When the Safety Net Snaps: Government Shutdowns and the Fragility of Needs
How do you guide young people to their full potential when they’re worried about their next meal? That’s the question I kept returning to a few years ago while developing a social impact program at Google focused on youth empowerment. My team began to explore the roots of intrinsic motivation, and we were drawn to the work of American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs. His framework revealed a simple but powerful truth: before young people can dream, they need to eat. Before they can learn, they need to feel safe. Strip away those foundations, and thriving becomes nearly impossible—because survival mode leaves little room for growth.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on that theory—and it feels especially urgent now, as the United States enters its fifth week of a government shutdown. Millions of Americans are waking up not just to political gridlock, but to tangible deprivation: health insurance subsidies poised to expire, federal workers receiving no pay, rising unemployment across the board, and food benefits—SNAP—slashed. And as I learned per Maslow’s framework, these aren’t abstract losses. These are the physiological and safety nets that are being swept out from under real people in real time.
We are not debating policy. Under this administration, we are choosing, as a nation, that we are okay with basic needs not being met and the less fortunate of us being forced to fend for themselves.
Deficiency Needs Denied
Maslow divided human motivation into two categories: deficiency needs (D-needs) and growth needs (B-needs). The former are about survival—air, food, safety, belonging. The latter are about expansion—creativity, purpose, transcendence.
When SNAP benefits are delayed or cut, when healthcare becomes unaffordable, when jobs are lost or destabilized, people are pushed back into D-need territory. They are pushed into a state of daily triage, where long-term goals are replaced by short-term survival. And in that mode, you're not worried about becoming your best self—you’re worried about becoming your next meal.
That’s where millions are right now.
What Happens When the Pyramid Cracks?
Maslow’s framework reminds us that we’re all built with the same fundamental needs—but not everyone has equal access to meet them. When the government strips away that foundation, the fallout is both immediate and generational.
Maslow warned that chronic deprivation doesn’t just hurt individuals—it destabilizes societies. A person stripped of safety and stability becomes a “sick” person. And that sickness spreads: breeding anxiety, aggression, and apathy.
A society trapped at the bottom of the pyramid can’t dream or participate fully in civic life. It becomes reactive, vulnerable to authoritarianism, and divided between those who are merely surviving and those with the luxury to thrive.
Maslow put it plainly: “The ‘good’ or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted man’s highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all his prepotent basic needs.”
The Cultural Bias We Can’t Ignore
Of course, Maslow’s original theory has been critiqued—rightfully so—for its Western, individualistic framing. In collectivist cultures, belonging often precedes individual esteem, and self-actualization is measured in community well-being, not personal accolades. But even within that critique lies a powerful truth: the base of the pyramid is still the base. Whether in Kingston or Kansas, Lagos or Los Angeles, Sudan or San Francisco—people need to eat. People need to feel safe. People need connection.
What differs is how we define fulfillment and purpose. But before we even get there, we must ask: Are we willing to guarantee the basics?
A System That Starves and Stalls
It’s no coincidence that the communities bearing the brunt of this shutdown—Black and Brown families, immigrants, gig workers, rural communities—are the same ones who’ve been historically excluded. These are the folks disproportionately uninsured, underpaid, and overlooked—pushed into cycles that stall momentum and trap entire communities in survival mode.
And we all know that’s by design. Under Trump’s administration, it was always the plan to turn the American Dream into a gated community—open only to the white and the wealthy, closed to the rest of us. See Project 2025. The cruel irony? The very people locked out are the ones who’ve done the most to build it—generation after generation of labor, care, sacrifice, and brilliance that made this country what it is.
What We Build Next
Last night, I watched with pride, New York City elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani—our first Muslim and South Asian mayor, a democratic socialist whose bold platform on affordability and justice electrified a multiracial, working-class coalition. His rise is deeply symbolic. A reminder that when we organize, when we dare to dream together, we can disrupt the status quo.
I pray this moment becomes a catalyst for the entire country. This is the democracy we’ve been fighting for—one that feeds its people, protects their health, and honors their humanity.
This is what President Obama called the audacity of hope—that insistence on possibility even when the systems seem irredeemable. It’s the belief that we are not bound by the failures of our present, but guided by the potential of our collective future.
Let this be the moment we remember that a society that allows people to go hungry or untreated is not one rooted in justice—it’s one in desperate need of transformation.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is just a framework—I’m sure there are plenty more. But frameworks alone don’t nourish communities. They don’t guarantee shelter. They don’t deliver care. That my friends, is our collective responsibility.
With Love,
Peta-Gay