Roughly 42 million Americans rely on SNAP benefits to put food on the table each month, according to CNN’s reporting on the November shutdown crisis — but the people most likely to fall through the cracks are rarely the ones we picture when we think of food assistance. They are not always unemployed. They are not always poor. Sometimes they are a 53-year-old school bus driver in Portland, Oregon, sitting across from you at a diner booth, stirring her coffee and saying, quietly, “I never thought I’d be the one filling out those forms.”
Janine Fitzgerald reached out to Benefit Reporter last November, after reading a piece I’d written about identity theft and its downstream effects on public benefit eligibility. Her email was three sentences long: she’d been through something similar, it had been worse than she expected, and she didn’t want to talk about it but thought she probably should. We met in person in early March 2026 at a diner near her apartment in Northeast Portland. She was on time. She brought documents.
A Good Income, and Then a Better One
To understand what happened to Janine, you have to understand where she started. She has driven school buses for Portland Public Schools for eleven years. In early 2024, after years of incremental raises, her union secured a new contract that pushed her base salary to approximately $78,400 annually — a jump of nearly $14,000 from the previous year. For a single-income household supporting herself and her partner, Marcus, who is finishing a graduate degree in education policy, it felt like a turning point.
“We celebrated,” she told me. “We finally felt like we could breathe. So we breathed a little too much.” She said it with a short, dry laugh — the kind of laugh that has calcified over time into something that no longer really reaches the eyes.
Lifestyle inflation set in almost immediately. They moved to a larger apartment — an extra $580 per month. They leased a second vehicle so Marcus could get to campus. They ate out more, subscribed to more services, built a small buffer of comfort they hadn’t allowed themselves in years. By mid-2024, their monthly expenses had climbed to roughly $6,100, up from an estimated $4,400 the prior year. The math still worked, but only barely, and only if nothing went wrong.
Something went wrong.
The Day the Accounts Stopped Working
In September 2024, Janine received a text from her bank flagging unusual activity. By the time she called the fraud line — from the parking lot of her school district depot, still in her uniform — two checking accounts had been compromised, a credit card had been opened in her name with a $9,200 balance, and her Social Security number had been used to file a fraudulent tax return. The thieves had also initiated a change-of-address request with the U.S. Postal Service, rerouting her mail for nearly three weeks before she caught it.
“The bank froze everything,” she told me. “Which I understand. But frozen means I couldn’t pay rent. I couldn’t buy groceries. I had nothing in my hands for almost six weeks while they investigated.” Marcus’s graduate stipend — approximately $1,100 per month — was the only income moving freely during that window. It was not enough.
Her credit score, which had sat around 710 before September, dropped to 490 within weeks as fraudulent accounts went delinquent. She filed a report with the FTC, placed fraud alerts with all three bureaus, and filed a police report — the standard steps, all of which took time she didn’t have and produced results she couldn’t spend. Meanwhile, rent was due.
Applying for SNAP — and What the Process Actually Looks Like
It was Marcus who first suggested SNAP. Janine’s initial reaction was resistance. “I kept thinking, I make too much money for that. Or I did. It was confusing to hold both things at once.” What she didn’t realize — and what the Oregon DHS website doesn’t exactly advertise in plain language — is that SNAP eligibility is calculated on current household income, not annual salary projections. With her accounts frozen and only Marcus’s stipend accessible, their verifiable monthly income had temporarily collapsed to a fraction of normal.
To qualify for SNAP, households must generally meet a gross monthly income limit of 130% of the federal poverty level. According to NCOA’s SNAP eligibility guide, for a two-person household in 2025, that threshold is approximately $2,311 per month in gross income. During the freeze period, Janine and Marcus’s accessible income was well below that line.
She applied online through Oregon’s ONE system in October 2024. The process required documentation she was simultaneously fighting to recover: bank statements, proof of residence, identity verification. “They needed documents to prove who I was,” she said, “while I was in the middle of proving to every other institution that someone else had pretended to be me.” The irony wasn’t lost on her. It was exhausting in a way she struggled to describe beyond the word tired.
The Approval — and What It Actually Covered
The application was approved in November 2024. Her monthly SNAP benefit came to $311 for a two-person household — less than she had hoped for, she admitted, but enough to keep the refrigerator functional while she navigated the bank dispute. “It covered maybe half our grocery bill,” she said. “But that half mattered enormously.”
Notably, starting October 1, 2025, maximum monthly SNAP benefit amounts increased as part of the annual cost-of-living adjustment. According to Propel’s SNAP COLA analysis, the 2025–2026 adjustment added modest increases to maximum allotments across household sizes — though the exact impact varies by state and household composition. For Janine, the adjustment came after her case had already closed, but she noted it when I mentioned it: “I’m glad someone’s getting it.”
Her case was reviewed in January 2025, once the bank disputes were partially resolved and her direct deposit had resumed. At that point, her accessible income had climbed back above the eligibility threshold, and the case was closed. She had received three months of benefits in total — a total of approximately $933 in food assistance.
Where Things Stand Now
When I met Janine in March 2026, she had been off SNAP for over a year. Her bank accounts were functional again. The fraudulent credit card had been removed from her report after a protracted dispute process. Her credit score had climbed back to approximately 580 — better than 490, not close to 710. “I’ll be 55 before it’s fully fixed,” she said, not with self-pity but with the tired arithmetic of someone who has done the math too many times.
The lifestyle inflation, she acknowledged freely, had compounded everything. If she and Marcus had maintained their pre-raise spending habits, the frozen accounts would have been painful but survivable. Instead, they had committed to obligations — the larger apartment, the second car — that required the full paycheck to function. “The raise felt like safety,” she told me. “It wasn’t. It just moved the edge further out and made it harder to see.”
She still drives buses. Marcus graduates in June. They have not moved back to the smaller apartment — the lease renewed before the crisis fully hit — but they have scaled back in other ways. Subscriptions canceled. Dining out reduced to once a week. A small emergency fund, finally, that sits in a credit union she opened specifically because it wasn’t connected to any of the compromised accounts.
What stays with me from our conversation is less the financial architecture of what happened and more the emotional texture of it. Janine is not someone who crumbled. She documented, disputed, applied, waited, called back, faxed — yes, faxed — notarized letters to three different institutions in the same week. She did everything right, and it still took four months to begin recovering. The government assistance she received was real and meaningful. It was also, by her own account, a humbling thing to need. She holds both of those truths without drama. That, perhaps more than any statistic, is the story.
For anyone navigating a similar crisis, USA.gov’s benefits portal provides a starting point for identifying federal and state programs based on your specific situation — including SNAP, emergency housing assistance, and more. Eligibility always depends on current circumstances, and those circumstances can change faster than most people expect.
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