On the morning of August 11, 2026, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins came to Henderson, Colorado, for a private roundtable with farmers and ranchers. It was the third time in six weeks that Gabe Evans had shared a stage with a member of Donald Trump's cabinet.

9NEWS reporter Marshall Zelinger was there, and he asked Evans a simple question.

"Congressman, you voted to make it harder for families to receive SNAP benefits, and those changes take effect in less than two months. There are about 90,000 people in your Congressional District who receive SNAP benefits. How many do you think, or do you expect to lose these food benefits? And why is that a positive for taxpayers?"

Evans did not answer.

He was asked again. He still did not answer. The second time, he told the reporter: "If you want an answer from that, you'll have to answer the question that I asked you last year at the state Capitol first, thanks, Marshall."

That's it. That's the whole answer. Ninety thousand of his own constituents are two months out from a change he voted for, and the man who voted for it will not say — or does not know — how many of them lose their groceries.

The subject he changed it to

Instead of the number, Evans wanted to talk about something else.

"Let's look at the SNAP error rate. Under [John] Hickenlooper, as governor, it was about 5%, under [Jared] Polis, it's ballooned up to 10%."

He said that means about $12 million a month of Colorado's roughly $120 million monthly SNAP budget isn't reaching the people who need it — "because of mismanagement here in the state of Colorado."

Here is what he left out.

Colorado's payment error rate for fiscal year 2024 was 9.97%. The national rate that same year was 10.93%. Colorado isn't an outlier. Colorado is doing better than the country as a whole. Only eight states in America came in under 6%.

So the "ballooning" Evans is describing happened nearly everywhere, and Colorado ballooned less than most. Blaming one governor for it is like blaming your mayor for a heat wave.

And the second thing he left out is bigger: an error rate is not a fraud rate. The Congressional Research Service says it in plain words: "This rate is not a measure of fraud." It counts overpayments and underpayments — a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family reporting the wrong number on a form, a typo. Even the USDA describes it as program waste, not fraud.

We've walked through exactly how that formula works and the trap buried inside it. A state gets punished for paying a family a little too much. A state gets punished not at all for wrongly cutting an eligible family off. So the cheapest way for any state to drive its error rate down is to deny more people and process fewer of them.

Evans is holding up a number that rewards kicking people off food assistance, and using it as his reason for kicking people off food assistance.

What's actually coming to Colorado

About 612,700 Coloradans get SNAP every month — roughly one in ten people in the state. In Colorado, 1 in 6 kids already faces hunger.

Ninety thousand of those people live in Evans's district, Colorado's 8th. It is one of the most closely divided House seats in the country.

Nationally, the cuts Evans voted for are already showing up. More than 4 million Americans have dropped off SNAP in nine months — while unemployment stayed flat and grocery prices kept climbing. The researchers who study this say the pattern doesn't match a jobs story at all. It matches a program that got harder to get into.

And as the reporter noted, the new work requirement rules land in weeks, not years.

Evans could have said "I expect a few thousand people in my district to lose benefits, and here's why I think that's worth it." That's an argument. He didn't make it. He recited a statistic about paperwork.

He's done this before

The second time Zelinger pressed him, Evans referred back to a May 2025 news conference at the Colorado state Capitol. At that one, he was asked how taking people off Medicaid and pushing them into emergency rooms helps medical providers in his district.

His answer then: "Do you want illegal immigrants on Medicaid, Marshall?"

Between that day and this one — more than a year — Evans never said how many of his constituents were at risk of losing health coverage either.

He does keep making claims about it. He voted for Trump's budget bill and then told Colorado it wouldn't hurt anyone's health care, calling the warnings "fear mongering." A year later, nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk, including ones in his own district.

The pattern is the same both times: vote for the cut, refuse to count the cost, attack the person asking.

Three cabinet secretaries. Zero open town halls.

Evans told 9NEWS he has personally done more than 300 in-person meetings, town halls, roundtables and site visits, that his staff has held roughly 2,500 more across Colorado, and about 200 in Washington.

When Zelinger asked why he can find time for Trump cabinet officials but hasn't held a general public town hall anyone can show up to, Evans said: "Incorrect. We had a text go out to everybody for a town hall that we did with the secretary of energy, just a couple of weeks ago."

9NEWS could not find a record of an in-person town hall open to the general public. What they did find was a June 29 event hosted by the America First Policy Institute — a conservative organization founded by Brooke Rollins, the same secretary standing next to him in Henderson. Evans's office did not answer questions about how the public was invited, or what "a text go out to everybody" meant.

None of this is new for him. Evans went his first three months in Congress without holding a town hall at all, and when he finally held a telephone-only one on April 2, 2025, it came "after weeks of calls from some voters in his district" — making him the last member of Colorado's entire congressional delegation to hold one.

Three weeks after that, more than 100 people gathered at a "People's Town Hall" in Thornton. Evans didn't come. So they put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. A hospice nurse asked it: "Hey Gabe, did you know that 25% of your constituents … are on Medicaid?"

Who he's making time for

Three Trump cabinet members have come through Colorado's 8th District in six weeks: Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Homeland Security's Markwayne Mullin, and now Rollins. Evans is in one of the most competitive races in the country, facing Democrat Manny Rutinel in November.

He has time for the cabinet. He has time for a conservative think tank's invite-only event. He has time to lecture a reporter about a state error rate that is better than the national one.

He does not have an answer for the 90,000 people in his district who are about to find out whether they still get to eat.

Source

Marshall Zelinger, "After voting for SNAP benefit changes, does Rep. Gabe Evans know how many in his district will lose food assistance?", 9NEWS, August 11, 2026. Photo: 9NEWS/KUSA.