Parents Must Feed Their Children, Consistent with U.S. Law, Science, and Major Religions * The Gateway Pundit * by Antonio Graceffo

Since President Trump signed changes to SNAP, Democratic lawmakers and sympathetic media outlets have repeated a familiar script: the President “took food away” from millions of Americans. To evoke an emotional response and frame the issue as a moral, even theological, question, headlines repeatedly focus on the number of children affected.

“Mean old trillionaire Elon Musk and evil Grinch Trump stole food from children” is easier to sell than saying, “Able-bodied adults now have to work part-time to receive government benefits, and the administration is requiring parents to take responsibility for feeding their own children.”

What that framing leaves out is the foundation of the American system itself. The United States is not a socialist country, and no citizen has an unconditional claim on the labor of others simply by virtue of need. SNAP is, technically, a legal entitlement, but only for those who meet the eligibility rules that Congress writes and rewrites. No one has a permanent claim to a particular income threshold or set of conditions. Congress can, and just did, raise the bar.

America operates on personal responsibility, paired with a generous safety net for those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves: the disabled, the elderly, and the temporarily unemployed. That safety net was never intended to become a permanent way of life. Yet mandatory spending, the budget category covering Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and similar programs, has grown from roughly 40 percent of the federal budget in the early 1970s to about 60 percent today.

Heritage Foundation researcher Robert Rector has documented that “multiple generations have grown up dependent on government transfers” and that “half of aid goes to individuals who have received food stamps for 8.5 years or more.” Evidence of multigenerational dependency is supported by the data.

Households in the bottom income quintile have higher teen births than higher-income households, and more than 60 percent of young, unmarried mothers already live in poverty, with most entering public assistance within a year of the child’s birth. With each generation spanning roughly two decades, the nearly six decades since the launch of the modern welfare state have provided more than enough time for families in the bottom quintile to cycle through three or four generations of dependency.

Media coverage of the changes has centered on CBO’s estimate that 2.4 million people will lose participation in an average month over the next decade, framed as a government simply cutting food from the mouths of children. An estimated 8.8 million people became newly subject to the requirement, meaning the 2.4 million figure largely consists of people who voluntarily choose not to meet the new work, volunteer, or study requirements.

To deflect the argument that losing benefits is a matter of personal choice and responsibility, two arguments are commonly made. First, some people will lose benefits due to paperwork glitches. But that argument is true of every benefit program that has ever existed and is not unique to a requirement that people work to receive benefits. The second argument is structural: people doing gig work may find it difficult to prove they are working to comply with the rules. While that may be true, nothing is preventing them from obtaining a qualifying part-time job in addition to their gig work. This would give them a job, gig income, and government benefits, improving their standard of living.

The underlying rule requires able-bodied adults ages 18 to 54 without dependents to work 80 hours a month, about 20 hours a week, to keep benefits beyond three months in a three-year period. The requirement is not limited to paid employment. Volunteering also counts, as do education or training through an approved program. That base rule already existed; the new law raised the age ceiling to 65 and narrowed the parental exemption.

The media has also criticized the administration’s termination of required funding for SNAP-Ed, the nutrition education grant program, even as the federal government has launched broader nutrition education and public health initiatives. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins released updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal nutrition standard that shapes school meals, military food, and public dietary guidance.

Kennedy and Rollins have also pushed states to restrict SNAP purchases of foods deemed unhealthy, secured voluntary industry commitments to remove artificial dyes, and redirected $1.8 billion annually toward combating childhood chronic disease. Democrats oppose the program, arguing that people receiving benefits should be allowed to make their own food choices, and some articles have claimed that Kennedy is preventing poor children from having birthday cakes.

However, the restriction only applies to SNAP purchases. Parents are free to buy a birthday cake, beer, liquor, or cigarettes with cash. The liberal counterargument is that they can’t afford a birthday cake. However, as an economist, this author would like to point out that the average birthday cake in the United States costs about $35. If parents set aside about $3 per month, they could pay for their child’s birthday cake without relying on SNAP.

Kennedy also relaunched the Presidential Fitness Test for public schoolchildren under a 2025 executive order, launched a medical school nutrition education partnership to train future physicians, and established the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program to fund rural hospitals and MAHA-aligned state policies. This was again opposed by the same people who supported vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and mandatory gym closures during COVID and who generally favor expensive medications over health advice encouraging people to lose weight and exercise.

Data from HHS and the CDC confirm that lower-income groups have a higher prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors, including obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. A lower family income-to-poverty ratio is also independently associated with higher odds of diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, and all-cause mortality. Many of these risks could be mitigated through proper diet and exercise.

The left’s accusations that the Trump administration is evil for not feeding children ignore the fact that the responsibility of parents to care for their children is clearly established in U.S. law, science, Christianity, and Judaism.

American law imposes an enforceable duty on parents to support their children through every state’s child support statutes. The behavioral sciences recognize parental sacrifice for offspring survival as one of the most consistent patterns across species. And the major religions agree on this point despite their many differences.

Christianity teaches that a man who fails to provide for his household “has denied the faith” and is worse than an unbeliever. Judaism’s Talmud treats feeding one’s own children as a father’s binding moral duty. Islam’s concept of nafaqah obligates a father to provide his children’s food and clothing, a duty rooted directly in the Quran. Law, science, and faith converge on the same point: children are the responsibility of their parents.

The one ideology that has historically argued otherwise is communism/socialism/Marxism. Marx and Engels wrote openly in the Communist Manifesto of wanting to “rescue education” from the family and replace it with a collective one, a vision in which the state, not the parent, becomes the final authority over a child’s upbringing.

It is frightening that this entire SNAP debate hinges on Democrats and liberals opposing the Republican positions of personal responsibility; requiring able-bodied adults to work or study; parental responsibility for children; and encouraging the bottom 20 percent of income earners to exercise, work, eat a healthy diet, and lose weight so they can live longer.