Saturday may see cutoffs in food and heating aid as federal shutdown strains safety net programs

Thousands of families and individuals in Cambridge and Somerville face the possible loss of food stamps and help paying heat bills on Saturday unless the federal shutdown ends and Congress authorizes funding, state and local officials say. The Head Start program providing preschool education to 183 low-income children in both cities is also at risk of losing federal funding in December.

The food stamp program helps 6,700 households with very low income in Cambridge and 4,800 in Somerville buy groceries. There are about 16,000 people in those households.

Though the outlook seemed grim a week before federal funding was due to end, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a “contingency fund” that could fill most but not all the gap: $5 billion to $6 billion of the $8 billion needed nationally every month, according to information from the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute prepared for local antihunger advocates.

The state could also step in, though governor Maura Healey said Thursday that there was no way Massachusetts could come up with money needed to replace federal funding for the 655,000 Massachusetts food stamp recipients: about $212 million a month, according to the public interest law firm. Yet the state does have a “rainy day fund,” the law firm said, adding that if necessary the state Legislature should use it for food stamps. The fund is $8 billion to $9 billion, said Rachel Plummer, associate director of the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, the city’s antipoverty agency.

Fuel assistance at risk

Also in jeopardy from the shutdown is the fuel assistance program, which helps more than 1,200 low-income households in Cambridge and Somerville pay for heat during the winter. The federal government won’t pay for the benefits after the end of this month if the shutdown continues, though Massachusetts can use leftover money from previous years.

That apparently won’t go far; Cambridge is currently limiting help to people with heat “emergencies,” the city says on its website. That means no heat, a utility shutoff notice or less than three days of fuel supply. The city is encouraging people to apply for the program anyway for the heating season that begins Saturday, but also says there will be delays in processing applications and issuing payments.

Besides the threat to benefits, the government laid off federal workers this year who administered the fuel assistance program and has ordered employees who continue to work during the shutdown not to work on fuel assistance. The Trump administration sought to eliminate the program from next year’s budget, but Congress included it.

Difficult to predict

Though warnings proliferated, the situation was in flux on Thursday, with Cambridge spokesperson Jeremy Warnick saying it was “difficult to predict what may happen in the next week” and “there are avenues for these benefits to continue and we’ll be monitoring the situation carefully.” He referred to “critical safety net programs” and said the “avenues” were primarily possible financial help from the city and the state, he said, referring to Head Start.

David Gibbs, executive director of the Community Action Agency of Somerville, Somerville’s antipoverty agency, said Head Start might keep going for a few weeks with money from Cambridge and the state if Congress doesn’t fund the program after Dec. 1, but then it will end. “It’s really up in the air,” Gibbs said.

A temporary pause may make it difficult to restart, Gibbs said. Families and employees may have found other jobs and different< preschool programs, he said. Somerville administers Head Start in both cities, Gibbs said. The Cambridge program serves 68 children and Somerville, 115.

Food for children will end

Head Start meals programs, which provide daily breakfast, lunch and two snacks to children, will also run out of money at the end of this month, Gibbs said. “For a lot of our kids this is their food,” he said.

He said “an awful lot” of the antipoverty agency’s clients are immigrants, “whether with status or not, we don’t care.”

“They are frightened,” Gibbs said. “In many cases they are not sending their kids to classes or schools.”

The uncertainty itself has alarmed recipients of food stamps and other programs, said Plummer of CEOC. “There’s a looming threat hanging over them,” she said. A “panicked” food stamps beneficiary on Thursday told Plummer that she was considering not paying rent so she could buy food, Plummer said.

We would have gone hungry”

CEOC was a co-sponsor of a candidates forum Thursday at which clients affected by lack of affordable housing and food, immigration crackdowns and mental health problems spoke about their experiences before candidates made statements.

One mother of three, identified by her first name, Racquel, said: “There have been weeks when I had to decide between paying a bill and putting food on the table. No parent should ever have to make that choice.”

“Food pantries are places of hope. Without them we would have gone hungry many times,” Racquel said.

Food pantry need is double

Plummer said the number of people who come to CEOC’s Wednesday food pantry had doubled since January: to 300 from 150. If food stamp payments end Saturday, food pantries will be overwhelmed, she said.

“Our fear is that the federal government will not do anything and the state will not be able to fill the gap,” Plummer said. The loss of food stamps will have “a reverberating effect throughout the community” because recipients patronize grocery stores, she said.

The Cambridge and Somerville antipoverty agencies themselves are facing cutbacks. Federal grant money that supports staffing and other administrative expenses ran out Oct. 1. “We are spending down what we have,” Gibbs said. “We’ll be out of that in a few weeks.” The grant program also pays for services that help people avoid homelessness. “It’s what makes us a community action agency, he said.

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