Charlie E. & Minnie P. Hendrix Foundation

Community Reflection Series | May 2026



There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from laziness or lack of effort. It comes from doing everything right — showing up to work, stretching a grocery budget, filing paperwork on time — and still finding that the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet. Across the United States right now, millions of families know this exhaustion intimately. And in communities like the ones the Charlie E. & Minnie P. Hendrix Foundation is honored to serve, it is not an abstraction. It is Tuesday morning.

In July 2025, the federal government passed sweeping changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the largest single reduction to food assistance in American history. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law cuts federal SNAP funding by $186 billion through 2034. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 2.4 million people will lose food assistance in a typical month over the next decade. Work requirements have expanded to cover adults up to age 64, including veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth. SNAP participation nationwide has already fallen by more than three million people — eight percent — between the law’s enactment and January 2026. These are not statistics. These are neighbors.

For those who remain enrolled, the calculation is shifting. New rules limit how much benefits can increase each year, even as groceries cost 29 percent more in 2025 than they did in 2020. Utility expense calculations are changing, meaning that for households where actual bills fall below federal estimates, benefit amounts may be reduced. The Thrifty Food Plan — the formula underlying every SNAP benefit amount — has been adjusted in ways that do not reflect the true cost of putting nourishing food on a table in 2026. Families are being asked to stretch a budget that was already too thin.

And while the plate grows lighter, the medicine cabinet grows harder to fill. Medicare’s drug price negotiation program — a historic first step toward affordable prescriptions for seniors, established under the Inflation Reduction Act — faces mounting legal challenges. Drug manufacturers have filed numerous lawsuits contesting the program’s constitutionality, cases that remain unresolved. Meanwhile, the 2025 reconciliation law broadened the orphan drug exclusion in ways that exempt more drugs from negotiation, including blockbuster cancer treatments like Keytruda and Opdivo — drugs on which Medicare and beneficiaries spent more than $7.5 billion in 2023 alone. For seniors managing chronic illness on fixed incomes, every delayed negotiation is a month of choosing between a prescription and the power bill.

Come home, and the door itself has become unaffordable. An American family now needs to earn $110,000 per year to own a typical home, according to Redfin — roughly 29 percent more than what the median household actually earns. The United States faces a shortage of more than 1.1 million housing units. Mortgage rates hover above six percent, and for the millions of homeowners locked into pandemic-era rates below three percent, selling is financially impossible. Families who want to rent face a market shaped by cost and scarcity in equal measure. The average family renter household — headed by a 42-year-old, with three members, earning around $68,000 per year — is making decisions about where to live that are, in the words of one housing analyst, “an exercise in financial survival, not a lifestyle choice.”

And then there is the drive to work, to the food pantry, to the doctor. Since military strikes on Iran in late February 2026, gas prices have surged nearly 50 percent. Stanford economists estimate that the average household will pay $857 more on fuel in 2026 than they did last year. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York study released in May 2026 found that households earning less than $40,000 cut their gas consumption by seven percent — yet still spent twelve percent more at the pump. They are driving less and paying more. The research described it as a “strongly evident K-shaped consumption pattern”: a widening chasm between those for whom price shocks are an inconvenience and those for whom they are a crisis. A recent CNN poll found that 76 percent of Americans now name the cost of living as their biggest financial problem, with concern specifically about gas prices rising from five percent to 23 percent in a single year. One-third of Americans worry all or most of the time that their income will not cover their expenses.

The human face of these numbers is not hard to find. Dalene Basden, 71, has spent her career supporting families with special needs children in a working-class city north of Boston. She volunteers at a soup kitchen after her day job. She is the kind of person communities depend on. Now, she and her husband spend over $600 a month filling their cars — double what they spent a year ago. She describes finding herself living paycheck to paycheck almost overnight. “It’s just like overnight,” she told NPR in May 2026. “Yesterday you could afford it, but today you can’t.” If she cannot make ends meet, the question must be asked plainly: who can?

The Charlie E. & Minnie P. Hendrix Foundation was built on a belief that dignity is not earned through hardship survived — it is inherent to every person who walks through a door asking for help. When we collect and distribute toiletries, we are not simply filling a bag. We are saying: you matter enough for the small things, too. We are saying that a person’s worth is not contingent on their circumstances. In a season when the structures meant to support human dignity are fraying at every edge, the work of community-grounded organizations is not supplemental. It is essential.

We do not offer this essay as a statement of despair. We offer it as an honest reckoning with the world our neighbors are navigating, so that our work remains rooted in what is real. The gaps are widening. The need is urgent. And in that urgency, there is also a call: to show up, to give, to see one another clearly, and to hold, as the Hendrix Foundation always has, the conviction that no one in this community should face these pressures alone.

Sources Referenced

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, SNAP Tracker (May 2026) • Congressional Budget Office, One Big Beautiful Bill Act cost estimates (2025) • Think Global Health, SNAP Benefits in 2026: What Older Adults Should Expect (January 2026) • Propel, SNAP Increase 2025–2026 (December 2025) • KFF, Key Facts About Medicare Drug Price Negotiation (March 2026) • Sidley Austin LLP, U.S. Drug Pricing Year in Review (March 2026) • Redfin / NPR, America Has a Housing Affordability Crisis (March 2026) • Realtor.com / Fast Company, Rent Affordability Crisis 2026 (March 2026) • 101 Financial, Rising Gas Prices and Your Family Budget in 2026 (May 2026) • NPR, She Helps Families in Need (May 2026) • CNN Politics, 76% of Americans Call Cost of Living Their Biggest Financial Problem (May 2026) • Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Gas Consumption and Spending Patterns (May 2026) • NAHB, 2026 Housing Outlook (February 2026)

Charlie E. & Minnie P. Hendrix Foundation • susan@cemphfoundation.com