Connecticut will temporarily fund a federal program to ensure that young children, along with pregnant and nursing mothers, continue to receive nutrition benefits during the government shutdown, officials said Wednesday.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, costs about $200,000 a day to run for Connecticut alone and provides food for women who are nursing or pregnant, as well as young children, serving around 52,000 people across the state and almost half of infants born in the United States.

At a press conference at a WIC enrollment site in Hartford, officials including Gov. Ned Lamont announced that the program would continue without interruption thanks to an infusion of state funds from the “common cash pool” of state operational dollars.

“I wanted to make sure that Connecticut is one of the, sadly, very few states in the country stepping up making sure that if you’re a new mom, if you’ve got kids under the age of 5, an infant, we’re taking care of you,” Lamont said. “We’ll make sure it continues until the federal government gets its act together.”

WIC provides funding for healthy food, but the program also includes support for pregnant women and nursing, including prenatal care, and counselors to help new mothers breastfeed. WIC provides whole grains, fruit, vegetables, milk, formula, eggs and beans, among other nutritious foods.

The press conference came a day after the Trump administration announced that it will use tariff revenue to fund WIC during the shutdown.

“The WIC program works really well,” Lamont said. “Stop injecting all this uncertainty. Look, you’re making a lot of people really nervous, starting with young moms with new infants. Get it together. You wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ Make a deal. Let’s end this shutdown.”

Officials said the state expects to be repaid for WIC spending once the shutdown ends.

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz praised Lamont for ensuring that the state has funds to draw on in such a crisis.

“I think we are very lucky to live in a state that has had fiscally responsible leadership from our governor, Ned Lamont. We are able to continue funding this program even during a federal shutdown because we’ve been fiscally responsible. We have a very large rainy day fund, and we are not going to let women and babies and children go hungry in our state.”

SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, are expected to remain unaffected through the end of October, officials said. But the uncertainty around the duration of the shutdown has advocates in Connecticut worried about the future of these benefits that support low-income families as well as mothers and infants — and the stress it would place on their own services that are already seeing higher-than-usual demand.

The potential loss or reductions in WIC and SNAP in the next month or so would put significant stress on food banks and mobile pantries. On top of looming cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in the coming years, Jason Jakubowski of Connecticut Foodshare sees it as a “real nightmare scenario” for the hundreds of partners his group works with on food distribution throughout the state.

The demand at food banks is already high, and the lines are similar to the peak during the pandemic, even in the early days of the shutdown. Over the last two weeks, Jakubowski said, the 600 pantries his organization partners with have seen an increased demand in food, and he expects that to grow over the next week.

“There’s a sense of panic in many communities out there, not just in Connecticut but across the country. And we’re prepared for that. We’ve already seen that play out — more people coming to our mobile lines, more people going to our pantries, more people looking for more food at a time in which either the food supply has either stayed stagnant or has even decreased a little bit,” Jakubowski said in an interview.

As a proactive measure, the board of directors for Connecticut Foodshare authorized $1 million in emergency funding at its Monday meeting. The group has already started to dip into that money, but the funds will be used primarily during a prolonged shutdown.

“I think we’re all kind of scrambling right now and trying to make sure our ducks are in a row when this really does start affecting people’s pocketbooks,” Jakubowski said.

Jakubowski sees similarities with the last government shutdown that began in late 2018 and lasted more than a month into January 2019. But he said the federal funding cuts plus the coming ramifications of the “big beautiful bill” add an extra layer of uncertainty and panic in this iteration.

During the last shutdown, Connecticut Foodshare set up pop-up food distributions and pop-up mobile trucks that were stationed around the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London as well as around Bradley International Airport. TSA agents and military are considered essential during a shutdown but don’t get paid. They receive back pay once a shutdown ends.

A week into this shutdown, the nonprofit has already started to purchase additional food. And Jakubowski said he expects to deploy the same kind of interventions and services during the week of Oct. 20 if a shutdown continues through the next couple of weeks, because federal workers could start to miss their first paycheck in the next week or so.

Jakubowski said he’s already started discussions with Gemma Morgan Food Center, which is prepared to launch four mobile truck sites in southeastern Connecticut to help families with a federal employee or contractor who is furloughed or not receiving pay while working. He said the group is also preparing to work with Bradley airport again.

“Our baseline is increased demand right now. The shutdown is literally throwing fuel onto the fire,” he said.

Food aid has already taken a hit this year because of federal cutbacks. Connecticut was hit by cuts earlier this year to The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP.

About 30% of the food for food banks and pantries comes from the federal government via the TEFAP program. Because of those cuts in the spring, they lost about 35 trailer loads of food, which amounts to about 1.6 million pounds.

“We’re already dealing in an environment in which there is less food to provide people. That’s a marked difference between 2025 and in 2019,” Jakubowski said.