The nine months on food stamps is John Kiriakou’s account of his family’s own dependence on public assistance, which he raised in October 2025 as 42 million Americans faced the loss of their food stamp benefits.
The calculator at the dining room table
“In 2012, in January, I was arrested in mid-January,” he says, “and just one week after my arrest, I was sitting at the dining room table with my wife, and she had a calculator, and then she looked up at me and she said, ‘I don’t see how we can afford to buy food next week.’”[1]
He asked whether they were in that bad a shape already. “And she said, ‘Yeah, everything that we have we gave to the lawyers last week, and I don’t think we have enough money for food.’”[1][2]
The welfare office
“So the next day we went to the welfare office in Arlington County, and we qualified for literally everything, including a $90 monthly cash supplement because she was breastfeeding.” There were two children at home, and two more from an earlier marriage for whom he was paying child support at the time.[2]
The assistance ran “for 9 months, until she finally found a job in October of that year. And thank God for that.”[2][3]
Why he tells it
Kiriakou brought the episode up to answer a question about scale — one in eight Americans on food stamps, one in four in some states, and that only a subset of the poor, since the working poor who do not qualify or do not apply and those sleeping outside are not in the system at all.[4][5]
His specific target was Senator John Fetterman, who had told people to stop acting like children and vote for the budget. Fetterman, Kiriakou notes, “was the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, which is one of the poorest, most crime-ridden cities in the entire state of Pennsylvania. He knows better.” If he will not help poor people feed their families, “maybe it’s time to primary this guy.”[6][7]