Food benefits skid to a stop in Kansas. Politics and government have utterly failed us.

There’s a word to describe the mess that Kansas and the rest of our country faces, now that the federal government shutdown has stopped food assistance.

That word is failure.

It’s a failure on the part of a Washington, D.C., governing class interested in scoring points at the expense of everyday people just trying to feed their families. It’s a failure of government bureaucrats — such as former Kansas Rep. Patrick Penn — who have used the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a political bargaining chip in the months leading up to this shutdown.

More broadly, it’s a failure on the part of a society that allows so many to go hungry without government intervention. In the United States, one in eight people receives benefits through the program. That’s more than 12% of the country’s