Johnson County food pantries say they are preparing for an influx of need amid uncertainty created by the ongoing federal government shutdown and a legal fight over federal food benefits.

Originally, the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — sometimes referred to as food stamps — was set to run out of money on Saturday amid the ongoing government shutdown. However, two federal court rulings on Friday ordered the Trump administration to fund the food assistance program using contingency money while the shutdown continues.

Those rulings keep nearly 42 million people across the country from losing access to their federal food and nutrition benefits, including more than 5,200 households in Johnson County, according to data from the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment.

After the rulings later Friday, President Trump on social media suggested benefits would still be delayed as his administration tried to clarify the rulings. (Trump and other Republicans have blamed Democrats for prolonging the shutdown and causing the lapse in SNAP funding.)

Jennifer Parker, who operates a small community pantry in Overland Park, said she thinks the whole situation is “horrendous.” It feels like politicians are “weaponizing food,” she said. 

“This should not, in this country, ever be something that is done, but here we are,” she said. “I’m just livid about it. … It’s a mess, and it’s unconscionable.” 

What is SNAP?

SNAP or some form of it has been around for nearly 90 years in the United States. It offers supplemental funds for groceries for low-income families — including people who have disabilities, seniors and families with children — in the form of EBT cards that look like debit cards.

But, officials from the Trump administration had said previously that no benefits would be issued beginning Nov. 1, saying those cards would not be refilled, as the program ran out of money without a new federal appropriation.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly had joined other Democratic governors and attorneys general in suing the Trump administration in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, ultimately successfully attempting to force the use of emergency funds to continue providing SNAP benefits.

Still, the uncertainty about SNAP funding sent local food pantries and community aid organizations into overdrive as they tried to prepare to meet what could still be a wave of need.

Independent food pantries are ramping up efforts

Terry Cushman and Yvonne Gibbons, the managers of FUUD, the food pantry at the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church in Lenexa, said last week that they were already starting to see the affect of the threatened SNAP cuts.

FUUD is open Tuesday afternoons and is appointment only — families can sign up for a time slot the Tuesday before. They said the appointments for this coming Tuesday filled up within hours.

“I had more calls [this past Tuesday] than I’ve had on a Tuesday forever,” Gibbons said. “And it wasn’t about, ‘When is it going to open up?’ But it was more about, ‘Can I come in?’”

But the calls are also from those who want to help.

“People are aware that this is going to be an issue and want to know how to donate,” Gibbons said. “So we really appreciate that.”

Families that don’t get an appointment can still come in to pick up pre-packaged sacks filled with shelf-stable food. Cushman and Gibbons say they are anticipating a lot more walk-ins too.

“It’s a pretty heavy sack to start with, but I’m thinking maybe some like the little cartons of powdered milk or liquid that they can take home for their kids, shelf-stable milk,” Gibbons said.

“I think the impact is already happening”

Parker runs The Tiny Pantry Times, a small food pantry that started as a front-yard pantry and has grown to operate in front of Overland Park Christian Church.

She says she has also started to see more people picking up food.

The Tiny Pantry Times already distributes between 50,000 and 60,000 pounds of food and hygiene products each month. In a recent interview during a trip to the grocery store to restock the pantry, Parker told the Post the nonprofit was expecting that amount to go up at least 18% if SNAP had been cut.

But even before the government shutdown threatened SNAP benefits, Parker said they were starting to see more traffic at The Tiny Pantry Times.

“We were bracing for impact, but I think the impact is already happening, so now we’re just trying to survive the impact,” she said. “We’re just kind of flying through the food.”

She stressed that the pantry is open and is doing everything it can to meet the needs in the community.

“We’re trying to assure our patrons that they don’t [need to] have any fear, that we will take care of them as long as we are able,” Parker said. “We want them to have everything that they possibly can have.”

Church, mobile pantry busier than usual

Resurrection, a United Methodist church with eight locations in the metro area, has a food pantry at its Overland Park location, 8412 W. 95th St., and a mobile pantry that delivers goods.

Kristen Summers, the director of local missions for the church’s main Leawood campus, said they are amping up food scarcity initiatives.

“Really, whatever resources we can, we are gonna get out there to help this month and next if we can,” Summers said.

The church’s pantry had already been busier than usual this year, Summers said, something she attributes in part to federal job cuts.

“Our food mobile came back this week with like three sticks of butter on it, and it’s never been completely empty,” Summers said.

She said she’s seen congregants eager to help.

“People are wanting to help more,” Summers said. “I’m getting tons of calls on not only people needing support for pantry help, but just, ‘How can I help the pantry?’”

Upcoming holidays exacerbate concerns

There’s also the matter of upcoming holidays that center around family meals and shared food, including Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas.

Some local groups have started pulling together resources to offer holiday meals in a bag to members of the community who need them for themselves or their families.

Resurrection hosts a Holiday Meal Bag drive every year. Congregants are asked to pack bags with everything needed for a Thanksgiving meal. Summers said they collected 2,000 bags last Sunday at the Leawood church alone.

“Our congregation is just so generous that we’re able to really just share this hope with others,” she said.

Parker with The Tiny Pantry Times is also worried about the upcoming holidays and what time out of school will mean for children who come from low-income families and rely on free or reduced-cost school meals.

“When you have no school lunch and you have no school breakfast and you have no snacks, and you’ve got these kids home, suddenly there’s all this additional need to feed these families,” she said. “These families are suffering, they’re really suffering, and they were suffering before.”

How you can support local food pantries:

Parker said there are several ways people can support her pantry, including business sponsorships, donating food, volunteering or giving money. (For more information about how to help out, visit tinypantrytimes.org.)

“We definitely need help; we need money, we need product,” Parker said. “We need everyone to step up, we really, really do.”

She worries about what will happen if the federal government doesn’t reopen soon or if other programs families rely on are affected by the shutdown.

“To our recipients, this could be the difference of whether they remain healthy or not. We know that food and health go together,” Parker said. “The long-reaching outcomes of this are going to be felt for years if something doesn’t happen very, very soon.”

Officials with both FUUD and Resurrection said donating money is the most helpful during this time, but also welcome food donations. (For more information about how to help out, visit fuudpantry.org and resurrection.church/foodpantry.)

Before the legal ruling on Friday, Johnson County Board of County Commissioners Chair Mike Kelly announced the county will be partnering with the United Way of Greater Kansas City in response to potential SNAP delays.

“No one, especially our children and seniors, should have to worry where their next meal will come from,” the statement read. 

Kelly said those who want to help can donate to United Way, pack meal kits for the organization or bring non-perishable food to next week’s board of county commissioners meeting. It wasn’t immediately clear after the rulings if these plans would continue. 

Find a list of local food pantries in Johnson County here.

Does this issue impact you or someone you know? The Post wants to hear from you. Email us at stories@johnsoncountypost.com.

Kaylie McLaughlin contributed reporting to this story.

Keep reading: How Johnson County Head Start programs are weathering the federal government shutdown

A decade ago today, Sugar and Spice came to live with us here at the Scalzi Compound. They were semi-feral kittens who lived on the porch of my mother-in-law’s neighbor; we were originally going to just get one but the two of them seemed particularly attached to each other, and both Athena and Krissy thought it would be cruel to separate them, so, fine, we took them both. Two kittens at once means quite a bit of chaos, which is how I eventually started calling them “The Scamperbeasts.” They were the founding members of a club that grew to include Smudge, and now, Saja.

Neither Sugar nor Spice seem inclined to make a big deal out of the day — they are both napping right now, Spice four feet from me in the cat tree in my office — but I thought it would be nice to make note of the day anyway. A decade is a lot of time in the life of a cat, and a fair amount in the life of a human, too. I glad our times on earth have intersected. Even if Sugar does randomly hork up weird things onto the carpet on a semi-frequent basis, and Spice regularly wakes me up at 3am to show me her butt. None of us are perfect, now, are we.

— JS

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books. 

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

Upon learning of her company’s closure, Jennifer Kennedy, a customer services account manager with Baker & Taylor, broke the news on October 6 on r/Libraries Reddit community. 

“I just wanted the libraries to know,” Kennedy told 404 Media. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage waiting for books that would never come. I respect them too much for all this nonsense.”

Kennedy’s post prompted other current and former B&T employees to confirm the announcement and express concern for the competitors about to be inundated with requests from the libraries who would be scrambling for new suppliers. 

B&T in Memoriam

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing. 

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through. 

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know. 

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.  

“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added.

B&T did not respond when asked for comment. 

Kennedy has been with B&T for 16 years. At a time when it's uncommon to remain with one company more than a few years, that’s exactly what many of B&T’s employees have been able to do, until now. The same was true of the libraries who did business with them. Andrew Harant, director of Cuyahoga Falls Library had to consider the library's longstanding business relationship with the company against the roughly 20 percent of books the library had ordered from the beginning of the year they had never received.

“For us, that was about 1,500 items,” which Harant told 404 Media that for a small library is a lot of books they were ordering and not receiving. 

Release dates for new books come and go on B&T’s main software platform for viewing and managing orders, Title Source 360. Better known as TS360, Harant realized the platform was updating preordered books never received to on backorder, which was “not sustainable”.

In September, Cuyahoga Falls Library canceled all outstanding orders with B&T. 

“We needed to step up and make sure that we’re getting the books for our patrons that they needed,” he said. 

Cuyahoga Falls Library was fortunate to have an existing account with the other main distributor on the scene, Ingram Content Group. This has been true for many of the libraries 404 Media reached out to for this story.

“The easier part is re-ordering the book,” Shellie Cocking, Chief of Collections and Technical Services for the San Francisco Public Library, told 404 Media. “The harder part is replacing the tools you use to order books.”

Integrated Fallout

Of the ancillary services B&T offered customers, TS360 was Cocking’s favorite. It helped her  streamline collection development tasks, for instance, anticipating how popular a title might be or determining how many quantities of a book to purchase, which for larger libraries with dozens of branches, could be complicated to figure out manually. Once titles were ordered in TS360, B&T shared a Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) record that was automatically shared with the library’s API integration using data derived from B&T’s record set. This product, BTCat, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by OCLC earlier this year. 

OCLC owns WorldCat, the global union catalog of library collections that lets anyone see what libraries own what items. OCLC alleged in a U.S. district court filing that B&T misused their proprietary bibliographic records to populate its own competing cataloguing database. OCLC also accused B&T of inserted clauses into its contracts where there was overlap with the businesses and customers, requiring libraries to grant B&T access to their cataloging records so the libraries could then license the records back to B&T for BTCat. B&T has denied these claims, accusing OCLC of stifling fair competition in an already consolidated marketplace.

Marshall Breeding, an independent consultant who monitors library vendor mergers has been following all of this rather closely. He says B&T's closure creates a number of bottlenecks for libraries, the primary one being whether suppliers like Ingram or Brodart can absorb thousands of libraries as customers all at once. 

“Maybe, maybe not,” Breeding told 404 Media. “It’s going to take them a while to set up the business relationships and technical things that have to be set up for libraries to automatically order books from the providers.”

But one thing is evident. 

“Libraries are kind of in a weaker position just scrambling to find a vendor at all,” he added. 

Less competition in the market makes for more challenging working conditions all around. Just ask Erin Hughes, director of the Wood Ridge Memorial Library in New Jersey, made the move over to Ingram after a series of negative experiences with B&T in 2021 from late and damaged deliveries to customer service calls that went poorly, to say the least. Hughes worries her experience with B&T will happen again, only this time with Ingram. 

Since the Reddit announcement, she's noticed it's a little more difficult to get a rep on the phone and the number of shipments to the library is smaller. But the other way Hughes is seeing the problem play out involves the consortium her library belongs to. While she may have foregone B&T years ago, her network hasn't, which affects the operability of InterLibrary Loan lending.

“The resource sharing is going to be off for a bit,” Hughes told 404 Media. 

Amazon Incoming

If Ingram’s service stagnates due to the B&T cluster, Hughes says she'll use Amazon, which recently launched its own online library hub, offering competitive pricing. One downside, says Hughes, is that it's Amazon. 

“No, we do have a little bit of pause around Amazon,” she added. “But we’re at a point now where Ingram actually does supply most of the books for Amazon. So we’re already in the devil’s pocket. It’s all connected. It’s all integrated. And as much as I personally don’t care for the whole thing, I don’t really see a lot of other options.” 

It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector. It can't be a cautionary tale because market consolidation is in itself a cautionary tale. 

But it’s also worth acknowledging how the timing could not be worse. Library use is way up right now, which is indicative of the times. People are buying less for various reasons. People also seem to like the idea of putting a little friction between their media consumption habits and Big Brother, even at the expense of a little convenience.

“We kind of made our own bed a little bit because we didn’t branch out,” said Hughes. “We didn’t find other solutions to this, and we were relying essentially on two giant companies, one of which folded so quick it was not even funny.” 

Food banks in several states, including Idaho and Maine, are bracing for an influx of visitors. In South Carolina, a state emergency relief fund will be tapped to respond to demand. And in North Dakota, the state’s sole food bank has started an emergency fundraising campaign.

As lawmakers in Congress extend a nearly record-breaking federal government shutdown into possibly another month, massive cuts to critical aid are looming for the nation’s most vulnerable people — including women, postpartum parents and children.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps or SNAP, is set to run out of money beginning Saturday, the start of November. Separately, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, has no long-term funding for November. (The White House tapped some contingency funding for WIC in October, but advocates warn it’s set to run out over the next few weeks.)

SNAP, which has been around for 60 years, ensures nearly 42 million low-income Americans, including nearly 16 million kids, can access money to buy groceries. The funding is typically issued through debit-style cards that are not scheduled to be refilled on November 1 (or throughout the month since some states administer the program on a staggered calendar.)

“The fact that we’re talking about so much money and so many families that depend on it — not having the benefits go out next month is really going to be a crisis,” said Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health at the University of Connecticut.

WIC, developed in the early 1970s, provides some money for food purchases, but it primarily offers resources aimed at making sure low-income new parents can raise healthy babies. That includes prenatal care, nutrition education and breastfeeding support. The program is a lifeline, serving 7 million people, including nearly half of all babies born in the United States.

Cutoffs to one or both programs would be unprecedented — Congress has never let funding for these vulnerable populations lapse, even during previous shutdowns. The ripple effect could be hungry families and pregnant and postpartum parents with fewer resources — including formula in some cases — to keep their babies healthy.

Food banks — the charitable aid system that distributes food to pantries and meal programs around the country and is funded through a range of sources, including private donations — are offering help as panic begins to set in among families. Many existing recipients of food pantries don’t qualify for SNAP because their income threshold, while potentially low, might not be low enough. It means strained resources for more people.

“Food banks and food pantries are going to step in during this period as a little bit of a bridge,” said Eric Hodel, chief executive officer for the Midwest Food Bank, which distributes food that reaches nonprofits in 25 states and runs distribution sites in two international facilities. “At times, we’ve maybe bridged some people for a day or for a week. If we have extended delays in the administration of SNAP, I think at the food bank we’re preparing that we may have to bridge that a little bit longer and further — so we’re continuing to do what we do to the best of our ability.”

But it’s not expected to be enough. Feeding America, the organization that provides a nationwide network of food banks, estimates that food pantries provide about one meal to every nine provided by SNAP. 

“The most challenging and heartbreaking situation for staff members and volunteers is when the pantry shelves are empty, and they must turn people away — veterans, seniors, families with young children. Yet, with increasing demand and the high cost of food, this is already the harsh reality for so many and, without immediate action, will become a reality for countless more people across the country,” said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, in a statement.

It’s a dynamic playing out amid rising grocery prices. Schwartz added: “The charitable food system is there to support families, but it is tiny compared to the amount of money that is available through SNAP.”

That would be particularly relevant for the separate WIC program, explained Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager at the National WIC Association, which advocates for WIC staff who are based around the country. WIC is the nation’s largest breastfeeding support promotion program — a resource that cannot be filled by the charitable food system. The program also provides tailored foods that meet the specific nutritional needs of pregnant and postpartum parents, as well as those of children from infancy through their fifth birthday. It would also be at the whims of potentially inconsistent food offerings at food pantries.

And if a family is using infant formula, that can be the sole source of nutrition for a young child. For the most part, food banks have not historically supplied infant formula, said Menefee-Libey.

“It’s a pretty delicate supply chain, so trying to figure out what it would look like to get additional infant formula to food banks to support families in the event of a widespread disruption to WIC is incredibly challenging,” she said.

Advocates for SNAP benefits note that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers WIC and SNAP, has contingency funds — between $5 billion and $6 billion, according to some estimates, for SNAP alone. The agency claims it’s unable to use those funds for the program. Nearly 60 percent of SNAP beneficiaries are children and older adults.

“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” reads part of a message on the USDA website.

The assertion is being challenged in court. On Tuesday, a coalition of 25 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its plans to cut SNAP access.

“The funds are available to continue SNAP right now without any interruption,” said Democratic Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont during a news conference this week. “So that is a decision the president is making on his own — on his own — to allow people to go hungry.”

While lawmakers in Washington remain deadlocked over how to reopen the government, some are also discussing stand-alone legislation that could continue to fund food assistance. The idea has bipartisan support, but whether there’s enough political will to do something within days is unclear for now. 

USDA tapped $150 million in contingency funds for WIC in October, and then a separate $300 million transfer from tariff funds. Menefee-Libey said if there is no clarity soon, the consequences will include WIC staff being furloughed, which would impact how families are able to access resources.

“I think we’re really fortunate that this is a program with broad bipartisan support, that the White House and USDA have both stepped in to provide quite a bit of support for the program during the shutdown,” she said. “But even all of the extraordinary measures that have been taken only get us through October. It is entirely fair to say that there needs to be a certain amount of urgency to make sure that we don’t see folks losing access to WIC benefits as soon as November.”

Carolyn Vega is associate director of policy analysis at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that seeks to address hunger and poverty and oversees a No Kid Hungry campaign that is focused on ending child hunger.

Vega worries about the different groups who are most likely to suffer, including single-parent households and children who may show up to school hungry. (There are federal food assistance programs offered at schools, including for breakfast and lunch, which are not expected to be impacted by the shutdown.)

“The fastest and best way to address the looming hunger cliff is for USDA to step in and provide the benefits that families are eligible for and are counting on,” Vega said.

This cliff comes as the Trump administration announced in September that it would stop tracking food insecurity in American households through an annual report, claiming through a news release that the work was redundant, costly and politicized. Schwartz criticized the move, and its broader implications amid the shutdown.

“That measure has been around for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been in the field for a pretty long time,” she said. “The fact that they’ve just decided not to measure it — it’s like they’re trying to make it harder to really document the harm that’s occurring.”

With 42 million Americans on the brink of losing their SNAP benefits on November 1, many nonprofits and online content creators are asking parents to rethink what they hand out to trick-or-treaters this Halloween. 

Some groups and influencers are using their platforms to remind followers that funding for SNAP — short for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and often referred to as “food stamps” — is about to run out because of the government shutdown. Handing out nonperishable food alongside candy, they say, can go a long way to help neighbors in need. 

In a viral Facebook post, the United Way Family Resource Center recommended adding things like ramen, microwave macaroni-and-cheese cups, shelf-stable pudding, bags of pretzels and protein bars to the sweet treats in every child’s Halloween basket. “Every little bit helps keep a child’s belly full — and shows that kindness can be just as sweet as candy,” the post says.

Many popular pediatrician influencers and other content creators who focus on child well-being are repeating a similar message. Among their suggestions is placing a supply of Cup Noodles and mini cereal boxes on the doorstep so families can take what they need without stigma. 

Heather Black is the vice president of 211 System Strategy at the United Way. 211 is the three-digit dialing code designated at the federal level to connect people to health and human services in their community — and Black said there has been “very significant increases in calls related specifically to food” to 211 since the government shutdown began four weeks ago. 211 has call centers across the country, reaching virtually all of the United States. Callers are connected with a trained responder who, after completing a short intake, connects them with local resources. 

Black told The 19th that housing, utility assistance and food have always encompassed the top needs of 211 callers. Now, she said, “we are starting to see food needs specifically increase from people who maybe have always been able to rely on SNAP benefits and with the increasing publicity that funding from those benefits will not be available for the month of November, there’s beginning to be a lot of anxiety among families around how they’re going to meet those costs.”

Another group of callers concerned about food insecurity right now, Black said, are federal workers who do not receive SNAP benefits, but who are approaching four weeks without a paycheck while also dealing with increasingly high grocery store prices. 

“This is real life for people,” Black said. That’s where the spirit of the now-viral Halloween posts come into play — and speak of ways to extend that energy even further. 

“I think that’s a really creative idea, the Halloween idea — but that’s just one brief moment in time,” she said. “We’re going to need to do a lot more.”

In addition to encouraging people to support local food pantries and other community groups that help provide groceries to those in need, Black said there are other ways people can help.

“We need to check on our neighbors,” she said, mentioning people with children and older adults in particular. “We need to check in and make sure that people that we might know who would in a situation where their income could either be impacted by the government shutdown where they are now not getting a paycheck or if they have relied in the past on some of these programs where funding has now been paused — we need to check in on those folks.”

Black reminded that giving can also go beyond just donating to local food pantries. She recommended that when checking on people whose access to food might have been impacted by the shutdown in some way, ask if they need any items from the grocery store.

“I really encourage people to think in that way because asking for help is not always easy,” she said.

There are few constants in American politics, but one of them has been older Americans’ faith in Social Security. That might be changing for some, including older women, according to recent focus groups hosted by AARP. 

“They’ll find a way to take it from you,” Dorothy B., a 74-year-old Democrat from North Carolina, said during one of the focus group sessions, held this month as part of the organization’s ongoing research into the priorities and concerns of women 50 and older. Focus group participants are identified by their first name and last initial, according to the rules laid out by AARP.  

“I think it’s definitely going to be reduced,” agreed Claudia C., a 65-year-old Democrat from Washington, who said she decided to receive her Social Security benefits earlier than she might have otherwise as a result. 

“I could have waited until 70 or my full retirement age and gotten a lot more money. But I felt that I should take it now. At least I got the money now,” she said. 

All eight participants in the Democratic or Democratic-leaning focus group raised their hands when asked if they were worried about the future of their Social Security benefits. But the fear and uncertainty older women in the focus groups felt transcended politics. Republican or Republican-leaning women over 65 expressed similar doubts. In a show of hands, five out of the eight women in the GOP focus group indicated they were not confident that Social Security was something they could rely on. 

“They keep telling us, OK, in 2032, there’s no more money in Social Security,” said Amy M., 70, a Republican from Missouri, referring to a projected date in which some experts say President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful law” will cause sharp cuts to the program. “Congress can’t seem to get on the same page about anything,” she said, adding: “I don’t see them doing anything to shore it up and make sure that it’s there. I don’t believe we can count on it.” 

Patricia H., 66, a Republican from New Jersey, noted that while she and her family are financially comfortable, she is reluctant to spend money on things like vacations, just in case. 

“The way the political climate is, you just never know,” she said. 

This uncertainty expressed in these focus groups represents a big departure from long-standing polling on Social Security. Confidence in the future of the program tends to be relatively steady, although the most recent polling has shown a decline. Overall, seven percentage points fewer Americans are confident in the future of Social Security compared with five years ago according to AARP’s polling on the issue. 

Older people already receiving Social Security tend to have the highest confidence in the program. This was the case in a recent AARP poll marking the program’s 90th anniversary. About 65 percent of Americans over 65 said they were somewhat or very confident in Social Security’s future, compared with more pessimism from younger cohorts. About 25 percent of Americans ages 18 through 24 said they were somewhat or very confident in Social Security’s future, and only 20 percent of Americans ages 25 through 34 were somewhat or very confident.

“Once you start receiving the benefit, it really does shift perspective about how you feel about the program,” said Jenn Jones, vice president of Financial Security and Liveable Communities in Government Affairs at AARP. 

Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan, left-leaning think tank, noted the same trend. 

“Typically, as people get older, they become more confident in the future of Social Security – probably because they know more people who receive it and are close to receiving it themselves or start receiving it themselves,” she said. 

Romig said she was “really surprised” by the uncertainty expressed during the focus group and suggested that perhaps this change is a result of diminished confidence in institutions in general. She pointed to a recent report from the Urban Institute indicating a spike in early claims for Social Security benefits after cuts undertaken by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. 

“When people saw chaos at [the Social Security Administration] in how the program was being implemented, they wanted to take the money and run,” Romig said. 

The decision will have a long-term impact on the financial wellbeing of those who claimed the benefit earlier. People who claim Social Security at age 62 instead of age 67, for example, receive 30 percent less in monthly benefits for the rest of their lives. 

Attitudes toward Social Security also tend to be linked to confidence in the economy at large. 

“As costs have risen, you are starting to see a little bit more concern about [Social Security’s] future show up in the data from the same cohort who rely on it heavily for their financial security. With rising costs, with inflation, Social Security doesn’t go as far because things are more expensive, and so you see a lot more sort of anxiety among especially the older cohorts around sort of changes,” Jones said. 

Older women are more vulnerable to these shifts because they receive lower Social Security payments, on average, than men.  

“Typically, women enter their retirement years with less financial security. They’ve been able to save less. This goes back to the pay gap — Women earning around 80 cents on the dollar men get,” she said. 

Another contributor? Women are more likely to be the ones who step up and take on caregiving responsibilities. 

“More often than not, women are the ones who have to step away from the workforce to care for loved ones. That’s not to say that they don’t return, but in those intervening moments, they have lost both income for their day-to-day and income that would have gone to taxes for Social Security,” Jones said. 

As a result, older women may feel the financial pinch and by extension, uncertainty about Social Security’s future, more than men. 

So what will happen to Social Security in the next few years? Both Romig and Jones said they think it is unlikely anything will change for people already receiving their benefits. 

“There’s a pretty strong bipartisan consensus that you just don’t go after people who are already receiving benefits or are close to it,” said Romig. 

However, they stress that the anxiety older Americans, particularly older women feel makes sense. 

“Confidence in all kinds of institutions, has been diminishing over some time, but especially this year, I think confidence in the government to deliver has really taken a huge hit,” Romig said, pointing to chaos caused by federal government layoffs and appointees who are hostile to the departments they have been tapped to lead.