here. I might go to the trash can when I need something to eat; I might get sick in my stomach but it’s a chance I have to take. I might steal something because I’m going to be hungry.”
In February, about 42 million Americans received assistance via the Snap program, which cost $70.9bn in 2016. Most recipients, about 72%, live in households with children, and more than a quarter live in households with seniors or people with disabilities. The federal scheme has been widely applauded by economists and academics as a cost-efficient method of helping the most needy.
“In recent memory, in the late 1960s and early 70s, we had a problem of severe malnutrition in this country. Not everywhere, but in poor communities around the country we had problems with severe hunger,” said Stacy Dean, the vice-president for food assistance policy at the nonpartisan thinktank the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Snap “largely solved that problem”.
Dean said she found the budget cut proposal worrying. Abdicating responsibility for ending hunger as a national issue is “a proposal to take us back to a dark time in our history”, she said.
The District of Columbia in comparison with US states has one of the highest proportions of the population to be on food stamps. For instance, 21.97% of residents were on them in 2014, a report from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) nutrition service reported in 2015.
Many residents of Congress Heights, a disadvantaged area that’s a 20-minute drive from the executive mansion, depend on food stamps and would soon feel the pain of cutbacks.
Last week, Kozette Green, a 44-year-old single mother, dropped into a convenience store on Alabama Avenue with her nine-year-old twins Jerzey and John; she also has a daughter, Nija, 18. Green has been on food stamps since Nija’s birth in 1998 prompted her to leave her job in childcare. “They made a big difference because I don’t really make a lot so it helped me bring food for my kids.”
Green receives $273 a month for herself and her children. If that was taken away? “Oh my god, I don’t know,” she replied. “My kids probably wouldn’t get as much as they do now. I think it’s horrible. It’s going to be harder on the people who don’t have jobs trying to eat and provide for their families.”
Walking by the store, Reginald Porter-Bey, 59, who used to work as a printer at the Pentagon, started using food stamps a decade ago when he was homeless and jobless. “They’re very important to get through the month. You’ve got to know how to find bargains.”
Porter-Bey, who has five children, added: “It would have a hell of an impact. That’s taking food out of my mouth and other people’s mouths who’ve got kids. That’s not fair. People voted for Trump and he slapped them in the face. There are people in West Virginia who are poor just like here. He doesn’t care because he’s all right.
“We’ve had people robbing from another just to survive. No man is not going to allow his kids to eat, not if he’s a man.”
His friend Donald Greenfield, 36, a cook, added: “It’s gonna hurt a lot of people. A person’s got to survive. For him to take the Snap and not put something in its place is totally wrong. You’re taking money out of kids’ mouths who are hardly making it.”
Conservative media outlets such as Fox News have previously referred to food stamp users as “moochers”, “parasites” and “takers” instead of “makers”. Last week Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney said: “If you’re on food stamps and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work.”
But according to the government’s own figures, most families on Snap – 55% of them – do have a family member working. The issue is that they do not make enough money to feed their families. “This budget is not an evidence-based exercise in policy-making. It’s oriented at cutting government spending in order to lavish tax cuts on the wealthy,” said Dean.
Daimond and Georgia Gibson have a six-year-old son and receive food stamps worth $350 a month. Daimond, 44, suffered a slipped disc in his back and lost his job as a manager about 18 months ago. He said: “I voted for Trump: what a mistake. He’s a businessman, and I thought he’s going to run the country like a business. I can’t see it.”
If the family lost food stamps, he said, “it would be a major blow. We’d have to come down from three meals a day to maybe one or one-and-a-half. We’re in the nation’s capital and prices are high. We feed the third world countries; why not feed us?”
Georgia, 25, who could not vote because of a past felony, described the proposal to slash food stamps as “ridiculous”. She said: “If he doesn’t look after poor people now, he’s going to see a lot more poverty.”
She said of Trump: “He’s tearing our country apart. There’s so much hate. He’s dividing our people. There has always been racism and we knew it was a problem but we clearly see it now.”
Others in the neighborhood – which includes fast-food outlets, convenience stores with bulletproof glass, police cars on regular patrol and Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School – warned that they might turn to desperate measures without food stamps.
Rodney Crowder, 51, is diabetic, has mental health problems, spent three years in prison for robbery and is homeless, forcing him to sleep in a car. “Trump is a good guy, but he’d better not take any food stamps. He can’t do that shit. People need help. It would make me want to rob again. What the hell do you think? I ain’t got no food stamps, I’m gonna steal. I gotta eat.”
Ralik Turner, 52, a community developer and social worker, offered a different perspective on the proposal. “It will just be the direction the country has been going for years. Bill Clinton started the cuts and I like Clinton. Like any underground network, people are going to find a way because they have no choice.
“Food stamps is a subsidy. It’s not making the bread of any household in this country. In no way does it take the credit for the situation of freedom in the black community. Most of the elderly get $6 to $14 a month on food stamps; no one can live on them; it means nothing. This lie proposed that food stamps is an industry making poor people rich is bullshit.”
