In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest-ever federal shutdown came to a close late last Wednesday as Congress finally managed to agree upon a deal to reopen the government. Government agencies are now beginning to resume operations, employees are returning to work, and federal payments are beginning to flow once again.
Experts say, though, that the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration — which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.
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“When agencies like the USDA or FDA halt or scale back operations there are ripple effects through the supply chain because of the effect on crop payments, insurance, inspections, and nutrition programs,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist studying food insecurity and climate change at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “These, along with unpredictable policies, can erode public trust and market transparency, weaken these support systems, and increase vulnerabilities to shocks like disease outbreaks or extreme climate events.”
Grist spoke to federal workers, farmers, economists, food benefits recipients, and analysts throughout the country to piece together how the longest shutdown in U.S. history is likely to affect America’s food system in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Who eats what
Among the furloughed federal staffers was Ethan Roberts, who represents the bargaining unit employees at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president and works for the Department of Agriculture as a physical science technician. After six weeks out of office, Roberts returned to work at the Agricultural Research Service in Peoria, Illinois on Thursday.
Going into the shutdown, Roberts says his lab “mothballed” nearly all of their projects, including their work on fungal diseases, such as fumonisin toxin and wheat scab blight, in addition to finding new uses for crops.
“Basically, we just lost, like, a month and a half worth of progress and work, and a lot of those things will have to be restarted,” said Roberts.
Some of Roberts’ colleagues had to file for unemployment to pay their bills. Many were forced to look for other work. More still might not return to the USDA at all. The losses only add to the cuts that the Trump administration made before the shutdown. Upwards of 20,000 USDA staffers, or roughly a fifth of the agency’s workforce, have lost their jobs this year. Only a small group of staffers in Roberts’ lab stayed on through the shutdown to continue work that the USDA considered critical, including the cryogenic preservation of the largest publicly available collection of microorganisms in the world.
The consequences of the lab’s dwindling administrative capacity will eventually reach the country’s ranchers and farmers. “It is our job to find new products, new uses, new everything for the crops that farmers produce,” said Roberts. “So if we’re not working on that for a month and a half, that’s time we weren’t working on solutions and implementations to assist these farmers.”
Fewer employees at labs like Roberts’, of course, also means that the USDA will fall further behind on agricultural research. “The United States was definitely the leader in agricultural research in the entire world, and that’s slipping out of our grasp,” he said. “In terms of ripple effects, it can’t get much bigger than that.”
This growing exodus of federal workers doesn’t just compromise research capacity, but also food safety oversight, putting Americans’ health at risk. Leading into the shutdown, federal food safety agencies had already faced significant staff losses threatening their ability to ensure the safety of the national food supply. Between January and April, the Food and Drug Administration lost around 4,000 staffers to mass layoffs, according to government data. Operational slowdowns during the shutdown then limited routine inspections, facility oversight, and ongoing food safety investigations.
Where that food comes from
Quietly tucked into the stopgap funding bill that will keep the government open through January 30 was a one-year extension of the 2018 farm bill and an annual USDA funding bill.
The two bills will get essential services — think farm loans, conservation assistance, and local food grants — operating after weeks of disruption. But the appropriations bill also cut more than $75 million from conservation technical assistance programs, while the farm bill extension removed payment limits for cost-sharing conservation programs. Combined, this is both bad news for climate-weary farmers and could result in inequitable distributions of those funding pots, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
All told, farm bankruptcies are soaring, and farm debt is set to hit a record high this year. Farmers are currently being squeezed by low commodity crop prices, spiking interest rates, struggles following several successive federal funding cuts, blowback from the president’s tariffs on markets, and stubbornly high costs of energy and fertilizer, among other inputs. Livestock producers are confronting supply chain constraints, persistent droughts, and rising production costs. Climate change and extreme weather have been amplifying all of these existing issues — as has the shutdown. “When the government is closed for 43 days, it really does stunt the possibility of federal policy to provide more timely solutions,” said Lavender.
“The negative effects of the shutdown on the U.S. agricultural industry, coupled with climate change driven disruptions to agriculture in the U.S., and globally, could create crop deficits and contribute to rising prices of food,” said Alla Semenova, an agricultural economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Other typical effects of delayed climate adaptation include rising food production and transportation costs, falling nutritional quality of foods, and deteriorating population health.
The shutdown also further exposed the U.S. agricultural sector’s high reliance on federal financial assistance, such as farm subsidies and loan programs. That reliance, warns Semenova, is at risk of only increasing over the next two years because of climate change.
“As the government shutdown froze financial assistance to farmers during the critical harvesting and crop planning season,” Semenova said, it has created “potential risks to the U.S. food supply chain in 2026 and 2027. Without adequate financial assistance from the federal government, the nation’s food is on track to become more expensive and more limited in supply.”
On Monday, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announced that the administration will release another tranche of the billions in emergency assistance to help struggling farmers authorized by Congress last December. According to Vaden, the agency is now opening up applications for another installment of a $16 billion pool for weather-related aid.
Which communities get left behind
The effects of the shutdown have already begun reverberating throughout the supply chain. Nearly 42 million Americans who rely on programs like SNAP spent weeks waiting on their supplemental grocery stipends, while the Trump administration fought a series of legal battles to hold off on paying those benefits during the shutdown.
According to Parker Gilkesson, a senior policy analyst who researches SNAP at the Center for Law and Social Policy, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Even a single week suspension of the food stamp dollars, says Gilkesson, can drive lasting effects on everything from supplier relationships to business revenue.
She’s also near certain it will further inflate America’s rising food insecurity problem. New SNAP work requirements taking effect, alongside historically unprecedented program funding changes — now coupled with USDA warnings of an imminent program overhaul — threaten to push the nation’s food safety net to a breaking point. But tracking the fallout on food access will be close to impossible. That’s because, preceding the shutdown, the Trump administration got rid of the nation’s primary tool that would do so. “When SNAP shrinks, the whole food economy shrinks. And it doesn’t just affect households who receive SNAP. It affects every household,” said Gilkesson.
Jared Grant, an agricultural economist who specializes in food security at Ohio State University, says that the shutdown exposed vulnerabilities throughout the nation’s supply chain that could shift consumer behavior in the grocery stores and slow overall consumer spending. A new preliminary report from the University of Michigan found that consumer confidence dropped to its lowest point since June 2022 this month, largely driven by the shutdown.
“The government shutdown is going to affect consumers in their perception and behavior,” said Grant. “They might think they see higher prices on certain items.”
That will have a knock-on effect: When consumers slow their spending, that in turn can slow economic growth, which ramps up pressure on the labor market, strains public services, and widens income gaps.
It wasn’t so much the shutdown in isolation that created the biggest problems for America’s food system, says Rodger Cooley, executive director of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, but the policies that fueled the congressional gridlock to begin with. The loss of healthcare subsidies has trickle-down effects for things like household economic stability, which is directly tied to food access and affordability. And the administration’s funding priorities for Trump’s hardline immigration enforcement agenda, which Democrats and Republicans were staunchly divided on during the government impasse, is what Cooley considers the biggest issue impeding the future of the food system, as the immigration crackdown continues to throttle the farm and food sectors with labor shortages that risk supply shortfalls and sticker shock.
“Leading up to the shutdown, many, many programs and policies had been turned over, shut down, and inverted. Food banks, local governments, and state governments just are in constant emergency pivot modes, and now the administration is moving massive amounts of demand back to the private sector and local government sector to fill in that gap, which is impossible,” said Cooley. “There’s a lot of ‘Okay, what is next? What even is [Trump’s] vision of an operational food system?’”
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