The Shutdown’s Over. Trump May Still Cut Food Stamps.

Trump now appears to see SNAP as a political threat. “We can reform SNAP, and I think we should,” Trump said on Monday night in a Fox News interview, even as some Democrats readied a deal with Republicans to end the shutdown. “It really puts the country in jeopardy,” he added, claiming that people leave their jobs because “it’s easier” to be poor and rely on income-limited programs like these.

The shutdown ended on Thursday after a record 43 days. But SNAP recipients were still awaiting their payments—and Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, dismissed these concerns in a CNN interview on Thursday. “SNAP is a broken program. SNAP is full of corruption,” Rollins said, claiming the administration had found the names of 186,000 dead people on SNAP lists in 29 states—but she offered no evidence that the dead people were receiving benefits.

This continued focus on food stamps, even after the end of the shutdown, raises red flags. “It’s something that I worry about,” said Benjamin Chrisinger, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Wellbeing. “Is this setting up a bigger undermining of the program?” That would have enormous repercussions throughout the country, Chrisinger said. “To fully call the program into question is quite concerning because it is our main food insecurity program. That is all we’ve got.”