Hungry families are facing a potential new obstacle, just days after the federal government shutdown ended.

All 360,000 Connecticut residents on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, may have to reapply from scratch, according to the Trump administration.

At Connecticut Foodshare, workers are busy shipping out Thanksgiving turkeys and all the trimmings.

“Our goal is to collect and distribute 40,000 Thanksgiving meals over the next seven days,” said Foodshare president and CEO Jason Jakubowski.

For Foodshare, the Thanksgiving rush comes right after the shutdown delayed SNAP benefits for a week.

“We saw over the last couple of weeks anywhere from a 50 to 100% increase in lines at our pantries and at our mobile sites,” Jakubowski said.

But now, there’s a new concern.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wants everyone on SNAP to file a new application to root out waste and fraud. Typically, families fill out a simple renewal form every year.

“SNAP is a broken program. SNAP is full of corruption,” Rollins told CNN. “We found 186,000 dead people.”

In April, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found that “SNAP fraud is rare” and most issues are due to unintentional mistakes. Still, CRS found that SNAP overpaid more than $10 billion during fiscal year 2023.

But Rollins said the statistics are incomplete because states like Connecticut are holding back information.

“We asked for the SNAP data earlier this year,” she said. “It has never been turned over to the federal government before.”

Connecticut and 28 other states are fighting USDA’s demand to turn over SNAP recipients’ personal data, including social security numbers.

“Preventing fraud and abuse does not require Trump to troll through years of grocery lists for hundreds of thousands of Connecticut families,” Attorney General William Tong said in August. “Our laws protect this personal and private information, and Connecticut has no intention of turning this over.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal said requiring every SNAP recipient to reapply at once will lead to massive delays.

“The Secretary of Agriculture is talking about either re-application or re-certification of the entire SNAP beneficiary population, which creates a huge burden on states,” he said.

SNAP is also facing tighter eligibility requirements and $186 billion in funding cuts from President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

States will also be required to cover most of the costs to administer SNAP. Last week, Connecticut lawmakers set aside $500 million to cover funding gaps for SNAP and other federal programs through February.

Meantime, food banks are bracing for more hungry mouths to feed.

“We’re already operating seven food pantries, mainly by faith-based organizations, as well as four mobile Foodshare sites,” said Laurence Burnsed, East Hartford’s director of Health and Social Services. “And even with those resources, we were still hearing from residents that there was more needed.”