(The Epoch Times)—Undercover investigators with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are going to check whether stores are complying with new restrictions on food stamps, the department said in a new notice to state and regional officials.
The USDA’s Office of Retailer Operations and Compliance carries out federal oversight of retailers that accept funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as food stamps. The office “initiates and conducts undercover investigations to determine if a retailer is complying with program requirements,” the USDA said in the Dec. 30, 2025, notice.
Once new SNAP restrictions take effect in states, investigators “will incorporate attempts to purchase restricted items according to the state’s SNAP Food Restriction policy, beginning 90 days after the implementation date,” the notice states.
Retailers that are not in compliance will initially receive a warning letter advising corrective action. If retailers are found to be out of compliance again, then officials will revoke their authorization to keep accepting SNAP.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins in 2025 approved requests from 18 states to diverge from normal SNAP operations and impose various restrictions on which items participants can buy.
The first five states—Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and West Virginia—began restricting purchases on Jan. 1. The next restrictions take effect in Idaho, Louisiana, and Oklahoma in February. Restrictions in other states may not start until as late as Oct. 1.
Many of the states have targeted soda and other soft drinks. Some have barred SNAP funds from being used for energy drinks, candy, and prepared desserts.
Some 42 million Americans participate in SNAP. Eligibility is primarily based on household income.
Federal law says SNAP’s main purpose is to “safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s population by raising levels of nutrition among low-income households.”
The waivers “further that purpose, as part of broader state and federal government efforts to fight the obesity epidemic and Make America Healthy Again,” Patrick Penn, a USDA official, told state and regional officials in the new notice.
Each waiver has definitions of restricted items. Due to the varying definitions and implementation dates, close coordination between state agencies and retailers is needed, Penn said. Retailers have to take steps such as updating equipment and training employees.
Penn also said that the USDA plans to approve additional waivers in the future.
The Food Industry Association, whose members include retailers, said in a statement it appreciated that USDA clarified there is a 90-day grace period before the agency will enforce the new restrictions, and guidance from federal and state officials.
“While receiving this guidance and assurance of a 90-day grace period is critical, our members have additional questions and need assurance that ‘involuntary withdrawal’ following a second offense mentioned in the guidance will be limited to retailers knowingly and intentionally not following the restriction, not an accidental error on one of 21,000 or more products that must be coded as restricted in each state,” Jennifer Hatcher, an association officer, said.
The National Grocers Association, a trade group representing independent supermarkets, said in a statement on Dec. 22, 2025, that the waivers present challenges because they mean that SNAP funds can no longer be spent on tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of items.
That will force grocers to reprogram systems, track items, retrain workers, and talk to customers, the group said.
“These regulatory burdens have the potential to disrupt store operations and slow checkout lines as retailers work in good faith to implement and enforce the new rules,” the association said. “For SNAP reforms to Make America Healthy Again, policymakers must provide clear, consistent definitions and a realistic implementation timeline. Independent grocers are proud economic drivers, creating local jobs and generating tax revenue, but they need certainty and common sense, not more costly red tape handed down by bureaucrats.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
