As the holiday season begins, food banks across the nation are still struggling to keep up with the need.

That's partly fueled by the disruption in SNAP benefits during the government shutdown.

But as William Brangham reports, there will be more restrictions and cutbacks coming.

The supplies at food banks nationwide are already low, but as they've been telling us, demand

for their assistance is still climbing. We spoke with the head of a few of them around the country

as the shutdown came to a close.

It's been a rough 20-25. We've received a reduction in the amount of food that we've been getting year over year when it comes to federal programs.

Although we're struggling to make sure that we have the supply, we want to make sure that anyone in need knows we can help.

Even before this announcement of the government shutdown and Snap not being

funded as of November 1st, we had consistently seen an increase across our service area of 27%

to 30% of neighbor visits to our agency partners in our service area. That just put an even more strain on an R-80 weakened system.

Six months ago, we were giving you enough food for your whole household.

Now we're giving you half of the food, and you still have to feed every member of that household with half the food.

All of our nonprofit partners that we distribute food to have pretty

much just been requesting more food. If they come to us and they're typically picking up

10,000 servings of food per week, they're hoping to get 15,000 servings per week. And multiply that

by 110 nonprofits. And, you know, we're looking at massive

numbers of food that's being requested. We prepare about 17,000 meals a day across Washington,

D.C. We've already increased our daily production of healthy meals by about 500 daily meals

so far this month.

And we have frontline partners all across the city that are reporting 50 to 100% increases in

turnout. We're a native-led nonprofit organization that's based on the Blackfeet tribal community.

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