I will do everything I can to make sure that SNAP benefits reach the families who rely on them.

The Trump administration dragged families to the edge of a cliff.

His team said they would fail to fund the SNAP program starting November 1 — for the first time in history. But a federal judge has ordered the funding to go forward, which shows what we can achieve when we push back in the courts, in Congress, and out in the community.

I will do everything I can to make sure that SNAP benefits reach the families who rely on them.

This is the program that feeds more than 42 million people in America — that includes 16 million children, 4 million people with disabilities, and 1 million veterans.

In Massachusetts, over 1 million residents rely on SNAP to put food on the table. More than half of those cases are in Greater Boston, in the Massachusetts 7th.

Trump has had a pot of money to prevent this program from expiring, and I’ve joined hundreds of Democratic colleagues to demand that his administration draw on those funds — but he refused. It took an act from a judge to get him to pay these Congressionally-approved funds. This was a cruel, unlawful, and violent policy choice.

Forcing a child to go to bed hungry is policy violence, and it is 100% preventable.

But Trump and his Republican co-conspirators would rather fill their own pockets than fill the stomachs of hungry children.

Republicans have used this government shutdown to skirt accountability and hamstring our federal employees and essential programs that help our families make ends meet. All while building gaudy ballrooms at the White House and handing out tax breaks to billionaires. All in the name of so-called efficiency and patriotism.

There is nothing efficient about making people sicker and hungrier, and there's nothing patriotic about starving a nation's children.

What has happened here? Republicans are not a party. They are a cult of cowards complicit in wholesale harm to our shared constituents — who won't take on the current occupant of the White House because they're more concerned with keeping a job than doing it.

While I know the Commonwealth, the city, and our incredible community partners will continue to stand in the gap, we need Republicans to take their foot off the necks of our most vulnerable and reopen the government.

The House has not been in session since September 19, and House Republicans have been on vacation for over a month.

Democrats remain ready to negotiate and reopen the government. I will continue calling on our colleagues across the aisle to come to their senses, listen to the people, and negotiate an end to this cruel shutdown — and I will continue to insist that because in the wealthiest nation on the planet, no one should go to bed hungry.

In solidarity,

Ayanna