America's Working Poor
- Gael MacLean
- 11 minutes ago
- 14 min read
Escalating a manufactured crisis
“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.”— Nelson Mandela
Here’s what I see from the food bank: families who work forty hours a week, sometimes more, arriving in cars held together by hope and duct tape. They’re spending more than half their income on rent, forced to choose between housing and basic necessities like food and healthcare. They’re teachers who got seven weeks of paid leave after Hurricane Helene—the lucky ones who could navigate FEMA’s bureaucratic labyrinth because they had time. And they’re medical assistants who gave up on federal aid after their husbands died because two-hour phone wait times became just one stressor too many in a life already crushed by grief and logistics.
This is the thin line I’m talking about. Not a line between stability and homelessness, really. More like a tightrope made of twine, fraying in real-time. One many of us are walking these days.
The Numbers That Don’t Lie
In January 2024, 771,480 Americans were experiencing homelessness—an 18 percent jump from the year before. But here’s what makes my stomach drop: families entering homelessness surged 39 percent in that single year. These aren’t the street-corner stereotypes. The new homeless are working people—often families with children—doubled up with relatives or stuck in extended-stay hotels, moving from place to place, school to school, never feeling “at home.” They have no home.
Only 35 affordable rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income households. Think about that math. It’s not a housing shortage—it’s architectural violence. There isn’t a single state where someone working full-time at minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. In South Dakota, the cheapest state, you’d need to work 66 hours a week. Seventeen states require $30 an hour just for average rent on a two-bedroom.
“People who are homeless are not social inadequates. They are people without homes.”— Sheila McKechnie
I volunteer at the food bank, so I saw what happened when the Trump administration abruptly slashed $500 million from The Emergency Food Assistance Program in spring 2025—a quarter of the program’s 2024 funding. Between May and September, 4,304 deliveries were canceled across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and D.C.—nearly 94 million pounds of food that never reached hungry people. That’s not counting the deliveries that were never even scheduled for later in the year.
The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, which serves one of the nation’s poorest regions, lost over $400,000 worth of pork, chicken, cheese, dried fruit, milk, and eggs. They used to give out 25-pound food packages. By summer, some had shrunk to half that. One woman picking up food told reporters they hadn’t received meat “since way before the summer.” When chicken finally arrived—from a donation, not the government—it barely made up for the 74,000 pounds that never showed up in June. ¹
The Disaster Tax on Being Poor
Hurricane Helene exposed something uglier than flood damage: in the hardest-hit rural North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much FEMA housing assistance as lower-income ones.
Income isn’t supposed to matter for FEMA aid—in theory, a couple in a million-dollar home and another in a starter house should qualify for the same help. But theory collapses under bureaucratic weight. The application process is onerous and overwhelming, especially for people with fewer resources, less time off work, or less experience navigating complicated finances.
Take the Hills and the Parkers—two couples whose homes were destroyed by Helene’s floodwaters. The Hills were public school teachers who received nearly $40,000 from FEMA, just shy of the maximum. The Parkers got $2,210 for two months of rental assistance and gave up pursuing more after Michelle’s husband died and FEMA wait times ballooned to two or three hours following the Texas floods. “I got tired of calling,” she said.
The Hills had something crucial: seven weeks of full pay while schools were closed, giving them time to navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy during a crucial window when for many others, pursuing aid felt insurmountable. Susie Hill acknowledged this bluntly: “Unfortunately, I think it is a bit of a socioeconomic situation where we have jobs, where we know people that know people, that maybe have money or that are able to help us, or that have the skills to help us, where other people are just trying to make it day to day.” ²
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”— Herman Melville
Meanwhile, FEMA lost hundreds of workers under the Trump administration, including much of a team trying to improve the online application process. That team had been working to modernize a 27-year-old back-end system. In January, they had at least 10 people; by summer, they were down to two. The rest took deferred resignation offers or were pushed out. More than 180 current and former FEMA employees signed a letter warning Congress that cuts risk kneecapping disaster response capabilities. The administration suspended most of them.
Housing, Healthcare, and the Systematic Dismantling
ProPublica obtained drafts of two unpublished HUD rules that would fundamentally restructure how America houses its poorest residents. Experts estimate 4 million people could lose federal housing assistance under these plans. The rules would allow local housing authorities and landlords to impose work requirements and time limits—residents could be required to work up to 40 hours a week, with time limits as short as two years before losing assistance. HUD expects 750 public housing authorities and 3,500 landlords to implement these restrictions, likely starting in conservative areas. ³
But most non-elderly, non-disabled households receiving assistance already include one or more people who work. Their jobs just come with limited hours and poverty wages. So working families could still lose housing aid. And there’s little evidence that work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency among housing assistance recipients.
“Poverty isn’t a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”— Rutger Bregman
The second rule targets mixed-status families—households where some members are citizens or legal residents and others aren’t. Currently, these families can live in public housing with prorated benefits, but the proposed rule would make them completely ineligible, affecting roughly 20,000 mixed-status families, 16,000 of which include children. HUD expects virtually all of them to give up assistance out of “fear of the family being separated,” according to their own analysis.
Here’s the kicker: because the rule would replace families receiving prorated assistance with fully eligible families, it will increase government rental assistance costs by up to $370 million annually. But HUD won’t initially increase funding to local authorities, so they’ll have to offer fewer vouchers or leave units vacant. It’s expensive cruelty.
The Affordable Care Act sits in similar crosshairs. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act—signed July 4, 2025—represents the largest rollback of federal support for healthcare in American history, cutting over $1 trillion from health programs. Enhanced tax credits that help people afford ACA insurance are set to expire at the end of 2025, which alone will cause an additional 4-5 million people to lose insurance. Premiums could more than double—on average, a 114% increase—with some families seeing their monthly costs jump from $800 to $3,000. A 25-year-old barista making $32,000 a year might see her monthly premium rise from $180 to $900. 6 She won’t see it for long, though. She’ll drop the coverage. She has to. And when the inevitable happens—the infection, the accident, the thing you can’t predict or prevent—she’ll face a choice between a hospital bill and rent. Most people choose rent. Until the collections calls start. Until the landlord checks credit scores. Then there’s no choice left at all. ⁶
The OBBB also guts Medicaid through work requirements, reporting obligations, and restrictions on provider taxes states use to finance their programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 16 million more people will be uninsured by 2034: 7.8 million from Medicaid cuts, 4.2 million from expired ACA tax credits, and the rest from various restrictions. After the ACA was implemented in 2013, California’s uninsurance rate dropped from 17% to 6%. Analysts now project it could rise back above 10%. Rural areas will be disproportionately harmed, with experts predicting closures of rural hospitals and clinics. North Dakota alone has 13 hospitals on the chopping block once federal funding dries up. ⁴
The OBBB slashes at least $120 billion-$187 billion from SNAP through 2034—a 20% cut—expanding work requirements and removing protections while requiring states to contribute more money to the program for the first time in decades. Feeding America estimates that for every meal food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. You can’t math your way out of that gap with donations. The majority of people who receive food assistance also receive Medicaid, so cuts to both programs force people to choose between healthcare and groceries. ⁵
One 76-year-old man in Albuquerque caring for his autistic son said his SNAP benefits shrank from $600 a month after the pandemic to just over $100. Food banks help fill the gap—when we have food, which increasingly we don’t.
The Ones You Don’t See
Here’s what makes the working homeless so dangerous politically: they’re invisible. They’re doubled up with family or friends, living in unsustainable conditions in extended-stay hotels, moving from place to place. They don’t sleep on park benches where you can count them in January’s Point-in-Time survey. They work. They drop their kids at school. They look like everyone else until the moment they don’t—until the eviction, until the medical bill, until the car breaks down and there’s no money to fix it because rent was due and groceries cost $200 more than last month.
More than 20 million Americans lived in deep poverty in 2021—6.2% of the total population. Women’s share of newly homeless individuals jumped from 31% (2015-2023) to 45% (2023-2024). The crisis is changing shape and accelerating.
“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.”— Mother Teresa
Jessica Bruder documented this in Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century—older Americans living in vehicles and working brutal seasonal jobs because retirement became unaffordable. The book became a film in 2020 starring Frances McDormand and won three Oscars. It’s a drama based on the lives of real people. They’re in the film. Their numbers grow each year. Adults over 50 now represent the fastest-growing segment of people experiencing homelessness, pushed out by rising housing costs, growing medical bills, and an insufficient social safety net.
“The last free place in America is a parking spot,” Bruder wrote. And: “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.”
I met some of these people in Quartzsite, Arizona, one winter—retired teachers and former nurses living in RVs in the desert. You may have met them too, back when they were your neighbors, before rent priced them out.
The USDA canceled an annual food insecurity survey, calling it “redundant” and “politicized,” so we’ll have even less data on who’s hungry and why. Making the invisible even harder to count.
In Louisiana’s rural parishes, people line up for food distributions where produce has already gone bad by the time it reaches them. In Albuquerque, a woman pieces together what she can from multiple distribution sites across the city because her SNAP card doesn’t last halfway through the month. In North Carolina, a 23-year-old drives 45 minutes from her grandfather’s house—the nearest grocery store—to pick up donations, then points out a cantaloupe so frozen and soft her mom will feed it to the pigs “because people can’t really eat those.”
Food banks are reporting declines in private contributions and volunteers. Grocery stores that managed inventory more efficiently during the pandemic now have less leftover food to donate. AmeriCorps, which helps staff mobile food pantries, has been disrupted by other Trump cuts. And is now closed with the shutdown.
Meanwhile, HUD Secretary Scott Turner and other Trump officials wrote that welfare is “a lifelong trap of dependency” and work requirements impart a “renewed sense of purpose for millions of Americans.” This from the people engineering a system where households spending half their income or more on housing are forced to forego groceries, medicine, and healthcare—people who are already working but simply can’t access affordable housing.
When the Safety Net Workers Need the Safety Net
And here’s the part that should terrify anyone paying attention: the numbers we’re looking at are already obsolete. They don’t account for what’s coming.
Since the beginning of 2025, approximately 300,000 workers have been cut from the federal workforce through layoffs, buyouts, and resignations under DOGE. By May, over 58,500 people had been laid off and more than 76,000 accepted buyouts from a civilian workforce of 2.4 million. Now, as of October 2025, approximately 750,000 non-essential federal workers sit on furlough during the government shutdown—not receiving pay. The administration has announced it will use the shutdown as an opportunity to initiate further reductions in force, with agencies already sending termination notices to furloughed employees. ⁷
These aren’t just statistics. They’re the 20,000 workers cut from the Department of Health and Human Services. The more than 25,000 IRS employees let go. FEMA workers who were helping disaster survivors navigate aid applications. USDA employees who coordinated food bank deliveries. HUD staff who processed housing vouchers. Cybersecurity specialists at the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA. Employees at the Departments of Education, Treasury, Commerce, Energy, and the EPA. The people who ran the safety net programs are about to need them—and those programs are being eviscerated at the exact moment their own families will require them.
Think about the math: a GS-7 federal employee in a mid-cost area might make $50,000-$55,000 a year. With rent at $1,500-$2,000 for a modest two-bedroom, they’re already housing cost-burdened. Now add a sudden job loss, severance tied up in legal battles over illegal terminations, and a jobs market where “former federal employee” might be a liability rather than an asset in certain sectors.
They’ll burn through savings—if they have any—in two, maybe three months. The 750,000 furloughed workers aren’t receiving pay right now. Many don’t know if they still have jobs or if the RIF notices arriving at agencies mean their positions are being permanently eliminated. A woman who processed SNAP applications for fifteen years might find herself needing SNAP. An IRS auditor might discover his unemployment claim is taking months because there’s nobody left to process it. Then come the impossible choices: rent or food, health insurance or utilities.
Their kids’ schools will start seeing more families doubled up in apartments, more addresses changing mid-semester, more children flagged as “unstably housed” under McKinney-Vento. Teachers will notice students falling asleep in class—not because they stayed up too late, but because they spent the night in a car and the parking lot lights made sleep impossible. School counselors will see the signs: kids hoarding cafeteria food in backpacks, wearing the same clothes repeatedly, giving vague answers about where they live now. Some families will move constantly, hopscotching between relatives’ couches and cheap motels, trying to stay one step ahead of complete destitution. Their children will attend three, four, five different schools in a single year, never catching up, never making friends, never feeling safe.
We’ll see them soon at the food bank. Professional families who never imagined they’d be standing in line for emergency groceries. People with bachelor’s degrees and work experience who can’t find employment because entire departments have been eliminated, because agencies have hiring freezes, because “we’re restructuring” means “we’re not hiring anyone who might have institutional knowledge.”
And when they need FEMA assistance after the next disaster? When they need housing vouchers because the unemployment ran out? When they need Medicaid because COBRA costs $2,000 a month they don’t have? They’ll discover firsthand what it’s like to navigate the depleted, understaffed, deliberately obstructed systems they once helped administer.
The current homelessness numbers—771,480 in January 2024—are about to surge. The food bank lines are about to get longer. And the people joining them will include the ones who used to process the paperwork.
The Architecture of Collapse
This isn’t accidental. It’s manufactured. Cut food aid and people spend grocery money on rent, then can’t afford both, then lose housing. Restrict housing assistance, add work requirements, and working poor still lose housing because wages are too low. Cut healthcare subsidies and medical bills force impossible choices, create debt, trigger eviction. Slash Medicaid and people can’t afford treatment, get sicker, can’t work, lose everything. Make FEMA harder to navigate and disaster survivors with fewer resources get less help, can’t rebuild, become homeless. Eliminate food insecurity surveys to hide the scale of the crisis and justify more cuts. Fire federal workers to swell the ranks of the vulnerable and overwhelm the diminished safety net.
The result? An estimated 11.8 million people will lose health insurance coverage. Care will be less accessible. Patients will forego seeing physicians. Acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions.
And when people lose health insurance, when they can’t afford food, when disaster aid becomes an obstacle course designed to exhaust them—where do they end up? Hospitals that can’t turn them away. Emergency rooms. The most expensive, least effective intervention possible. Uncompensated care costs that strain hospitals and state budgets, particularly in rural areas already on the edge. ⁸
Here’s what’s maddening: preventing homelessness by paying for rent or covering costs to help people stay housed is cheaper than addressing homelessness once it occurs. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates it would cost $9.6 billion—nearly triple current spending—to provide permanent housing for every household who stayed in an emergency shelter in 2022. That’s not cheap. But it’s a fraction of what we’ll spend on emergency room visits, incarceration, and crisis management. And golf tournaments.
Housing First—giving people safe, permanent housing with no preconditions, then offering voluntary supportive services—is proven effective. But Trump and other Republicans are abandoning this evidence-based approach in favor of measures like arresting people for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go. That only punishes people for being homeless. It doesn’t help them find stable housing. It just makes us all feel better about not having to see them.
From Where I Stand
I see this every day at the food bank. Donations drying up while demand surges. People who work full-time still going hungry. Families making impossible calculations: rent or food, medical care or heat, all three somehow with not enough money for even one.
Some people come after dark, timing their arrival for when fewer volunteers are around. Others ask if there’s a back entrance. Once, a professional I’d seen at a community event came through the line—we both looked away, a silent agreement to preserve the fiction that this encounter never happened. The shame is its own kind of poverty.
The children are the hardest part. Kids doing homework in car backseats under dome lights. Teachers who recognize the same outfit three days running and quietly slip extra snacks into backpacks. School nurses who’ve become de facto social workers, tracking which students are “staying with relatives”—the coded language for homelessness. Under McKinney-Vento, schools must identify and support children experiencing housing instability, but that only works if families admit the instability exists. Many don’t. Can’t. The shame again.
One food bank administrator in Louisiana said it plainly: “Those are real people on the other end of those cuts.”
The line between housed and homeless, between fed and hungry, between covered and medically bankrupt—it’s not a line at all. It’s a trapdoor. And they’re sawing through the hinges while people are still standing on it, then calling it a budget exercise, a return to personal responsibility, a restoration of American values.
“Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It’s time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.”— Marian Wright Edelman
The thin line is getting thinner. When the OBBB’s full provisions kick in over the next few years, when the furloughed workers lose their homes, when the next disaster hits and there’s nobody left to process the aid applications—millions more will discover just how thin it was all along.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”— Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean
