Killing Kids in Iran While Kids in the U.S. Go Hungry
This article is a joint publication of The American Prospect and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
When food stamps run low at the end of the month, Brenda has to get creative. She stretches her pantry to piece together meals to feed herself, her fiancé, and her teenaged daughter. She goes to food banks when she can, but they’re so far away from her home in Cherry Hill, Maryland, that she has to take the bus. Distribution is often scheduled during the hours she works at a local café, where she makes $16 an hour. When she’s unable to get to the food bank in time, she says, that’s when things get “stressful.”
Brenda is confounded that while so many people are struggling to eat and staring down major cuts to federal nutrition assistance, the U.S. government is spending billions of dollars on a war with Iran. “What I see every day in my community is there are hard-working, single-parent households out here,” says Brenda, who is going by a pseudonym to protect against retaliation. “They’re struggling to afford basics, just like I am. Groceries are costing more. Rent costs more. A lot of people are having to choose between paying their electric bill or buying medication or keeping a roof over their head … Our own people are dying because of a lack of necessities.”
“The government could end all of the suffering in our country,” she continued. “We could have health care and access to food, healthy foods, fresh food, we could have good doctors. We should be asking, ‘Why are we investing billions of dollars into another war across the seas?’”
As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon stretches into its second week, it is bringing death and destruction across the region. On the first day of the war, the United States bombed an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, killing 168 people, 110 of them children. The U.S.-Israel coalition went on to heavily bomb residential areas in Iran and Lebanon, and strike oil depots around Tehran, filling the air with thick, black smoke that blots out the sun and unleashes oily, toxic rain. Trump administration officials are openly boasting about the death toll. When asked whether Russia’s involvement endangers American personnel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CBS that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.”
The Pentagon estimates that the war costs $1 billion a day, according to Atlantic journalist Nancy Youssef, who cites “a congressional official.” For that amount, the United States instead could be paying the daily cost of food stamps for the 41 million people who need them, or the daily costs of Medicaid for the 16 million people who are expected to lose their coverage due to recent cuts, according to Alliyah Lusuegro and Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project, an organization that researches federal budgets.
“The primary concern is the death in Iran,” says Koshgarian, who is NPP’s program director. “Having a foreign government come and invade your country and bomb it is not giving you self-determination. And then it’s not protecting Americans, but it is preventing Americans from having enough resources.”
The Pentagon estimates that the war costs $1 billion a day.
IT’S BEEN TWO AND A HALF YEARS since JC Bengtson lost his job as an autoworker when the Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois, idled. He’s been waiting to go back to work ever since as his union local, United Autoworkers Local 1268, pushes for a reopening. In the meantime, he’s been volunteering once a month with the union’s food distribution program that it operates with a local food bank.
That volunteering, says Bengston, has deepened his understanding of the hunger and poverty in his community. “Last November, when the government shut down and SNAP payments were frozen, we had the highest turnout of families at the food distribution we ever did. It was so much that we had two food distributions in December to help,” he says.
When I asked him how he feels about the money the Trump administration is now putting toward war with Iran, he told me, “People just want a shot at the American dream, and by taking money that could be for jobs, training, education, health care, basic needs, and putting it into bombs and missiles, there’s a word for it. It’s obscene.”
It’s not just the costs to American workers. Bengston is deeply concerned about what these resources are being used for in Iran. “The bombing of the school that killed children, that’s just an abomination of humanity. War crimes come to mind, going back to the boats in the Caribbean, intervention in Venezuela,” he says.
By opposing the war, Bengtson represents the vast majority of Americans. Six in 10 people in the U.S. are against the airstrikes, according to a CNN poll released March 2. A whopping 82 percent of Democrats disapprove, found the poll, which mirrors the findings of another poll from Reuters/Ipsos. That survey determined just 7 percent of Democrats support the war, and just 27 percent of all adults.
Mary Turner, an intensive care unit nurse in Minnesota who is on the council of presidents for the National Nurses United labor union (NNU), was brought to tears when discussing the U.S. and Israel bombing hospitals. The World Health Organization says it has verified the bombing of at least 13 hospitals and medical institutions in Iran and Lebanon. “That’s beyond the pale. That is unconscionable,” Turner says. “To be bombing and killing health care workers and obviously the patients in their most vulnerable state, it’s monstrous, inhumane. Boy, now we really know they have no respect for human life at all.”
“And the thing is, the hospitals get bombed and all that, and they’re half functioning, they lose power, those health care workers don’t leave their post,” she added. “That’s the thing about doctors, nurses, and all health care workers. We don’t abandon our patients, like the government does. The government abandons them, but we don’t.”
Turner says this disrespect for life extends to the misallocation of resources at home. As an ICU nurse, Turner sees cuts to Medicaid block patient access to preventive care, leading to worse outcomes. Access is further strained when hospitals cannot stay open when their patients lose insurance. “They’re spending a billion dollars a day on war, and we’re at risk of much-needed hospitals being closed, and not just any hospitals, but Level 1 trauma hospitals,” she said.
NNU AND THE SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL UNION have come out publicly against the war, and a longer list of unions endorsed the Khanna-Massie bipartisan Iran war powers resolution, which was aimed at triggering a congressional vote on the war, though it failed to pass. Saqib Bhatti, co-founder and executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, says there is “interest in a sign-on letter” for unions and worker organizations opposing the Iran war, and that more developments are expected later this week. Almost 400,000 letters have been sent to corporate CEOs and tech executives demanding they condemn “yet another illegal, immoral, and unauthorized military action by the White House and Israel,” in an effort being organized by the May Day Strong coalition, a network of local unions and community organizations.
Sheigh Freeberg is the secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 17, which represents more than 6,000 workers in hotels, stadiums, and convention centers in the Twin Cities metro area. He says, “It’s infuriating that the leaders of our country are spending billions of dollars bombing schools in Iran when they’re not even funding schools here. It’s a complete waste of resources that could be used to better our own country. It makes no sense, and it’s just going to make things so much worse for working people.”
Working-class Americans are already feeling the strain in their bank accounts. Since the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, gas prices have jumped 17 percent, an impact that—due to the realities of how our cities are designed—disproportionately harms working people. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also blocked a significant chunk of the world’s fertilizer, which raises input costs for food producers and will almost certainly lead to higher food prices.
Food insecurity increased in 2025, climbing to 16 percent in November of that year, according to the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability at Purdue University. One in 7 households in the U.S. are “struggling to put food on the table,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, warned in February. “For the 47.9 million people, including 14.1 million children, who live in these households, food insecurity is not an abstract concept. It is a daily reality, and it has only gotten worse as the cost of food has continued to climb.”
Freeberg says that “the only people getting rich on this are the people who sell the bombs and that build the bullshit AI. Everyone else suffers. All working people here suffer, and working people in Iran are suffering.”
Despite the deep unpopularity and high cost of the war, Democratic leaders are failing to forcefully oppose it, and some have signaled that they might agree to supplemental funding, on top of the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that drew significant bipartisan support. According to a Politico report published March 4, “[s]ome Democrats aren’t ruling out voting for a multibillion-dollar military infusion” for the war. Reporters Katherine Tully-McManus, Joe Gould, and Jennifer Scholtes note, “Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee aren’t ruling out supporting more Pentagon funding. That includes the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, as well as Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.”
Brenda in Maryland responds, “I really don’t think we have any place bombing anything when we don’t have our own self together.”
When we first spoke on March 7, Brenda told me she was meeting minimum work requirements for her SNAP benefits, and had seen no indication that they would be cut, though she still worried about that possibility. “If that were to happen, I could definitely see us struggling to eat,” she says. Her fiancé is a preschool teacher and “holds a lot of the household bills,” explains Brenda, who volunteers with the community group Progressive Maryland. “The food stamps help stretch, but we would probably be back to eating ramen. I wouldn’t be able to cook as many meals as I would like.”
When we spoke again two days later, Brenda told me she had just found out the previous day that her food stamps were, in fact, terminated. She discovered this while accessing her online account, and she was not given a reason. “I’m waiting for a piece of actual mail,” she says.
“It’s very discouraging because I am a good community member and I follow the rules and things like that,” she says. “To take something away that I rely on is kind of messed up, because I pay taxes into that program. We should be putting money into the elderly and the veterans and the lower-class people that are working to support these corporations that line their pockets and fund stupid things like this war.”
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