MAGA Report Cards — Food Assistance

Rudy Yakym Voted to Cut Food Stamps by Nearly $200 Billion. Now He's Written a Bill Letting Food Pantries Ask for Your ID.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:11:22 +0000

On May 21, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 8953, the Preserving Community Food Assistance Act of 2026. It was referred to the House Agriculture Committee. It has no cosponsors. He is the only member of Congress on it.

Here's what it does.

It amends the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983 — the law behind TEFAP, the federal program that sends USDA food to food banks and pantries — so that a distribution site may ask a person for proof of residency before giving them food: "photo identification card, a piece of mail, residency documentation, or other similar document."

That list is not Yakym's phrasing. It's USDA's. On December 30, 2024, a federal rule took effect barring emergency food sites from requiring an address or those exact identification documents as a condition of getting USDA food. Yakym's bill lifts that sentence out and turns the prohibition into a permission.

His stated reason:

"Hoosiers are generous by nature, but that charity should not be abused."

What "abuse" turns out to mean

Read the complaint the bill is built on, because it isn't fraud.

The director of the Mishawaka Alliance for Care Food Pantry, Kristi York, described the problem after the 2024 rule: a substantial increase in people showing up from outside the pantry's service area — other counties, other states — plus repeat visits by members of the same household. The result, she said, is that "our resources have been depleted at a much faster rate," with more pressure on volunteers, donors and operating funds. Hearts United for Bristol Food Pantry pulled out of USDA grocery support programs entirely.

Those are real operational problems, and the people running those pantries aren't villains. Small pantries running on donations and volunteers do get overwhelmed.

But look at what the described behavior actually is. Someone drove in from the next county. Someone came back a second time this month. Someone in the same household came separately.

That is what hungry people do when there isn't enough food. It is the signature of scarcity, not of cheating. And Yakym's fix isn't more food. It's a document check at the door.

Who a document check keeps out

TEFAP is emergency food. The people at the far end of it are, by definition, at the end of something.

A photo ID, a piece of mail in your name, residency documentation — those are the exact things you don't have when you've just been evicted, when you're couch-surfing, when you left a violent house in a hurry, when your ID was in the car that got repossessed, when you're a kid sent to pick up a box for the family, when you're elderly and your mail goes to a relative's address.

Nobody in that list is defrauding a food pantry. They're the reason the federal rule was written the way it was.

And the fix Yakym is reversing was not a Washington whim about paperwork — it was a decision about whether a free box of food should require you to prove where you sleep.

The part he leaves out

Here is the sequence, in order.

On July 3, 2025, Yakym voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, H.R. 1 — it cleared the House 218 to 214. According to Feeding America Action, that law cuts nearly $200 billion from SNAP — through state cost-shifting, tighter eligibility, expanded work requirements, and new limits on USDA's ability to adjust benefits. Feeding America projects it takes nearly 6 billion meals off the table for SNAP participants every year.

Six billion meals is roughly what the entire Feeding America network — every food bank in the country — distributes in a year.

Then, eleven months later, he introduced a bill making it easier for food pantries to turn people away.

You cannot separate these two things. Cutting SNAP does not make people stop being hungry; it moves them from the grocery store checkout to the pantry line. The "substantial increase in individuals visiting" that Yakym's supporting pantries describe is the predictable downstream effect of the vote he cast. Since the law took effect, SNAP enrollment has fallen by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, while unemployment stayed flat. Nobody stopped being hungry.

He voted to push people off food stamps. Then he wrote the bill to let the backstop check their papers.

In his own district

Indiana's 2nd District is not a place with a surplus.

25,416 households in IN-02 — about 9% of every household in the district — rely on SNAP to put food on the table, according to USDA data. That includes 13,986 households with children and 7,736 with someone over 60.

Those are the households the cuts hit. They are also, when the benefit shrinks, the households that show up at MAC in Mishawaka and Hearts United in Bristol.

Nationally, Feeding America counts 48 million people a year facing food insecurity, including 14 million children.

The pattern

This is the shape the food fight keeps taking: vote for the cut, then perform concern about the consequences.

In Arkansas, Rick Crawford voted to cut food assistance by $187 billion and then threw a celebration over an amendment letting SNAP recipients buy a hot rotisserie chicken — a change that adds no money and helps nobody already cut off. In California, David Valadao cast the deciding vote for the same bill in a district where 27% of households are on SNAP, and said the enrollment drop doesn't worry him. And a 1,000-mile reporting trip through four states found what the cuts look like on the ground: people selling blood twice a week, people who can't afford toilet paper.

Yakym's contribution to that record is a bill that would let the last place those people can go ask them for a piece of mail first.

The bill nobody else would sign

The tell is the cosponsor count.

Members of Congress cosponsor thousands of bills a year. They are cheap to sign and cost nothing if they never move. H.R. 8953 has been sitting in the Agriculture Committee since May with exactly one name on it — Yakym's.

If the case were as simple as he makes it sound — pantries overwhelmed, a bureaucratic rule to fix, Hoosier generosity being abused — this would be an easy signature for a hundred colleagues.

Nobody else signed.

We deserve better.

Source

US Rep. Yakym's bill could lead to ID requirements for food aid — WRTV Indianapolis, May 25, 2026, and the same report via WISH-TV. Bill status from congress.gov. Photo: WRTV / Scripps.

Rick Crawford Voted to Cut Food Assistance by $187 Billion. Then He Threw a Party Over Letting People Buy a Hot Chicken.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:46:00 +0000

On April 30, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 384 to 35 in favor of an amendment to the Farm Bill written by Rick Crawford. Under current rules, someone on food assistance can buy a rotisserie chicken off the grocery store shelf if it's cold, but not if it's hot. Crawford's amendment fixes that.

It is, on its own, a perfectly good little rule change. The hot/cold distinction is silly. A $7 chicken feeds a family.

Here's the thing they didn't put in the press release.

Ten months earlier

On July 3, 2025, Crawford voted "Aye" on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump's budget bill.

The Congressional Budget Office scores that law as cutting food assistance by nearly $187 billion. As we've written, it is the largest cut to food assistance in American history. Four million people have already lost their benefits, and the expensive parts — shifting costs onto the states — were timed to land after the 2026 votes were counted.

So the sequence is:

July 2025: Vote to take $187 billion out of the program.
April 2026: Win a bipartisan standing ovation for letting the people still in the program buy their chicken warm.

What the amendment does and doesn't do

The National Chicken Council was clear about the limits, in its own celebration of the vote. The provision:

does not expand food assistance funding
does not broaden who is eligible
does not open the program to restaurants
applies only to hot rotisserie chicken, at retailers already in the program

In other words: it costs the federal government nothing and it does nothing at all for the four million people who no longer have a benefit to spend. If you were cut off last year, the temperature of the chicken is not your problem.

Who was happiest about it

The trade group for the companies that sell rotisserie chickens. Its president, Harrison Kircher, said the bill "is popular because it's a winner on affordability and nutrition."

Of course it is. Every hot chicken bought with food assistance dollars is a chicken sold. The amendment moves grocery-store poultry sales from one column to another at no cost to the industry and no cost to the Treasury. It is the rarest thing in Washington: a bill with no opponent because it asks nothing of anyone.

Crawford sits on the House Agriculture Committee — the committee that writes the Farm Bill and sets food assistance policy. OpenSecrets' tally of FEC filings for this cycle shows the industries that committee regulates sitting near the top of his donor list: Tyson Foods ($10,000), the National Cattlemen's Beef Association ($10,000), the National Cotton Council ($10,000), the Farm Credit Council ($10,000), American Crystal Sugar ($10,000).

That's the tell. Crawford will absolutely go to the mat on a food assistance rule — when the beneficiary is a company that sells food. When the beneficiary is a family that eats it, he votes the other way.

The 35 votes against tell you something too

Three hundred eighty-four members voted yes. Only 35 voted no.

A bill that passes 384-35 isn't a fight. It's a photo. And the reason it's a photo is that it doesn't cost anything or take anything from anyone with a lobbyist. Compare that to the actual food assistance fight, where Crawford was on the side that took $187 billion out and did it on a party-line budget bill that needed only a simple majority.

The chicken vote is what he'll put in the mailer. The $187 billion is what will show up in the grocery line.

The Farm Bill part nobody talks about

This isn't the first time the Farm Bill has been used this way. For fifty years the bill kept farm supports and food assistance together on purpose — so rural Republicans and urban Democrats needed each other, and neither program could be picked off alone. We've written about how Republicans worked to split them apart, and what happens to hungry families once that link is broken.

The rotisserie chicken amendment is the friendly face of that arrangement. Everyone gets a bipartisan win on a $7 chicken while the actual money moves somewhere else entirely.

What this costs the First District

His vote for the budget bill will leave 40,000 more people in the First District without health insurance. In January 2026 he joined every Arkansas Republican in voting against extending the subsidies that hold health premiums down. He has opposed raising Arkansas's minimum wage. And DOGE cut more than $8 million in grants out of his district — money that had been going to FEMA, AmeriCorps, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education.

He has not held an in-person town hall since 2017, so nobody gets to bring this up to his face.

The bottom line

Nobody should be against warm chicken. Take the win.

But do not let a $7 chicken buy off a $187 billion cut. Rick Crawford sits on the committee that writes food policy for this country, and when it counted — when the money was real and the vote was hard — he took food off the table for millions of people and then came home with a coupon.

We deserve better.

Source

National Chicken Council, "House Passed Farm Bill Includes Provision to Include Hot Rotisserie Chicken in SNAP", April 30, 2026.

For 50 Years the Farm Bill Fed Farmers and Hungry Families Together. Frank Lucas Called Splitting Them Up "Fortunate."

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:33:37 +0000

For more than half a century, the farm bill worked because of one deal.

Farm country needed crop insurance, price supports and disaster aid. Cities needed food stamps. Neither side had the votes alone. So Congress bundled them into a single bill, and rural Republicans and urban Democrats each voted for the other guy's half to get their own. That's not a theory about how the farm bill worked — that is how it worked, every five years, for fifty years.

Frank Lucas has been in Congress for that entire modern era of it. He was first elected in 1994. Oklahoma Watch describes him as a 19-term representative and a longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee; he currently chairs its Subcommittee on Conservation, Research and Biotechnology. Few people in the House have spent more of a career inside that bargain than he has.

In January 2026, he was asked what he made of the bargain falling apart. Here is what he said:

"Fortunately, most of what typically gets passed in a Farm Bill was included in the recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill, like updating the commodity support programs. This puts us in a much better position as we look towards passing what's left in a 'Skinny Farm Bill.'"

Fortunately.

What actually got split, and who got which half

Here's what the split did, laid out plainly.

The farm half — crop insurance, Price Loss Coverage and Agricultural Risk Coverage, disaster assistance, animal health money, trade support, and tax breaks for farm estates — went into Trump's budget bill, H.R. 1. Locked in over a ten-year window.

That bill did not go through the Agriculture Committee. It did not need 60 votes in the Senate. It moved through a special fast-track budget process called reconciliation, which lets a bill pass on a simple majority — so Republicans didn't need a single Democratic vote, and didn't get many.

The food half went in too. And it came out $187 billion smaller.

H.R. 1 rewrote SNAP: new cost-sharing rules that push bills onto states based on their payment error rates, more state responsibility for administrative costs, expanded work requirements, and changes to how benefits are calculated. The Food Research & Action Center calls the $187 billion figure the historic cut it is.

So the two halves of the old deal both moved — but only one of them got paid.

As Oklahoma Watch reported in the story where Lucas's "fortunately" line appears, that decision "effectively decoupled nutrition from agricultural policy." Analysts at the Oklahoma Policy Institute warned it weakens one of the last bipartisan coalitions in Congress and dumps new costs on states.

We've written about what that cost-shift looks like on the ground: states now on the hook for billions in food stamp costs for the first time ever, and four million Americans already off the program while unemployment hasn't moved.

Then he voted for a farm bill that doesn't fix any of it

On April 30, 2026, the House passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — the "skinny" farm bill — 224 to 200. Republicans voted 209 to 3 in favor. Lucas voted yes.

That bill had one obvious job available to it: put the food aid back.

It didn't. FRAC's read of the committee text was blunt — the mark "fails to include funding to restore the historic $187 billion in cuts to SNAP." It doesn't reverse the expanded time limits. It doesn't reverse the cost shift onto states. It doesn't restore benefits for the caregivers, veterans, older workers and homeless people who lost them.

What it does instead is write the new, smaller SNAP into standing farm law — the permanent statute the program runs on. The cuts stop being a line in a budget bill and become the baseline everything else gets measured from.

45,277 households in his own district

This is not an abstraction in Oklahoma's 3rd District.

45,277 households there — about 15% of every household in the district — use SNAP to buy groceries. That includes 21,027 households with children and 14,920 with someone over 60 in them, according to USDA's own data.

His district is rural and enormous — it stretches from the Panhandle to the western edge of the Tulsa suburbs. It is exactly the kind of place the old farm-bill bargain was built to cover on both ends at once: the people who grow the food and the people who can't afford it.

The farmers in that district got their ten-year certainty. Charlcey Plummer, an Oklahoma cotton grower quoted by Oklahoma Watch, described 2025 as the best cotton crop her family ever grew and the least money they ever made on one — "Every input on the farm is higher." She's right, and crop insurance and updated reference prices genuinely help her.

The grandmother two counties over who lost part of her food budget got nothing. There was no second bill for her. Lucas's word for that arrangement was fortunately.

The pattern in one bill

The same farm bill Lucas voted for on April 30 carries something else with his fingerprints on it: language that would permanently block the return of Fort Reno to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, by deleting the expiration date on an 18-year-old ban.

That's the through-line. When Frank Lucas has real power over a bill — and after 32 years, he has as much as anyone in that room — the things that get locked in permanently are the ones that take something away.

The bill is with the Senate now. The food aid can still go back in.

We deserve better.

Source

Oklahoma Farmers Face Uncertain Future as Comprehensive Farm Bill Splinters — Stephen Martin, Oklahoma Watch, January 30, 2026. Photo: Oklahoma Watch.

The Farm Bill Failed by One Vote. Tommy Tuberville Was at the Meeting — Just Not in the Room.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:25:35 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee tried to advance a farm bill. It failed by one vote.

Tommy Tuberville sits on that committee. He was at the markup. He was present for other parts of the meeting.

He was not in the room for the final vote.

How one empty chair killed it

The bill went down 10-11.

Tuberville did vote — by proxy, in favor. But proxy votes don't count toward the final majority in committee. You have to be in the room.

Republicans were already short. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been hospitalized and in rehabilitation since June. That was one seat Republicans couldn't fill no matter what.

Tuberville's was a seat they could have.

As the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported, "Republicans were without a majority in the room" because of McConnell's absence, and Tuberville "was also not present during the final vote on the bill, allowing Democrats to win the vote against the bill by one vote."

His office did not respond to requests for comment.

What Alabama lost when the bill died

This is not a procedural footnote. The farm bill sets the rules for crop insurance, disaster payments, conservation programs, marketing assistance, and rural development.

It has not been reauthorized since 2018. Farmers have been operating on extensions for years.

The bill that died on Thursday included things farm groups had been fighting for. The National Corn Growers Association said it was "extremely disappointed," calling it a bill that "was particularly important to corn growers," and warned: "We are running out of time in this Congress."

American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said the "stakes are too high" for another year without a farm bill.

Chairman John Boozman, the Arkansas Republican who wrote the bill, said struggling farmers were being held "hostage." He also warned exactly what failure would mean:

"Should this legislation be defeated today, current law will remain in effect, and states who poorly administer SNAP programs will begin to pay for the portion of the benefit cost next year."

Remember that sentence. It matters enormously for Alabama, and Tuberville knows it better than almost anyone in that room.

The bill he skipped was about a bill he voted for

The whole fight was over SNAP — food assistance.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with SNAP payment error rates above 6% have to start paying a share of their residents' food benefits. Democrats wanted a two-year delay so states could get ready. Boozman offered one year as a compromise and called it his "best and final offer." Democrats said no. The bill died.

Here's the part Alabamians should sit with.

Tuberville voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. That's the law that created this cost-shift in the first place.

And Alabama is one of the states it hits hardest. According to Alabama Daily News, Alabama's SNAP error rate for fiscal year 2025 was 9.52% — up from 8.32% the year before. That puts the state in the 10% cost-share tier. Beginning October 1, 2027, Alabama would owe roughly $174 million to cover its share of food benefit costs.

About 670,000 Alabamians get SNAP. 300,000 of them are children.

So: Tuberville voted for the law that put a $174 million bill on Alabama's desk. Then he sat on the committee handling the relief. Then he wasn't in the room when the vote came.

And he's running to be the one who pays it

Tuberville is not running for re-election to the Senate. He is running for governor of Alabama.

If he wins, he is the person who has to find that $174 million. He would be governor when the bill comes due.

His plan for fixing Alabama's error rate, per Alabama Daily News, is to use AI. He said he and his team plan to use artificial intelligence to bring the rate down to around 5%. The reporting notes he offered no implementation details and no evidence of coordination with the state Department of Human Resources.

That's the plan. Artificial intelligence, no details, for a number that just went the wrong direction two years running.

This is the job, and he keeps not doing it

Skipping the vote is not a one-time thing with Tuberville. It's the shape of his entire Senate career.

In 2023 he spent ten months holding up more than 450 military promotions — generals and admirals included — to protest an unrelated Pentagon policy. He dropped the holds without winning a single policy change.

He has told Alabamians that Social Security is a scam, which we wrote about when he called it a "Ponzi scheme" while collecting about $93,000 in benefits from it.

He has been caught voting in Florida while claiming to live in Alabama.

Now the farm bill — the single most important piece of legislation for the state he wants to govern — failed by one vote, in a room he had walked out of.

What happens next

The committee recessed rather than adjourned, so it can take the bill up again when the Senate returns from its August recess. Ranking member Amy Klobuchar said she is "committed to continuing to work on the bill."

Meanwhile, current law stays in effect. The cost-share requirement is still coming. Alabama farmers still have no farm bill. And 670,000 Alabamians on SNAP, including 300,000 kids, are still in the middle of a fight their senator declined to show up for.

Alabama deserves a senator who is in the room.

Source

Alex Angle, "Senate panel, with Tuberville absent, fails to advance farm bill amid SNAP stalemate," Alabama Daily News, via The Decatur Daily, August 8, 2026. Additional reporting from Cami Koons, Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Nebraska Was Offered $18 Million to Feed Hungry Kids Over the Summer. Jim Pillen Said 'I Don't Believe in Welfare.'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:42:00 +0000

In December 2023, the federal government offered Nebraska $18 million to feed children from low-income families during the summer months, when school meals stop.

The program is called Summer EBT. It puts about $40 a month per child on a grocery card. Nebraska didn't have to build anything or pay for the benefits — the state only had to opt in and split administrative costs.

Jim Pillen said no.

Asked at a news conference to explain the decision, the governor gave an answer that traveled well beyond Nebraska:

"I don't believe in welfare."

What he was turning down

The money would have gone to groceries for kids in families that qualify for free or reduced-price school meals — about 175,000 Nebraska children, by the Associated Press's count, who might otherwise go hungry when school lets out.

At $40 a month, that is around $120 per child across a summer. That is not a lifestyle. It's about two weeks of breakfast.

Nebraska was one of a small group of states that refused. The children affected did not choose their parents' income, and none of them can opt into anything themselves.

What changed his mind

The refusal didn't hold.

Nebraska Appleseed circulated a petition and delivered 6,144 signatures from 230 communities. An Omaha man began a vigil outside the governor's residence.

And then Pillen met some of the kids. In February 2024 he reversed himself and accepted the $18 million. His own explanation for the change was that "you sit down with kids who are living it."

Take that sentence seriously, because it's an admission. The governor of Nebraska decided the state's position on child hunger, announced it, defended it publicly with "I don't believe in welfare" — and only discovered what it meant after he sat down with the children it applied to.

He had that available to him before he said no.

The program he tried to block worked

The first summer under the program Pillen initially refused, Nebraska delivered nearly $24 million in grocery benefits to 121,855 Nebraska families. State officials deemed it a success.

That is what was on the other side of "I don't believe in welfare": twenty-four million dollars of groceries, in the carts of a hundred and twenty thousand Nebraska families, in one summer.

Why it isn't ancient history

Pillen's position on this hasn't softened — it's expanded.

Nebraska is now the first state in the country to implement Medicaid work requirements, which he announced alongside the federal Medicare and Medicaid administrator and touted on his January telephone town hall. On that same call, he dismissed the state's $471.5 million budget shortfall as something the press invented while defending a budget that cuts roughly $152 million from the Department of Health and Human Services — the agency that runs Medicaid and child welfare.

The through-line is a governor who treats programs for low-income Nebraskans as a matter of belief rather than arithmetic. The $18 million wasn't refused because Nebraska couldn't afford it. Nebraska wasn't paying for it. It was refused on principle, and the principle was stated out loud.

The bottom line

Jim Pillen was handed $18 million in federal money to keep Nebraska kids fed over the summer and turned it down, explaining that he doesn't believe in welfare. It took a 6,144-signature petition and a face-to-face meeting with hungry children to move him.

When the program finally ran, it fed nearly 122,000 Nebraska families.

Nebraskans deserve a governor who doesn't need to meet a hungry child to understand what hunger is. We deserve better.

Source

"Nebraska governor again rejects giving kids from low-income families $40 per month for food: 'I don't believe in welfare'" — Associated Press via Fortune, December 29, 2023. Reversal reported by WOWT, February 12, 2024; results by the Nebraska Examiner, October 17, 2024. Photo: Jim Pillen at SelectUSA (Wikimedia Commons).

27% of Households in David Valadao's District Are on Food Stamps. He Says He's Not Worried About the Cuts.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:05:00 +0000

More than 27% of households in California's 22nd Congressional District get help buying groceries through SNAP. Nationally, the figure is 17%.

That district belongs to David Valadao. And when HuffPost's Arthur Delaney asked him whether the steep drop in food assistance since Republicans passed their budget bill might be a problem for him in November, Valadao said he isn't sweating it.

The full piece is worth reading. His argument, in his own words:

"When you look at work requirements and you drive across the Central Valley, I represent a lot of very hardworking people that are out there picking grapes, working on farms, working oil fields in the hot sun, and the idea that there are people out there that have the ability to work and choose not to, have no dependents, no disabilities, is something I agree is what the average voter would expect from their neighbors and their fellow countrymen."

Read that carefully. Valadao is describing his constituents as two groups: the hardworking people picking grapes in the sun, and the people who could work and choose not to. He is betting the first group will be happy about what happened to the second.

He was the one vote

There is a specific reason this vote belongs to Valadao more than to almost any other Republican.

When Trump's budget bill first cleared the House on May 22, 2025, the roll call was 215 to 214. One vote. Valadao voted yes. Had he voted no, the bill would have died there.

He voted yes again on final passage on July 3, 2025, which carried 218 to 214.

He knew what was in it. HuffPost notes he was one of several House Republicans who hesitated over the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid before voting yes. He hesitated twice, and voted for it both times.

His district is not a marginal case for either program. CA-22 has the highest Medicaid enrollment rate of any Republican-held seat in the country — 64% of residents are enrolled. On food assistance, it's more than 27% of households. Whatever this bill did to America, it did more of it to the 22nd district than to almost anywhere else Republicans represent.

What the cuts actually did

The mechanism matters, because Valadao's defense rests entirely on it.

The bill imposed new work requirements — an expanded limit on benefits for unemployed adults without young children — and shifted costs from the federal government onto the states. Since then, more than 4 million fewer individuals and 2 million fewer households are receiving SNAP benefits.

Valadao's position is that this decline is fine, because it was driven partly by those work requirements. In other words: the people who left were the people who should have left.

That is an assertion, not a finding. Work requirements do not only remove people who refuse to work. They remove people who work irregular hours and can't document them, people whose paperwork arrives late, people who move, people who never got the notice. We've written about what the collapse in enrollment actually looks like on the ground — including the fact that unemployment hasn't moved and grocery prices haven't stopped climbing. If people were leaving SNAP because they'd found work, you would expect the job numbers to show it.

Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas gave HuffPost the same read Valadao did: "I think it just indicates that there are a lot of people on there that weren't working." He added, "it is what it is."

The people in the sun

The rhetorical move in Valadao's quote deserves attention, because it's doing the heavy lifting.

He invokes farmworkers — people picking grapes, working the fields, working oil fields in the heat — as the constituency who will approve of cutting food aid. He is contrasting them with an imagined group of able-bodied people who choose not to work.

But farmwork in the Central Valley is seasonal. Hours collapse between harvests. A packing-shed job that runs 50 hours in August can run zero in January. Those are exactly the workers whose hours fall below a monthly threshold through no choice of their own, and exactly the workers a rigid work-requirement rule cuts off.

The 27% figure isn't made up of people who don't work. In a district built on agriculture, a very large share of it is made up of people who do.

Valadao's Democratic opponent, Randy Villegas, framed it directly:

"Working people in the Central Valley are struggling to feed their families because David Valadao voted to cut SNAP in order to give tax breaks to billionaires."

The moderate label and the record

Valadao's whole political brand is that he's not like the others. He was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6th, and he has survived in a district Democrats keep expecting to flip.

That reputation is why the budget bill vote matters so much. On the vote where his district had more at stake than nearly any other Republican's, and where his single vote would have decided the outcome, he did not break with his party. He voted yes and then explained why the consequences are acceptable.

HuffPost describes CA-22 as a toss-up in November. Valadao's answer to the people losing groceries in a toss-up district is that the average voter would expect this from their neighbors.

Central Valley voters get to decide in November whether he's right about what they expect.

Sources

"Republicans Don't Think Steep Food Stamp Cuts Will Hurt Them In The Midterms" — Arthur Delaney, HuffPost, July 31, 2026

Photo: HuffPost.

4 Million Americans Have Lost Food Stamps. Republicans Say That's the Economy Getting Better.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:52:00 +0000

Last year, an average of 42 million Americans got help buying groceries every month — roughly 1 in 8 of us. As of April, that number was down to 37 million.

More than 4 million people lost food assistance in nine months. A huge share of them are kids.

Nothing about the economy explains it. Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent that entire time. Grocery prices kept going up. Nobody woke up one morning and stopped needing food.

What changed is the law. Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" in July 2025, and in state after state the decline accelerated right after it was signed.

And here's the part worth sitting with: the biggest cut hasn't even happened yet. It starts in October.

What the Agriculture Secretary said about it

In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a number to social media like a scoreboard: "4.3 million off SNAP and counting!"

She added that "Americans are getting back to work," that "healthy employment numbers mean less reliance on government programs," and that America "is back in business!"

In late April, on Fox Business, she had given the same explanation for the drop: "A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn't have been, and then a lot of it is just a better economy."

The Associated Press ran that claim through the data and the researchers who study it. It didn't hold up.

Caitlin Caspi, who studies food insecurity at the University of Connecticut, told the AP the shape of the decline doesn't match a jobs story at all: "We're not seeing a linear kind of drop-off. We do not see, for example, a pattern of decline in unemployment that would match the pattern of decline in SNAP participation." She also said flatly that she sees no evidence of a drop in fraud driving it.

Roger Figueroa, who studies nutrition at Cornell, pointed to a different cause: "What we've seen in terms of the data is that the trend in participation declines seems to be related to the program being harder to access."

That's the whole story. They made it harder. Then they took credit for the result.

The USDA's own line to NPR was that participation "tends to fluctuate" and the drop isn't representative of any one policy. That's a strange thing to say about the sharpest decline in three decades — the last time this many people fell off this fast was after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

Arizona is what this looks like when it's finished

If you want to see where the rest of the country is headed, look at Arizona.

Arizona had 882,419 people on SNAP in July 2025. By April, it was 400,641. That's a 54.6% drop. More than half the program, gone in nine months. No other state is close — the next steepest declines are Louisiana at 21%, Florida at 19% and Oklahoma at about 18%.

Then there's this, from the Arizona Food Bank Network, which has tracked the numbers the same way since 2016: for the first time, more Arizonans are visiting food banks each month than are enrolled in food stamps.

Their conclusion is one sentence long. "People need food banks now more than at any point in the last 10 years."

Natalie Jayroe, who runs the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, told NPR what that means for everyone else. "We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine," she said. "We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario."

This has names attached to it in Arizona

It's easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here's the roll call.

The House passed the final version of the bill on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. It came down to four votes. Every single Republican in Arizona's delegation voted yes:

Andy Biggs — AZ-05, now running for governor
David Schweikert — AZ-01, also now running for governor
Paul Gosar — AZ-09
Eli Crane — AZ-02
Juan Ciscomani — AZ-06
Abraham Hamadeh — AZ-08

All six of them represent a state where 1 in 5 kids already faces hunger. Any one of them could have flipped it.

Nine months later, more than half the people on food stamps in their state are off the program, and Arizonans are lining up at food banks in numbers the state hasn't seen in a decade. Biggs and Schweikert are now asking those same Arizonans to make one of them governor — the office that will have to decide, starting in October, whether Arizona can still afford to run SNAP at all.

Who they specifically decided to stop protecting

The eligibility changes weren't a broad trim. Congress went in and named groups.

Under the old rules, certain people were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits because lawmakers had recognized they were in genuine crisis. Republicans deleted those protections:

Veterans
People experiencing homelessness
Young people aging out of foster care

They also pushed work rules onto parents with a child as young as 14, and raised the top age from 54 all the way to 64. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the work-rule changes alone will cut about 2.4 million people from SNAP in an average month through 2034.

And they ended food aid for a small group of legal immigrants — refugees, people seeking asylum, and victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

Those are the people the "waste, fraud and abuse" language was covering for.

The human version of this is not abstract. We wrote yesterday about a woman in Oklahoma City who sells her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive and had $3.78 in her checking account. Her food stamps come to $298 a month, and there's a real chance she loses those too.

The bill that hits in October

Here's what almost nobody is talking about.

For decades, Washington and the states split the cost of running SNAP 50-50. Starting October 1, 2026 — this fall — the federal government drops to 25%, and states have to cover 75%.

Then, on October 1, 2027, states start paying for the food benefits themselves for the first time in the program's history — between 5% and 15%, depending on their "error rate." Almost half of states could owe $100 million or more.

An error rate sounds like fraud. It isn't. It's a count of overpayments and underpayments, mostly honest mistakes — a typo, a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family not knowing what to report. We've walked through how that formula works and why it quietly rewards states for kicking eligible people off: wrongly denying someone benefits doesn't count as an error at all.

The Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality ran the state budgets. On average, states will have to spend two to three times more of their own money on SNAP — a median increase of about 202%. In 15 states it's more than 300%. In Florida, nearly 770%.

States have to balance their budgets. So that money comes out of schools, roads, or the food program itself.

Some states are already talking about quitting

A survey of state SNAP agencies this spring found 29% saying they may have to narrow eligibility further, and 11% saying they might withdraw or pause the program entirely.

Of the 39 states that responded, 15 said they are now prioritizing payment accuracy over getting benefits to people on time. That is the trade-off in plain language: paperwork first, hungry families second.

"There's really an existential crisis in the future of SNAP," said Lexie Kuznick of the American Public Human Services Association.

And there's no backstop. Starsky Wilson of the Children's Defense Fund said it as bluntly as it can be said: "There's no replacement for SNAP if a state gets rid of it."

It doesn't stop at the poor

If you don't use SNAP, you still pay for this.

Every food stamp dollar gets spent at a grocery store, usually within days, usually close to home. The National Grocers Association estimates the eligibility cuts total $88 billion over ten years, and that SNAP sales will fall about 8.7% on average over the next nine years.

In a small town, that's the difference between the grocery store staying open and not. When it closes, everybody drives farther for milk.

The bottom line

Republicans campaigned on bringing down the cost of groceries. What they passed instead is the largest cut to food assistance in American history — nearly $187 billion — and they timed the expensive parts to land after the votes were counted.

Four million people are already gone. The state cost shift starts in October. The benefit cost shift lands in 2027.

And the official in charge of feeding this country is posting the casualty count like a win.

We deserve better.

Source

Juliana Kim, Over 4 million people are no longer receiving food aid amid sweeping changes to SNAP, NPR, August 3, 2026. Lead photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

She Sells Her Blood Twice a Week and Has $3.78 in the Bank. Republicans Just Took Food Away From 4.5 Million People.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:26:25 +0000

Trinity Goodman is 44 years old and lives in Oklahoma City. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in savings to keep the account open, and six pennies in a piggy bank. She had a bandage on her arm, because the way she stays alive is by selling her blood plasma twice a week.

"That's my full assets," she said.

Her food stamps come to $298 a month. You can't buy toilet paper with food stamps. You can't buy tampons with them either. So she goes to church pantries and hopes. She has never in her life been to a barber.

"I've never been to a barber or any of those places," she told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who met her on a 1,000-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. "Never. I don't have that luxury."

And now there is a real chance her $298 goes away too.

This is not the economy. This is a law.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nothing about the job market suddenly got better. Nobody stopped needing groceries.

And yet, in that same stretch, SNAP enrollment fell by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Participation dropped in every single state except Alaska. It fell by 10 percent or more in 23 states.

The Center is blunt about what that means: "It's very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline."

The last time this many people fell off food assistance this fast — outside of a temporary spike after a natural disaster — was nearly thirty years ago, after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

So what changed in July 2025? Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The Congressional Budget Office scores it as cutting SNAP by nearly $187 billion — the largest cut to food assistance in American history.

They didn't cut it because the economy improved. They cut it because they wanted to.

They took food from 1.5 million kids

Of the people pushed off SNAP, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 1.5 million are children. In the 19 states where the data is public, kids made up nearly half of everyone who lost benefits.

Children are already the age group most likely to live in poverty in America — especially children under 2 years old.

You cannot accuse a two-year-old of being lazy. You cannot accuse a two-year-old of gaming the system. There is no version of "personal responsibility" that explains taking food off a toddler's table.

Read who they specifically decided to stop protecting

This is the detail that tells you everything.

Under the old rules, a handful of groups were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits, because Congress had recognized these were people in genuine crisis. Republicans went in and deleted those protections one by one:

Veterans.
People experiencing homelessness.
Young people who just aged out of foster care.

They also raised the age you're subject to work rules from 54 to 64, and extended the rules to parents caring for kids as young as 14.

Now hold that next to another person Kristof met in Oklahoma City. Courtney Williams, 31, was put into foster care at age 6, after she saw her younger sister killed. She was moved through foster homes in seven different states, carrying everything she owned in a trash bag. In one home, at age 11, the family padlocked the refrigerator, the freezer and the food cabinets. She was hungry.

When she turned 17, the checks stopped coming and her foster mother put her out. She spent roughly the next decade homeless.

Today she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps survives.

Congress had specifically written a protection into the law for kids coming out of exactly that system. Republicans took it out. They also took out the one for homeless adults — which is the other category Williams spent ten years in.

Taxpayers paid to incarcerate her three times. We would not pay to feed her.

And it's not just food

The same crew came for health care in the same bill.

Marketplace enrollment is projected to fall to about 17.5 million people in 2026, down from 22.3 million in 2025 — a drop of roughly 4.8 million — after Republicans let the enhanced premium tax credits expire. For the people who managed to hang on, KFF found the average out-of-pocket premium jumped 58% and the average deductible climbed 37%, to $3,786 a year.

That's the trick. You don't have to repeal someone's insurance. You just make it cost more than they have.

In the states Kristof drove through, the damage is already mapped out:

In Oklahoma, an estimated 174,000 people are at risk of losing SoonerCare, with another 95,000 projected to go uninsured. About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — one of the highest rates in the country — and 1 in 4 Oklahoma kids already faces hunger.
In Arkansas — which has the highest food insecurity rate in the nation, where 1 in 4 kids goes hungry — SNAP enrollment is already down about 9 percent, nearly 21,000 people, including almost 7,900 children. The state stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with rural hospitals expected to close.

These are not blue states being punished. Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky send Republicans to Washington. Those Republicans voted for this.

This has names attached to it

It is easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here is the roll call.

The House passed the final version on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. Every single Republican from these four states voted yes:

Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern and Frank Lucas — the entire delegation, in a state where 1 in 4 kids already faces hunger.
Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman — the whole delegation of the hungriest state in America. Pine Bluff, where Latoya Foster is behind on rent and where Kristof found seniors saying life was more livable under Jim Crow, sits in Westerman's district. He keeps a district office there.
Tennessee: Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, Andy Ogles, John Rose and David Kustoff.
Kentucky: James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers and Andy Barr.

Only two Republicans in the entire House voted no. One of them was Kentucky's Thomas Massie — so Kentucky's delegation had a live example, from their own state, of what voting no looked like. Comer, Guthrie, Rogers and Barr voted yes anyway.

In the Senate, the bill passed 50 to 50 on July 1, 2025, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, all voted yes.

It was a tie. Any one of them could have stopped it. Cotton represents the state with the worst food insecurity in the country.

Two who weren't there — and one who did something else

Two names on this list didn't cast that vote, and it's worth being precise about it.

Matt Van Epps wasn't in Congress yet. He won Tennessee's 7th district in a special election on December 2, 2025 and was sworn in two days later — five months after the bill passed. He inherits the consequences rather than owning the vote.

Sarah Sanders is Arkansas's governor, so she never had a vote on a federal bill either. But she has had plenty to say about food assistance — and what she chose to do with it is its own answer.

Arkansas is dead last, #50 out of 50, for food insecurity. No state in America struggles harder to put food on the table. Faced with that, Sanders's signature SNAP initiative was to ask Washington for permission to narrow what hungry Arkansans are allowed to buy — banning soda, certain juices and candy from food stamps, while adding rotisserie chicken. USDA approved the waiver in June 2025, and it took effect July 1, 2026 — one month before Kristof's road trip.

Sanders said the approval "sends a clear message" and that Arkansas "leads the nation in getting unhealthy, ultra-processed foods off food stamps."

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families had a different read. Their policy director, Christin Harper, told legislators that the better way to fix bad health outcomes is to address the root causes — poverty and access to medical care.

Remember what Trinity Goodman actually can't buy with her $298: toilet paper and feminine hygiene products. The problem in these states was never that poor people had too many options at the register.

"The more I work, the harder stuff gets"

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Kristof met Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother of six who works as a shift manager at Taco Bell for $13.40 an hour. Her food stamps — $1,172 a month — were cut off in May over a suspicion she says is simply a mistake in the system. She's now behind on her $650 rent and racking up a $25-a-day late fee.

"I hit rock bottom daily," she said. "The more I work, the harder stuff gets."

Then she broke down and cried.

That is not an accident of the new law. It is the mechanism. Starting in 2027, states have to pay 5 to 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs themselves, and how much they pay depends on their error rates. So states are racing to drive their error rates down — more paperwork, more re-verification, more denials. And here's the catch the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: wrongly denying benefits to an eligible family doesn't count as an error.

Republicans built a system that financially rewards states for kicking eligible people off.

Who actually gets investigated in this country

The whole thing rests on a story about the "undeserving poor" gaming the system. So look at who the government actually goes after.

ProPublica mapped IRS audit rates by county, and the most heavily audited place in America was not a billionaire enclave. It was Humphreys County, Mississippi — a rural, majority-Black county in the Delta with a median household income of about $26,000. Its audit rate ran 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the nation, where the median income was $130,000. The five most-audited counties in America were all rural, predominantly African American counties in the Deep South.

The reason is simple: so many residents there claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS audits EITC filers at rates rivaled only by the very richest Americans.

Meanwhile, this same Congress found room in the budget for tax breaks for private jets and a war with Iran.

And when they can't get the cuts through the front door, they take the money anyway. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog — found that the administration broke the law by withholding Head Start money. Between January 20 and April 15, 2025, HHS pushed out over $825 million less than the year before, about 65% of the prior year's rate. GAO ruled it violated the Impoundment Control Act. During last fall's shutdown, the administration illegally refused to deliver SNAP benefits at all.

Two-thirds of us can't afford groceries

This is not a story about a distant underclass.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll taken July 8–13, 2026 found that about two-thirds of Americans now call the cost of groceries unaffordable. Among households earning under $50,000, it's 82 percent. Among households earning over $100,000, it's 56 percent.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they don't have a good chance at improving their standard of living in this country. Fifty-four percent say the economy and high prices are the single most important thing driving their vote this year.

So the people who ran on lowering your grocery bill have instead delivered the largest food assistance cut in American history, higher insurance premiums, and record deductibles — while two-thirds of the country says it can't afford to eat.

Trinity Goodman had a message for the president.

"You do not know what you're doing to people who are struggling to live. You got money in the bank. You don't know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn't be able to handle it."

She is selling her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive. And there is a real chance they take her $298 anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Nicholas Kristof, "Meet the Americans Who Can't Afford Haircuts or Toilet Paper," The New York Times, August 1, 2026. Photo: Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times.

The 4 Best States in America Don't Have a Single Republican in Congress

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:07:32 +0000

We rank all 50 states on 17 different measures of how life actually goes for the people who live there. Not opinions. Not vibes. Hard numbers from the CDC, the USDA, America's Health Rankings, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation — things like how long people live, how many babies die before their first birthday, how many families can't afford food, how many kids grow up poor, how many people are shot, and how good the schools are.

Then we add it all up. Here are the top four:

Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Vermont
Connecticut

Now here's the part worth sitting with.

Those four states send 25 people to Congress — 17 Representatives and 8 Senators. Not one of them is a Republican. Not one. Massachusetts has nine House members and two Senators, all Democrats. Connecticut hasn't sent a Republican to Congress since Chris Shays lost his seat in 2008. New Hampshire has two House Democrats and two Democratic Senators. Vermont has one Democratic Representative, one Democratic Senator, and Bernie Sanders.

Twenty-five seats. Zero Republicans.

Now look at the bottom

Flip the list over. The four worst states on our rankings:

#50 Louisiana
#49 Arkansas
#48 Mississippi
#47 Alabama

All four are Republican trifectas — the Republican Party controls the governor's office, the state senate, and the state house in every one of them, according to Ballotpedia. Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama send 24 Republicans to Congress between them, including the Speaker of the House.

So the four best states in America have zero Republicans in Washington. The four worst states have 24.

That's not a coincidence you can wave away. That's a pattern.

The gap isn't small

This isn't a photo finish. On measure after measure, the top four and the bottom four are living in different countries.

Dying young. Massachusetts ranks #2 in the country for life expectancy and Connecticut #3. Mississippi is dead last, with Alabama #48 and Louisiana #47.
Babies. New Hampshire has the lowest infant mortality rate in America. Vermont is #2, Massachusetts #3. Mississippi is #50, Arkansas #49, Alabama #48.
Hunger. New Hampshire has the lowest food insecurity rate in the country. Arkansas has the highest — #50 of 50. In Arkansas, 1 in 4 kids faces hunger. Same in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Poverty. New Hampshire has the lowest poverty rate in America, Vermont #3. Louisiana is #50 and Mississippi #49.
Paychecks. Massachusetts has the highest median household income in the country. Mississippi has the lowest.
Guns. Massachusetts has the second-lowest firearm death rate in America, Connecticut #6, New Hampshire #9. Mississippi is #50, Louisiana #49, Alabama #47.
Women's health. Massachusetts ranks #1 in the nation, Vermont #2, Connecticut #4, New Hampshire #5. Mississippi is #50, Arkansas #46, Alabama #44.
Kids. New Hampshire is #1 for child well-being, Massachusetts #2, Vermont #4. Mississippi is #50, Louisiana #48.

Same country. Same economy. Same federal government. Wildly different outcomes.

These are choices, and we can name them

Here's the cleanest example. The Affordable Care Act let every state expand Medicaid, with the federal government picking up almost the whole tab. Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut all took the deal on January 1, 2014. New Hampshire followed that August.

Mississippi and Alabama — #48 and #47 — still haven't taken it, twelve years later. They are two of only ten holdout states in America. Mississippi has the worst life expectancy, the worst infant mortality, and the worst women's health ranking in the country, and its leaders have spent over a decade turning down federal money to fix it.

That's not bad luck. That's a decision somebody made, on purpose, more than once.

Then they voted to make it worse

On July 1, 2025, the Senate passed Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" 50–50, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Two days later the House sent it to Trump's desk.

Look at how the two groups of states voted.

Every single one of the 25 members of Congress from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut voted no. All 17 House members. All 8 Senators. Unanimous.

Every single one of the 24 Republicans from Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama voted yes. All 16 House Republicans. All 8 Senators.

The bill cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts weighted toward the richest 1 percent. Here's what that means in the states that voted for it:

Louisiana loses an estimated $21.9 billion in federal Medicaid dollars over the next decade — 16% of what the state was set to get, one of the steepest percentage cuts of any state. Somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 Louisianians are expected to lose coverage. That's the state already ranked #50.
Arkansas loses about $8.9 billion, and rural hospitals there are expected to close.
Mississippi — the state that never expanded Medicaid in the first place — loses about $3 billion, and 115,000 residents are projected to lose coverage in a state where 24% of everyone is on Medicaid.
Alabama loses about $3.5 billion, and 53,000 more Alabamians lose coverage — rising to 170,000 if the enhanced ACA tax credits expire too.

The states with the least cushion took the hardest swing. Their own representatives swung it.

Here is every single one of them

No hiding in a party total. Here are the names, state by state. Every member of Congress listed below is a recorded yes on the House or Senate roll call.

Louisiana — ranked #50. Steve Scalise (LA-01), the House Majority Leader who runs the floor. Clay Higgins (LA-03). Mike Johnson (LA-04), the Speaker of the House, who decides what comes up for a vote at all. Julia Letlow (LA-05), who is now running for the Senate on this record. Senators Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy both voted yes too.

Arkansas — ranked #49 overall, and dead last in the country for hunger. Rick Crawford (AR-01), French Hill (AR-02), Steve Womack (AR-03), and Bruce Westerman (AR-04) — the entire House delegation. Senators Tom Cotton and John Boozman. Governor Sarah Sanders cast no vote — she doesn't get one — but she runs the state, and it has the highest food insecurity rate in the country, where 1 in 4 kids faces hunger.

Mississippi — ranked #48. Trent Kelly (MS-01), Michael Guest (MS-03), and Mike Ezell (MS-04). Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker. The only member of Mississippi's delegation who voted no was Democrat Bennie Thompson.

Alabama — ranked #47. Mike Rogers (AL-03), Robert Aderholt (AL-04), Dale Strong (AL-05), and Gary Palmer (AL-06), along with Barry Moore (AL-01). Senators Tommy Tuberville — now running for Governor on this record — and Katie Britt. Alabama's two Democrats, Shomari Figures and Terri Sewell, voted no.

Four states at the very bottom of the country. Twenty-four Republicans. Not one defection.

"But two of those states have Republican governors"

They do, and it's worth being straight about it.

Vermont's governor is Phil Scott, a Republican. He has also never voted for Donald Trump — he wrote in a former Vermont governor in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. He said he "had to put country over party." Whatever Phil Scott is, MAGA isn't it.

New Hampshire's governor is Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who took office in January 2025 — long after the numbers that put New Hampshire at #2 were built. New Hampshire is #2 because of what was built there over decades. Watch what happens to that number now.

The bottom line

A state's ranking is the sum of a thousand decisions: whether to take the Medicaid money, whether to fund the schools, whether to feed the kids, whether to make it easy or hard to get a gun, whether to expand coverage or hand the savings to the top 1 percent.

The four states that made those calls best send nobody to Washington to undo them. The four states that made them worst send 24 people to Washington who voted in 2025 to make them worse.

If the MAGA agenda worked, Louisiana and Mississippi would be at the top of this list. They've had total control for years. Instead they're #50 and #48, and their own Senators voted to cut the health care their constituents can least afford to lose.

We deserve better.

Sources

Rankings are our own composite of 17 state datasets — see the full comparison tool for every measure and its source. Vote records: U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote 372 (July 1, 2025) and House Roll Call 190 (July 3, 2025). Party control: Ballotpedia. Medicaid expansion status: KFF, May 2026.

What Utah's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:17:08 +0000

Utah ranks 10th out of 50 on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, life expectancy, and more. That's one of the best scores in the country, and it isn't an accident. It's insured families, funded hospitals, kids who eat, a university that does real research, and land nobody sold.

Most of that was built here. A lot of it is paid for in Washington. And the three Utahns who represent this state in the House have spent the past two years voting to spend it down.

Blake Moore, the House Republican Conference Vice Chair and a senior member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Celeste Maloy, who sits on Appropriations and Natural Resources. Mike Kennedy, a practicing family physician who serves as Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee.

All three voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 3, 2025 — the law that cuts health coverage and food aid to pay for tax breaks. All three voted twice to lock DOGE's cuts into permanent law, in June 2025 and again in July. And on February 11, 2026, when the House actually passed a resolution to end the tariff emergency, 219–211, all three voted no.

Here's what those votes cost.

80,000 Utahns lose their health insurance — and a doctor cast one of the votes

An estimated 80,000 Utahns are projected to lose their health insurance under Trump's budget bill — working families, people with disabilities, and rural communities that already drive furthest for care.

Utah's strong health ranking is exactly the thing 80,000 lost policies eats into. High rankings are built out of people having a doctor.

Mike Kennedy is a family physician. He voted for the bill anyway, and then defended the Medicaid cuts in a published op-ed, writing that they "cut waste while preserving resources for the people it was intended to serve." He has eight children. Presumably he'd want them to be able to see a doctor.

Utah's Republicans celebrated the bill's passage while health advocates in the state said plainly what it would do.

One in five Utah kids is hungry

Here in Utah, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day. About 176,200 Utahns — roughly 5% of the state — receive SNAP benefits every month to put food on the table.

Utah's SNAP enrollment is one of the lowest rates in the country. That is not a program running wild. It's a thin program in a state that already leans hard on churches, food banks, and neighbors — and the megabill the delegation voted for tightens who qualifies on top of it.

One in five kids goes hungry in a state that ranks 10th overall. Voting to make the food line shorter doesn't make the hunger smaller.

DOGE claimed $157 million. The University of Utah paid part of the bill.

DOGE says it "saved" Utah more than $157 million. Some of what that bought:

DOGE canceled 77 research grants at the University of Utah, costing $28.4 million in lost funding for medical and scientific research. That's not an abstraction in a state whose health ranking runs partly through its own research hospital.

Blake Moore isn't a bystander here — he co-chairs the House DOGE Caucus, which he helped launch in December 2024 alongside Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. But by his own account his northern Utah district ranks in the top 5% of all 435 congressional districts for federal workforce size — Hill Air Force Base, the IRS processing facility in Ogden, the veterans hospital, air traffic control, TSA, BLM, the Forest Service. When the cuts hit those workers, Moore told a February 2025 tele-town hall that "the communication that's come out from the DOGE world has been antagonistic" and that "I've been very, very frustrated at this alongside you." He helped build the bulldozer, then complained about the damage.

Celeste Maloy is a DOGE Caucus member too, and told Utahns she'd "like to see agencies do less with less" — advising them to ignore "the hysteria" as the cuts hit national parks, the IRS, and federal workers across the state. For someone crusading against government waste, she has her own history with public money: before Congress, she personally lobbied Utah lawmakers in 2019 to hand $300,000 in state funds to a public-lands nonprofit she had helped launch and later led. Watchdog reporting found "scant evidence" of what it accomplished. It dissolved in 2023 when she ran for Congress.

Meanwhile there were 267,000 layoffs in Utah in 2025. Utah's delegation spent that year voting to add to the pile.

They tried to sell 10,000 acres of Utah to pay for the tax cuts

This is the one that's specific to us.

Celeste Maloy pushed to sell more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land — parcels across Washington County near St. George — as an amendment to Trump's budget bill. The proposal drew bipartisan opposition and was stripped from the final bill. It failed because Utahns and others objected, not because she stopped pushing.

She also sponsored the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would require Congress to sign off on every new national monument — gutting the century-old law that protected millions of acres of American wilderness, a lot of it here.

Maloy is the cousin of Ammon Bundy and niece of Cliven Bundy, the family behind the 2014 armed standoff with federal agents over public land. Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, put it this way: "Leave it to a member of the Bundy family to lead an egregious attack on America's public lands, this time from within the halls of Congress."

On the environment generally, none of the three is close to a defender. Moore holds a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters in 2025 and 7% lifetime. Maloy is at 3% in 2025, 5% lifetime. Kennedy is at 0% in 2025 with a 0% lifetime score — every single vote against the environment.

450 Utahns a year, and ICE arrests doubled

Utah has about 13.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 4% above the national average, with about 450 Utahns dying from gun violence every year. That's one of the places a top-10 state is not doing well, and there's no bill from this delegation to fix it.

And ICE arrests in Utah more than doubled in 2025 — over 4,000 people, about 17% of them with no criminal history at all. One Utah father applying for a green card was arrested at his own immigration interview and shipped to a detention center in Las Vegas.

Mike Kennedy went further than a vote. In April 2025 he toured El Salvador's notorious CECOT maximum-security prison, where deportees — including wrongly deported Americans — are held in brutal conditions. He called the visit "sobering" and praised El Salvador for putting "the safety of their citizens first." He did not meet with or speak up for any of the wrongly deported Americans held there.

Utahns already told them

In March 2025, Maloy and Kennedy held a joint town hall at the University of Utah. Roughly 300 people showed up and heckled and shouted them down over DOGE cuts, federal layoffs, and health care. Kennedy suggested police remove a man he dubbed "Mr. Outburst." When Maloy insisted "I'm here to answer questions," the crowd shouted back "no you're not!"

By 2026, Maloy had moved to tightly managed events. At an Americans for Prosperity–sponsored town hall in St. George on January 28, 2026, more than two dozen residents protested outside, saying they'd spent months trying to get a real town hall with a congresswoman who was "always unavailable."

Who voted for this

These are the three members of Congress representing Utah in the House who voted for the budget law behind the health and food cuts, voted twice to codify DOGE's cuts, and voted to keep the tariffs:

Blake Moore — House Republican Conference Vice Chair, Ways and Means Committee, DOGE Caucus co-chair
Celeste Maloy — Appropriations and Natural Resources Committees
Mike Kennedy — family physician, Vice Chair of the Federal Lands Subcommittee

Utah sits at 10th because generations of people here paid for hospitals, schools, universities, and land they never put up for sale. A high ranking is the most expensive thing a state owns and the easiest to spend: 80,000 people off insurance, $28.4 million out of the U, 267,000 layoffs, and 10,000 acres nearly auctioned off is what spending it looks like.

In 2026, Utahns decide whether the three people who cast those votes get to keep casting them.

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What Nebraska's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:00:03 +0000

Nebraska ranks 23rd out of 50 on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, and more. Middle of the pack. Not a crisis, not a bragging point. A state with real strengths and some soft spots, held roughly steady by hospitals, schools, and food programs that people here have paid for over generations.

None of that was built in Washington. But a lot of it is funded there — and the three Nebraskans who represent this state in Congress have spent the past two years voting to cut exactly those things.

Pete Ricketts in the Senate. Mike Flood in the 1st District. Adrian Smith in the 3rd. All three voted for the budget law that cuts health coverage and food aid to pay for tax breaks. All three voted to lock DOGE's cuts into permanent law. And all three voted to keep the tariffs that are squeezing Nebraska farms and factories — even after two of them said out loud that those tariffs were doing damage.

Here's what those votes cost.

$4 billion out of Nebraska's health care, and 55,000 people off coverage

Nebraska stands to lose an estimated up to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. That means fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals, and worse outcomes for families who already struggle to get care. An estimated 55,000 Nebraska residents are projected to lose health coverage.

In a rural state, pulling billions in federal dollars out of the health system doesn't produce efficiency — it produces closed wings, longer drives, and hospitals that stop offering services because they can't cover the cost.

Flood and Smith voted for the bill that does it on July 3, 2025. Ricketts voted for it in the Senate two days earlier, on a 50–50 tie broken by the vice president. One vote the other way and it doesn't become law.

Ricketts then voted twice to let the enhanced ACA premium tax credits expire on top of that — against an extension in June 2025, and again in December 2025, when the bill to extend them died 51–48. Asked what Republicans would do instead, he offered no plan — only that "clearly Obamacare has failed" and that his party would "come back with a plan." Nebraskans watching their premiums climb don't get to wait for it.

One in five Nebraska kids is hungry. 18,000 already lost food aid.

Here in Nebraska, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day. About 151,000 citizens — 7.5% of the state — receive SNAP benefits every month to put food on the table.

That number is now falling, and not because hunger went away. About 18,000 Nebraskans have already lost food assistance under the Republican megabill — an 11% drop in a single year, driven by new federal restrictions on who qualifies.

Read that next to the first number. One in five kids here goes hungry, and the response from Nebraska's delegation was to vote for a law that took food assistance away from 18,000 people. This is a state that feeds the world. Deciding it can't feed its own children is a choice, and three members of Congress from here voted to make it.

"You're hurting Americans" — then three votes to keep it going

On April 24, 2025, Pete Ricketts stood in front of a town hall crowd in Kearney and said this about Trump's tariffs: "It's an $100 million impact. Lay off people -- that's a problem. You're hurting Americans, and specifically Nebraskans, if you don't fix this."

Six days later, on April 30, the Senate voted on a resolution to end the tariff emergency. It failed 49–49. Ricketts voted no. His vote was the difference.

He did it again on October 29 and October 30, 2025, voting no both times as the Senate passed resolutions to terminate the Canada tariffs and the global tariffs anyway, without him.

Adrian Smith has the same problem, with less excuse. Smith chairs the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Trade — on paper, the Nebraskan with the most power over this. He told the Ripon Society, "I'm not a fan of tariffs."

On February 11, 2026, the House voted on ending the tariff emergency. It passed 219–211. Six Republicans crossed over — including Nebraska's own Don Bacon, who represents Omaha. Smith and Flood both voted no. So this isn't a case of nobody having a choice: a Nebraska Republican in the same delegation voted the other way, on the same bill, on the same day.

What they voted to protect: Nebraska's manufacturing exports fell 12.6% in the first nine months of 2025, and Bish Enterprises in Giltner says component prices are up 75% to 80% over the prior year. On the farm side, China bought over $12 billion in U.S. soybeans in 2024 and has not ordered any since May 2025, shifting to Brazil instead. As one Grand Island farmer put it: "Commodity prices are in the basement, and all the inputs are way sky high."

DOGE claimed $283 million. Here's the receipt.

DOGE says it "saved" Nebraska more than $283 million. What that bought:

Humanities Nebraska lost more than 40% of its annual funding — over $1 million — when the National Endowment for the Humanities cut its entire federal grant.
UNL lost $850,000 in humanities grants, including $100,000 from the Willa Cather Archive.
A USDA field office in south Lincoln was shut down, SBA and FDA offices in Omaha were closed, and the Niobrara National Scenic River Visitor Center in Valentine was shuttered.
The National Weather Service cut hundreds of forecasters — in a state where knowing what the sky is about to do is a business input.
Mass layoffs at the USDA left an uncertain future for researchers and rural areas.

Cutting the weather service and the USDA in an agricultural state is not trimming fat. It's removing the tools farmers use to make money.

And Nebraska's delegation didn't just watch — they made it permanent. Flood and Smith backed the Rescissions Act twice, when it passed the House 214–212 in June 2025 and again on final passage in July. Ricketts voted for it in the Senate, 51–48. Together those votes locked roughly $9 billion in DOGE cuts into law.

There were 135,000 layoffs in Nebraska in 2025. Nebraska's members of Congress spent that year voting to add to the pile.

Who voted for this

These are the three members of Congress representing Nebraska who voted for the budget law behind the health and food cuts, voted to codify DOGE's cuts, and voted to keep the tariffs on Nebraska's farms and factories:

Pete Ricketts — U.S. Senator
Mike Flood — 1st District
Adrian Smith — 3rd District, chairman of the House Trade Subcommittee

Two of the three said the tariffs were a problem. All three voted to keep them. That gap — between what they say at a town hall in Kearney and what they do on the floor in Washington — is the whole story.

Nebraska sits at 23rd because people here paid for hospitals, schools, and full lunch trays and expected them to work. A middling ranking is a fragile thing: easier to lose than to win back, and $4 billion in Medicaid, 18,000 people off food aid, and a 12.6% drop in manufacturing exports is what losing it looks like on the way down.

In 2026, Nebraskans decide whether the three people who cast those votes get to keep casting them.

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What Wisconsin's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:42:19 +0000

Here's something Wisconsinites don't hear often enough: this state is doing pretty well. On the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, and more — Wisconsin ranks 13th out of 50. Not perfect. But better than 37 other states, and a whole lot better than most of the states whose politicians Wisconsin's delegation votes with.

That standing wasn't built in Washington. It was built here, over decades, by people who paid for hospitals and schools and food programs and expected them to work.

Now look at what Wisconsin's six Republicans in the U.S. House have been voting for. Every one of them — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Tom Tiffany, and Tony Wied — voted for the budget law that cuts health coverage and food aid to pay for tax breaks. Every one of them voted twice to lock in DOGE's cuts. And every one of them just voted to keep the tariffs that are squeezing Wisconsin farms and factories.

You don't stay 13th by doing that. Here's what those votes cost.

270,000 Wisconsinites lose health coverage

An estimated 270,000 Wisconsinites will lose health care coverage under Trump's budget bill — and the new red tape and work requirements will cost Wisconsin taxpayers over $284 million more to administer.

Read that twice. The state pays more money, and 270,000 people get less care. That's not efficiency. That's paperwork designed to make people give up.

Two hundred seventy thousand is more people than live in Madison. It's parents who work jobs that don't come with insurance, seniors in rural counties where the nearest hospital is already thin, and kids whose coverage depends on a form their parents now have to file over and over to keep.

All six — Steil, Van Orden, Fitzgerald, Grothman, Tiffany, and Wied — voted for the bill that does it.

Food aid, in a state where 1 in 5 kids goes hungry

Here in Wisconsin, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day. About 693,100 Wisconsinites receive SNAP benefits every month — 11.6% of the state — to put food on the table.

The same budget law all six voted for cuts SNAP and pushes new costs onto the state. When you tighten the rules on food assistance, the people who fall off aren't fraudsters. They're the working parent whose hours got cut, the grandmother raising grandkids, the kid who eats at school because there isn't enough at home.

Wisconsin is a state that grows food for the world. Letting one in five of its children go hungry is a choice, and six members of Congress from this state just voted to make that choice harder to reverse.

The trade war is hitting America's Dairyland from both sides

Canada is Wisconsin's biggest customer. In 2024 the state exported roughly $8.5 billion worth of goods to Canada — more than to any other country. Wisconsin's economic development chief calls it the state's "single most important trading relationship."

That relationship is now the target. The Trump administration has announced 50% tariffs on Canadian goods including wine, dairy, and cement, taking effect in August 2026 — and Canada has been retaliating against American exports for a year and a half. A report from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois found that in Wisconsin, the 2025 tariffs already pushed average household costs up $1,500 and cost the manufacturing sector 6,100 jobs.

On the farms it's worse, because the damage comes from two directions at once:

For nearly six months China refused to buy U.S. soybeans in retaliation for Trump's tariffs, leaving Wisconsin farmers with a bumper crop and no buyer while input costs climbed.
Wisconsin's dairy industry depends on immigrant labor for 60–90% of its workforce, so ICE raids like the one that scooped up 24 dairy workers in Manitowoc — most with no criminal records — have deepened a labor crisis on top of the tariff losses.

On February 11, 2026, the House got a chance to end it. A resolution to terminate the national emergency Trump used to impose the Canada tariffs passed 219–211. Six Republicans crossed over to vote for it.

Not one of them was from Wisconsin. Steil, Van Orden, Fitzgerald, Grothman, Tiffany, and Wied all voted no — to keep the tariffs on the country that buys $8.5 billion of what Wisconsin makes and grows.

DOGE bragged about $483 million. Wisconsin lost 2,400 jobs.

DOGE claims it "saved" Wisconsin more than $483 million. Here's what that looked like on the ground: under Trump and DOGE, Wisconsin lost 2,400 federal jobs — cutting services Wisconsin families rely on while federal spending actually went up.

That last part matters. The spending didn't go down. The staff did. Wisconsin traded 2,400 paychecks and the services those people delivered for a number somebody could post online.

And Wisconsin's delegation didn't just stand by for it — they voted to make it permanent. All six backed the Rescissions Act, first when it squeaked through the House 214–212 in June 2025, and again on final passage 216–213 in July, locking roughly $9 billion in DOGE cuts into law.

There were 382,000 layoffs in Wisconsin in 2025 — 13% higher than the year before. Wisconsin's members of Congress spent that year voting to add to the pile.

Who voted for this

These are the six members of Congress representing Wisconsin who voted for the budget law behind the health and food cuts, voted to codify DOGE's cuts, and voted to keep the tariffs on Wisconsin's largest export market:

Bryan Steil — 1st District
Derrick Van Orden — 3rd District
Scott Fitzgerald — 5th District
Glenn Grothman — 6th District
Tom Tiffany — 7th District, now running for Governor
Tony Wied — 8th District

Tom Tiffany is asking Wisconsin to promote him. Before anyone votes on that, it's worth knowing what he did with the job he has.

Wisconsin ranks 13th because generations of people here decided that hospitals, schools, and full lunch trays were worth paying for. Rankings like that are easy to lose and slow to win back — and 270,000 people losing coverage, 6,100 manufacturing jobs gone, and $8.5 billion in exports put at risk is how you start losing one.

In 2026, Wisconsinites decide whether the six people who cast those votes get to keep casting them.

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What Alaska's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:56:17 +0000

Alaska is one of the hardest places in America to get a doctor, a hot meal in winter, or a reliable weather forecast before a deadly storm. On the measures we track — health, crime, food security, and more — Alaska ranks 37th out of 50. That's the ground Alaskans are already standing on.

Then Washington made it worse. The budget law that Republicans passed in 2025 cuts Medicaid, cuts food aid, and hands the savings to the wealthiest Americans as tax breaks. Alaska has exactly two Republicans in Congress — Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Nick Begich — and both of them voted for it. Here's what that vote is costing you.

Medicaid: billions gone, thousands dropped

Alaska stands to lose an estimated $1.5–$2.5 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — an 11% cut. In a state where rural hospitals already run on the edge and villages can be hundreds of miles from the nearest clinic, that means fewer doctors, more strain on the hospitals that are left, and worse outcomes for families who already struggle to get care.

More than 9,000 Alaskans are projected to lose Medicaid coverage just because of the law's new work-reporting requirements, according to a report prepared for the Alaska Department of Health. And around 24,000 more Alaskans will see their health insurance costs jump 125% — an average increase of $1,836 a year.

That's not a spreadsheet line. That's a parent in Bethel or Kotzebue deciding whether they can afford to stay covered. Dan Sullivan and Nick Begich voted for the law that does it.

Food aid, in a state where 1 in 5 kids goes hungry

Here in Alaska, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day, and nearly 68,300 Alaskans receive SNAP benefits every month to put food on the table. Alaska is also one of the most expensive places in the country to buy groceries — a gallon of milk in a rural village can cost several times what it does in the Lower 48.

The same budget law both members backed slashes SNAP and shifts new costs onto the state. When you make it harder to qualify for food aid in a place where a bag of groceries already costs a fortune, the people who go without are kids, seniors, and working families.

DOGE bragged about the cuts. Alaska's fisheries and forecasts paid.

DOGE claims it "saved" Alaska more than $280 million — but look at what that number actually meant on the water and in the sky. Mass firings and budget cuts at NOAA reduced the services used to manage Alaska's fisheries — the backbone of the state's economy and the livelihood of thousands of Alaskans.

Worse, the cuts gutted weather data collection. When a deadly storm slammed western Alaska in October 2025, a lack of weather data caused by Trump's budget cuts degraded the forecast that villages depend on to get out of harm's way. On top of that, federal firings hit Alaska especially hard, and the state saw 67,000 layoffs in 2025.

Real jobs, real fish counts, and real storm warnings — traded away so Washington could brag about a savings number. Neither Sullivan nor Begich slowed any of it down.

Public safety, in the state with the highest violent crime rate

Alaska has the highest violent crime rate in the country, and it sits near the top for both its murder rate and its rate of firearm deaths. Alaskans need more support to keep their communities safe — more resources for law enforcement, mental health care, and prevention.

Instead, the same delegation that voted to cut Medicaid — which pays for much of the state's mental health and addiction treatment — keeps voting against the tools that could actually bring these numbers down. You can't say you're tough on crime while defunding the services that prevent it.

Who voted for this

These are the two members of Congress representing Alaska who voted for the budget law behind the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, and who stood by while DOGE tore through the state:

Dan Sullivan — United States Senator
Nick Begich — United States Representative

In 2026, Alaskans get to decide whether that's the representation they want. The numbers are already on the wall. The only question left is who answers for them — and whether Alaska sends back the same two people who voted to make it harder to see a doctor, feed a kid, and get a storm warning in time.

Compare Alaska to Other States →

What Alabama's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:54:33 +0000

Alabama ranks 47th out of 50 states on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, and more. Only Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana score worse. That's not an accident of geography or bad luck. It's the result of choices, and lately the people Alabama sends to Washington have been making those choices worse.

To be clear about what the ranking is and isn't: it measures outcomes — how Alabamians are actually living. It doesn't by itself prove any one politician caused it. But it tells you where the state already stands. And when your state is already near the bottom on health and hunger, the votes your members of Congress cast to cut health care and food matter a lot more, because there's no cushion left. Here's what those votes are costing you.

53,000 Alabamians are set to lose health coverage

Trump's budget bill cuts deep into Medicaid and the ACA. An estimated 53,000 more Alabamians will lose their health coverage — and that number climbs to 170,000 if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits are also allowed to expire.

Alabama is a state that never expanded Medicaid, so its safety net was already thin. Cutting it further means more people showing up in emergency rooms with no way to pay, and more rural hospitals pushed toward closing. Every Republican House member from Alabama voted for the budget bill that does this.

740,300 Alabamians rely on SNAP — and 1 in 4 kids goes hungry

Here in Alabama, 1 in 4 kids faces hunger every day. About 740,300 citizens receive SNAP benefits every month — that's 14.3% of the whole state, roughly one in seven people.

The same budget bill these members passed cuts and tightens SNAP, shifting costs onto states and pushing eligible families off the rolls. In a state where a fifth of children already don't get enough to eat, taking food off the table isn't an abstraction. It's kids going to school hungry.

DOGE gutted Alabama's public health defenses

DOGE claims it saved taxpayers $319 million in Alabama. But look at what that "savings" actually cut. DOGE canceled a $190 million CDC grant to Alabama's Department of Public Health — money that funded roughly 140 county health department jobs specializing in stopping the spread of infectious diseases, including outbreak investigations in prisons, nursing homes, and day care centers.

The cuts also jeopardized care and housing for vulnerable HIV patients across the state. Alabama's members of Congress didn't push back — they cheered these cuts on. When the next outbreak hits, the people who would have caught it early won't be there.

Alabama has the 5th-highest rate of gun violence in the country

Alabama has the 5th highest rate of gun violence in the nation — 213.6 shooting incidents per 100,000 residents from 2014 to 2024. That's roughly 83% higher than the national average, with 10,522 shooting incidents over that decade.

This is a crisis that costs Alabama families their kids, their parents, and their neighbors. And every year Congress does nothing — no background check expansion, no red flag support, nothing. Alabama's delegation has been reliable votes for that inaction.

And it's costing you at the register, too

Alabama exported $14 billion in goods and services to Europe and China last year, and the state's big auto industry runs on imported parts. Economists warn Trump's tariffs will hurt Alabama in both the short run and the long run — higher prices now, and lost jobs later. Sitting Senator Tommy Tuberville, now running for governor, has been one of the tariffs' loudest cheerleaders, calling them a win even as the bills land on Alabamians' kitchen tables.

Who voted for this

These are the members of Congress Alabama sends to Washington — the ones who cast the votes behind the numbers above:

Dale Strong
Gary Palmer
Mike Rogers
Robert Aderholt
Tommy Tuberville — Alabama's sitting U.S. Senator, now running for governor

None of them created Alabama's 47th-place standing overnight. But when your state is already near the bottom, the honest question is simple: did your representative vote to lift Alabama up, or to cut what little was holding it steady? On health care, food, public health, and guns, the record says they cut.

In 2026, Alabamians get to answer back. The numbers are real, the votes are on the record, and the choice is yours.

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What Arizona's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:53:04 +0000

Across the measures we track — health, food, crime, jobs, and more — Arizona ranks 34th out of 50 states. Not last, but firmly in the bottom half. That's the ground Arizonans are already standing on: high hunger, gun deaths well above the national average, and rising prices squeezing every household in the state.

Here's what matters about that starting point: when Washington cuts, states in the bottom half have less room to absorb the hit. And the Arizonans we sent to Congress — Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Paul Gosar, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, and Abraham Hamadeh — didn't vote to cushion Arizona. They voted for the budget bill and the cuts that make these numbers worse.

Let's walk through the figures, and then who signed off on them.

More than 300,000 Arizonans could lose their health coverage

More than 300,000 Arizonans are projected to lose access to federally subsidized health coverage under Trump's budget bill — one of the highest losses of any state in the nation.

For a state already this far down on health outcomes, that's not a rounding error. It's insulin that doesn't get filled, cancer screenings that get skipped, and rural clinics that lose the patients who keep their doors open. When coverage disappears, the cost doesn't. It moves to the emergency room and to families who can't pay.

This didn't happen to Arizona. It was voted for.

889,600 people on SNAP — and Arizona already leads the nation in cuts

About 889,600 Arizonans rely on SNAP food benefits every single month — roughly 11.7% of the state. Here in Arizona, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day.

Then the budget bill hit. Since it took effect, more than 400,000 Arizonans — including 180,000 children — have already lost their food benefits. Arizona has posted the highest reduction in food-stamp recipients of any state in the country. That's not a projection or a warning. It already happened — to the family down the street and to kids who never got a vote.

$470 million in DOGE cuts — and a wildfire season Arizona can't afford

DOGE brags about the roughly $470 million it "saved" by cutting from Arizona. But look at what that number actually bought.

After DOGE's mass firings at the Forest Service, the agency treated 35% fewer acres for hazardous wildfire fuels nationwide in 2025 — with Arizona's fuel-treatment acreage dropping about 11%. In a state that watches the forecast every summer and holds its breath, thinning less brush isn't a paperwork savings. It's a bigger, hotter fire waiting to happen — and the homes, watersheds, and firefighters that pay for it.

That's the trade Arizona got: a headline "savings" number in Washington, and less protection standing between the state and the next catastrophic burn. On top of it, there were 450,000 layoffs in Arizona in 2025.

A $2,600 hidden tax on Arizona families

While prices climbed, Arizona's Republicans in Congress lined up to defend Trump's tariffs — which the Arizona Center for Economic Progress found act as a hidden tax costing the average household about $2,600 per year. A 21% tariff on Mexican tomatoes alone could deal a major blow to Arizona's produce industry, a backbone of the border economy.

So the same delegation that talks about the cost of living voted for a health-care cut, a food-benefit cut, and a tariff regime that quietly bills every Arizona household $2,600 a year. Cutting your coverage and raising your grocery bill at the same time isn't fighting for Arizona. It's the opposite.

16.9 gun deaths per 100,000 — 32% above the U.S. rate

Arizona's gun-death rate is 16.9 per 100,000 people, 32% higher than the national rate. You'd think a delegation that talks about protecting Arizona families would treat that as an emergency. Instead, our members in Congress have consistently blocked even the most basic steps to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Who voted for this

The Medicaid cuts, the SNAP squeeze, and the budget that greenlit DOGE didn't pass themselves. They passed because Arizona's own representatives in Washington voted yes. All six currently serve in the U.S. House — and Biggs and Schweikert are now asking Arizonans to make one of them governor:

Andy Biggs — U.S. Representative (AZ-05), running for Governor
David Schweikert — U.S. Representative (AZ-01), running for Governor
Paul Gosar — U.S. Representative (AZ-09)
Eli Crane — U.S. Representative (AZ-02)
Juan Ciscomani — U.S. Representative (AZ-06)
Abraham Hamadeh — U.S. Representative (AZ-08)

And it's not just the budget. ICE arrests more than tripled in Arizona in 2025 — over 6,000 people — as street operations spread into neighborhoods and workplaces, with families taken outside grocery stores and on the way to doctor's appointments. This delegation cheered it on.

The choice in 2026

Arizona doesn't rank 34th because its people don't work hard. It ranks where it does because for too long it's been treated as a place to cut — and the people we sent to Washington kept holding the door open for the cuts instead of standing in the way.

In 2026, that's on the ballot: six House seats, and two of these same members asking for a promotion to the governor's office. The numbers on this page are the record. The names above are the ones who voted for it. Arizonans get to decide whether that's the representation they keep.

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What North Carolina's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:49:37 +0000

North Carolina sits right in the middle of the pack — 32nd of 50 states on the health, food, jobs, crime, and education measures we track. Not a disaster, but not the thriving state its leaders like to sell either. And the numbers are moving in the wrong direction, because the people North Carolinians sent to Washington keep voting to make life here harder, not easier.

Here's the honest way to read this. The state's ranking measures where we stand today. What follows is what our own members of Congress just voted to pile on top of that — the cuts, the trade war, and the layoffs they signed their names to. When you see who loses, you'll also see who voted for it.

$49.9 billion in Medicaid — gone

North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. That's not an abstract budget line. It means fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals that were already hanging on by a thread, and worse care for families who struggle to see a doctor now.

An estimated 195,000 North Carolina residents are projected to lose their health coverage entirely. This is happening in a state that just expanded Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of people — coverage now on the chopping block. The members below voted for the budget bill that does it.

1 in 5 kids goes hungry — and they voted to cut food aid

Here in North Carolina, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every single day. About 1.44 million North Carolinians receive SNAP benefits every month — nearly 13% of the whole state.

As food banks report rising demand, the same budget bill that guts Medicaid also cuts SNAP. When you take food off a hungry child's table to help pay for a tax cut, that's a choice. Every member on the roster below made it.

Their trade war is wiping out our farmers

Agriculture is North Carolina's largest industry, and the Trump tariffs are gutting it. A new report estimates the tariffs could wipe out roughly a third of North Carolina's net farm income — about $695 million — and cost 8,000 jobs, with total losses to the rural economy reaching an estimated $1.9 billion.

North Carolina grows 60% of all U.S. tobacco, but China left tobacco out of its trade deal and stopped buying the 2025 crop, knocking prices 20–25% below what farmers expected. Soybean growers are staring down a third straight year of losses. The members below cheered the tariffs on instead of standing up for the farmers in their own districts.

DOGE hit North Carolina harder than almost anywhere

This one is close to home. The Research Triangle was the hardest-hit congressional district in the entire country for DOGE cuts, losing 186 federal grants. All told, DOGE claims it cut more than $1.49 billion from North Carolina.

The damage is real jobs. RTI International — one of the Triangle's biggest research employers — lost about $1 billion in contracts and laid off a third of its workforce. UNC-Chapel Hill lost $38.4 million in federal grants; Duke lost more than $135 million. That's on top of the 606,000 layoffs across North Carolina in 2025. Our delegation stood by and cheered while the cuts landed on their own constituents.

The members who voted for this

These are North Carolina's Republicans in Congress — the ones who actually cast the federal votes behind the numbers above. Every one of them backed the agenda that put these cuts in motion:

Addison McDowell
Brad Knott
Chuck Edwards
David Rouzer
Greg Murphy
Mark Harris
Pat Harrigan
Richard Hudson
Tim Moore
Virginia Foxx

When these members duck the town halls where you could ask them about it — as North Carolina Republicans have been doing all year — that's not an accident. It's easier to vote for $49.9 billion in Medicaid cuts when you never have to look the people losing coverage in the eye.

What happens next is up to us

North Carolina doesn't have to slide down the rankings. The Medicaid cuts, the SNAP cuts, the trade war crushing our farmers, the DOGE grants ripped out of the Research Triangle — none of it was inevitable. It was voted for, name by name, by the people above. In 2026, North Carolinians get to decide whether the folks who did this keep their jobs. Look at the record before you fill out the ballot.

Compare North Carolina to Other States →

What West Virginia's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:47:14 +0000

Across the measures we track — health, food, crime, jobs, and more — West Virginia ranks 42nd out of 50 states. That's not an accident of geography or bad luck. It's the water West Virginians are already swimming in: high hunger, high gun deaths, thin paychecks, and a federal workforce that props up whole towns.

Here's the thing about ranking near the bottom: when Washington cuts, states like ours have the least cushion to absorb it. And West Virginia's three Republicans in Congress — Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Representative Carol Miller, and Representative Riley Moore — didn't vote to soften the blow. They voted to swing the hammer.

Let's walk through the numbers, and then who signed off on them.

55,000 West Virginians could lose their health insurance

Nearly 55,000 West Virginians are set to lose Medicaid health insurance under Trump's budget bill. With new work requirements and paperwork "redeterminations," coverage could be stripped from up to 75,000 residents by 2034.

In a state this old, this sick, and this poor, Medicaid isn't a line item — it's how people get their insulin, their cancer screenings, and their nursing-home care. Take it away and the bill doesn't disappear. It moves to the emergency room, to rural hospitals already on the edge, and to families who can't pay.

This didn't happen to West Virginia. It was voted for.

272,800 people on SNAP — in a state where 1 in 4 kids goes hungry

About 272,800 West Virginians rely on SNAP food benefits every single month — roughly 15.4% of the population, one of the highest rates in the country. And 1 in 4 children in West Virginia faces hunger every day.

SNAP is the difference between a full plate and an empty one for hundreds of thousands of our neighbors. The same budget bill that cuts Medicaid also squeezes food assistance — shifting costs onto a state that already can't afford them, and onto kids who didn't get a vote.

$330 million in cuts and 2,200 jobs gone to DOGE

West Virginia has roughly 22,900 federal workers — about 3.2% of the state's entire non-farm workforce, a higher share than almost any other state. Those aren't faceless bureaucrats. They're mine-safety researchers, Treasury clerks, and park rangers who live here, shop here, and pay taxes here.

DOGE's mass firings have already cost West Virginia more than $330 million in federal grants and 2,200 federal jobs — gutting NIOSH in Morgantown (the agency that literally studies black lung), the Bureau of Fiscal Service in Parkersburg, and National Park Service staff at the New River Gorge. DOGE brags about the roughly $70 million it "saved" by cutting from West Virginia — but the state lost more than $330 million in grants alone, before you count the wages and services that money would never have replaced.

On top of that, there were 95,000 layoffs in West Virginia in 2025. In a state this size, that's a wound that doesn't close fast.

281 West Virginians die from guns every year

West Virginia has 15.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — about 19.5% higher than the national average. That's roughly 281 West Virginians dying from gun violence every year, many of them suicides in a state hit hard by isolation and despair.

You'd think a delegation that talks about protecting West Virginia families would treat that as an emergency. Instead, our members in Congress have consistently blocked even the most basic steps to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

Who voted for this

The Medicaid cuts, the SNAP squeeze, and the budget that greenlit DOGE didn't pass themselves. They passed because West Virginia's own representatives in Washington voted yes:

Shelley Moore Capito — U.S. Senator
Carol Miller — U.S. Representative
Riley Moore — U.S. Representative

And when West Virginians tried to ask them about it face to face? They couldn't find them. Our three members of Congress have dodged public town halls, holding screened events or none at all while the cuts landed back home.

The choice in 2026

West Virginia doesn't rank 42nd because its people don't work hard. It ranks 42nd because for years it's been treated as a place to cut, not a place to invest — and the people we sent to Washington to fight for us have been holding the door open for the cuts instead.

In 2026, that's on the ballot. The numbers on this page are the record. The names above are the ones who voted for it. West Virginians get to decide whether that's the representation they keep.

Compare West Virginia to Other States →

What Mississippi's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:33:51 +0000

Mississippi works hard and takes care of its own. Faith, family, and the folks down the road still mean something here. But on the everyday things that decide whether a family gets by — health coverage, food on the table, a paycheck, safe streets — the numbers tell a hard story that no amount of pride can talk around.

When we add up the measures we track across all 50 states — health, crime, food insecurity, education, and more — Mississippi ranks 48th out of 50. That's the ground Mississippians are standing on before Washington lifts a finger. The problem is what Washington just did on top of it.

Let's be straight about what that ranking is and isn't. It measures where the state already sits. It doesn't prove any one politician put it there. But the votes below aren't a ranking — they're a record. Mississippi's Republicans in Congress voted for a budget that takes one of the poorest, sickest, hungriest states in the country and makes the very things Mississippians struggle with worse. Here's what that costs, and here's who voted for it.

Mississippi loses billions in Medicaid — and 115,000 lose coverage

Start with the biggest one. Under Trump's budget bill, Mississippi stands to lose an estimated $2–$4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. And an estimated 115,000 Mississippi residents are projected to lose their health coverage.

That's not a small program in Mississippi — it's the backbone of the whole system. On average 714,600 people, or 24.3% of the state's population, were on Medicaid in 2024. Nearly one in four Mississippians. Pull billions out of that, and it isn't only the newly uninsured who lose. In a state this rural, the local hospital is often the only one for an hour in any direction. When it cuts services or closes, everybody in that county drives farther for the ER, waits longer for a bed, and pays more. Faith leaders across the state have already sounded the alarm about what these cuts do to the most vulnerable.

Every Mississippi Republican listed at the bottom of this post voted for the bill that does this.

1 in 4 Mississippi kids goes hungry — and they cut food aid anyway

Here in Mississippi, 1 in 4 kids faces hunger every day. Nearly 400,000 citizens receive SNAP benefits every single month — including almost 258,000 families with children, over 150,000 families with older adults or people with disabilities, and 9,000 Mississippi veterans.

SNAP is how a lot of those hungry kids eat. So when Congress votes to cut it and shift the cost onto states, the question isn't abstract — it's whether a mom in the Delta can still cover the week's groceries. The same budget bill that guts Medicaid also squeezes food assistance. The two lifelines Mississippians lean on most, cut in the same stroke.

Tariffs are hitting Mississippi's factories and farms

Cost of living is the thing people feel every week, and Mississippi is getting squeezed. Trump's tariffs could hit Mississippians directly through higher prices, and the state's manufacturers are wary of the steel and aluminum tariffs that raise their costs and put jobs at risk.

That's a tax on Mississippi's kitchen tables and Mississippi's shop floors at the same time. The delegation below hasn't done anything to stop it.

DOGE torched Mississippi jobs and cut the culture budget

Mississippi saw 152,000 layoffs in 2025. Into that, DOGE went hunting for a headline number — claiming $6 million in "savings" from the state. In one of the neediest states in the country, those cuts landed with extra weight.

One concrete example: DOGE cut federal funding for the Mississippi Humanities Council, which gets 70% of its budget from federal grants — the group that keeps small-town libraries, museums, and history programs alive across the state. State lawmakers were left scrambling in a special session to ease the damage. Mississippi's Republicans in Congress didn't slow any of it down. They cheered it on.

Mississippi has the worst gun death rate in America

Mississippi has the highest firearm mortality rate and the highest murder rate in the United States. Not high — the highest. More Mississippi families bury someone to gun violence, per person, than in any other state.

Yet the delegation below has stood against even the most modest, widely popular steps — universal background checks, red-flag laws — that most Americans, including most gun owners, say they want. On the one issue where "thoughts and prayers" has worn thinnest, and where Mississippi is hurting worst of all, these members keep voting for nothing.

The members who voted for this

These are Mississippi's Republican incumbents in Congress — the people who actually cast the federal votes behind the numbers above. And when Mississippians called, emailed, and protested to raise the alarm about this budget, they got voicemail boxes and brush-offs from the whole delegation:

Cindy Hyde-Smith
Michael Guest
Mike Ezell
Trent Kelly

What happens next is up to Mississippi

None of this is fixed in stone. Mississippi ranks 48th today, but rankings move — and votes move them. Medicaid can be protected or gutted. Food aid can be defended or slashed. Factory jobs and the price of groceries can be steadied or squeezed for a press release. Every one of those is a choice, and in 2026 it's Mississippi's choice to make.

The people above have already told you how they'll choose. They've been telling you with every vote. The only question left is whether Mississippi keeps sending them back to cast the next one.

Compare Mississippi to Other States →

What Ohio's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:41:33 +0000

Ohio works hard. It builds things, farms, and takes care of its own. But on the everyday things that actually decide whether a family gets by — health coverage, food on the table, safe streets, a steady paycheck — the numbers tell a harder story.

When we add up the measures we track across all 50 states — health, crime, food insecurity, education, and more — Ohio ranks 35th out of 50. That's the ground Ohioans are standing on before Washington does anything. The problem is what Washington just did on top of it.

Here's the thing to keep straight: that ranking measures where the state already is. It doesn't prove any one politician put it there. But the votes below aren't a ranking — they're a record. Ohio's Republicans in Congress voted for a budget that takes an already-strained state and makes the very things Ohioans struggle with worse. Here's what that costs, and here's who voted for it.

Ohio loses $33 billion in Medicaid — and 356,000 lose coverage

Start with the biggest one. Under Trump's budget bill, Ohio stands to lose an estimated $33 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. And an estimated 356,000 Ohioans are projected to lose their health coverage — on top of the 113,000 who already lost coverage when tax credits were allowed to expire.

Think about what $33 billion pulled out of a state's health system means — especially in rural counties, where the local hospital is often the only one for an hour in any direction. When those hospitals cut services or close their doors, it isn't only the newly uninsured who lose. Everybody in that county drives farther for the ER, waits longer for a bed, and pays more.

Every Ohio Republican listed at the bottom of this post voted for the bill that does this.

1 in 5 Ohio kids goes hungry — and they cut food aid anyway

Here in Ohio, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger every day. About 1.4 million Ohioans — roughly 12% of the state — receive SNAP benefits every single month to help put groceries on the table.

SNAP is how a lot of those hungry kids eat. So when Congress votes to cut it and shift costs onto states, the question isn't abstract. It's whether a mom in Toledo or Youngstown can still cover the week's groceries. The same budget bill that guts Medicaid also squeezes food assistance — the two lifelines Ohioans lean on most, cut in the same stroke.

Tariffs are hitting Ohio farms and factories

Cost of living is the thing people feel every week, and Ohio is getting squeezed from two sides. Ohio farmers have seen a 74% drop in soybean sales to China in a single year, thanks largely to Trump's tariffs. Meanwhile the state faces a potential $110 billion economic hit as those tariffs push up prices, and a majority of Ohio businesses say they expect the tariffs to hurt.

That's a tax on Ohio's kitchen tables and Ohio's back forty at the same time. The delegation below hasn't done anything to stop it.

DOGE torched Ohio research and jobs

Ohio saw 700,000 layoffs in 2025. DOGE cut more than $466 million from Ohio, including $29 million from Ohio State University researchers and a $23 million grant meant to help Ohioans who don't have internet access get online.

That's real work, real jobs, and real access to a doctor or a classroom for rural families — gone, so Washington could claim a savings number. Ohio's Republicans didn't slow any of it down. They cheered it on.

Over 1,700 Ohioans killed by guns every year

Ohio sees more than 1,700 gun deaths a year, and firearms were the leading cause of death among young people ages 1–17 in 2023. That's kids — buried before they finish growing up.

Yet the delegation below has stood against even the most modest, widely popular steps — universal background checks, red-flag laws — that most Ohioans, including most Ohio gun owners, say they want. On the one issue where "thoughts and prayers" has worn thinnest, these members keep voting for nothing.

The members who voted for this

These are Ohio's Republican incumbents in Congress — the people who actually cast the federal votes behind the numbers above:

Jon Husted
Bob Latta
David Joyce
David Taylor
Jim Jordan
Max Miller
Michael Rulli
Mike Carey
Mike Turner
Troy Balderson
Warren Davidson

What happens next is up to Ohio

None of this is fixed in stone. Ohio ranks 35th today, but rankings move — and votes move them. Medicaid can be protected or gutted. Food aid can be defended or slashed. Farm markets and federal research can be steadied or torched for a press release. Every one of those is a choice, and in 2026 it's Ohio's choice to make.

The men above have already told you how they'll choose. They've been telling you with every vote. The only question left is whether Ohio keeps sending them back to cast the next one.

Compare Ohio to Other States →

What Texas's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:33:20 +0000

Texas is big, proud, and rich. But on the everyday things that actually decide whether a family gets by — health coverage, food on the table, safe streets, a steady paycheck — the numbers tell a harder story.

When we add up the measures we track across all 50 states — health, crime, food insecurity, education, and more — Texas ranks 40th out of 50. That's the ground Texans are standing on before Washington does anything. The problem is what Washington just did on top of it.

Here's the thing to keep straight: that ranking measures where the state already is. It doesn't prove any one politician put it there. But the votes below aren't a ranking — they're a record. Texas's Republicans in Congress voted for a budget that takes an already-strained state and makes the very things Texans struggle with worse. Here's what that costs, and here's who voted for it.

1.7 million Texans could lose their health coverage

Start with the biggest one. Under Trump's budget bill, an estimated 1.7 million Texans will lose their health coverage — and Texas hospitals stand to lose $39 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade.

Texas already has the highest uninsured rate in the country. Now think about what $39 billion pulled out of Texas hospitals means — especially in rural counties, where the local hospital is often the only one for an hour in any direction. When those hospitals cut services or close their doors, it isn't only the uninsured who lose. Everybody in that county drives farther for the ER, waits longer for a bed, and pays more.

Every Texas Republican listed at the bottom of this post voted for the bill that does this.

1 in 4 Texas kids goes hungry — and they cut food aid anyway

Here in Texas, 1 in 4 kids faces hunger every day. About 3.47 million Texans — roughly 11% of the state — receive SNAP benefits every single month to help put groceries on the table.

SNAP is how a lot of those hungry kids eat. So when Congress votes to cut it and shift costs onto states, the question isn't abstract. It's whether a mom in Lubbock or Laredo can still cover the week's groceries. The same budget bill that guts Medicaid also squeezes food assistance — the two lifelines Texans lean on most, cut in the same stroke.

DOGE torched Texas jobs and Texas air

Texas has more than 249,000 federal employees — 8% of the entire federal workforce, more than almost any other state. That makes Texans especially exposed when Washington starts firing people to score a headline.

That's exactly what DOGE did. It terminated more than $118 million in EPA environmental grants that had already been awarded to Texas organizations — money meant to clean the air Texas kids breathe. This lands in a state that already saw 1.68 million layoffs in 2025. Texas's Republicans didn't slow any of it down. They cheered it on.

4,390 Texans killed by guns in a single year

In 2024, 4,390 Texans died from gun-related injuries — more than a dozen every single day. Texas has buried more than its share of children in classrooms and shoppers in stores, and Texans of every stripe are exhausted by it.

Yet the delegation below has stood against even the most modest, widely popular steps — universal background checks, red-flag laws — that most Texans, including most Texas gun owners, say they want. On the one issue where "thoughts and prayers" has worn thinnest, these members keep voting for nothing.

The members who voted for this

These are Texas's Republican incumbents in Congress — the people who actually cast the federal votes behind the numbers above:

August Pfluger
Beth Van Duyne
Brandon Gill
Brian Babin
Craig Goldman
Jake Ellzey
John Carter
Keith Self
Lance Gooden
Michael Cloud
Monica De La Cruz
Nathaniel Moran
Pat Fallon
Pete Sessions
Randy Weber
Roger Williams
Ronny Jackson

What happens next is up to Texas

None of this is fixed in stone. Texas ranks 40th today, but rankings move — and votes move them. Medicaid can be protected or gutted. Food aid can be defended or slashed. Federal jobs can be steadied or torched for a press release. Every one of those is a choice, and in 2026 it's Texas's choice to make.

The men and women above have already told you how they'll choose. They've been telling you with every vote. The only question left is whether Texans keep sending them back to cast the next one.

Compare Texas to Other States →

Republicans Voted to Dump Billions in Food Stamp Costs on States — and Millions Could Lose Food

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:24:01 +0000

For 60 years, the federal government paid for food stamps. That was the deal. If you qualified for help buying groceries, Washington covered the benefit. Not your state. Not your county. Washington.

Republicans just changed that. And a new round of government data shows the price tag they handed the states: more than $9 billion a year.

What Republicans did

Last year's Republican budget law — the one Trump called the "One Big Beautiful Bill" — made the biggest changes to food stamps since the program started. Officially it's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It's the nation's largest food assistance program, and most households on it include a child, a senior, or a person with a disability.

The bill did two big things:

It made the rules harder. New work rules and eligibility changes have already pushed more than 4 million Americans off SNAP. Food banks and pantries are picking up the slack — and running low.
It made states pay. Starting in fall 2027, states will have to chip in for the benefits themselves for the first time ever. That's the part that just got a lot more real.

This wasn't an accident or a rounding error. It was written into the law on purpose, to move the cost off the federal books and onto the states.

The catch: a math trap called the "error rate"

Here's the trick. How much a state has to pay depends on its "payment error rate."

That sounds like fraud. It isn't. The error rate is a technical count of overpayments and underpayments — usually honest mistakes on a paperwork form, like a family reporting the wrong number. If a state's error rate is above 6%, it has to cover 5% to 15% of all its benefit payments.

And the trap is this: a state gets punished for paying someone a little too much. It gets no punishment for wrongly cutting someone off. So the safest way for a state to lower its error rate is to slow down, deny more people, and kick more families off the rolls.

As Gina Plata-Nino of the Food Research & Action Center put it, "There is no oversight in terms of the people who are eligible and being cut off."

Who pays, and how much

As many as 36 states will get a bill in the fall of 2027. Nearly half could owe $100 million or more every single year. A few examples the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ran the numbers on:

Michigan — around $300 million a year
Texas — an estimated $725 million a year
New York — more than $1 billion a year

These are states that have to balance their budgets. So this money comes from somewhere. It comes out of schools, roads, public safety — or it comes out of the food program itself, meaning fewer people get fed.

The National Association of Counties warned Congress that the shift could "destabilize county budgets, forcing reductions in staffing and delaying critical nutrition assistance for vulnerable residents." In 10 states, counties actually run SNAP, so they're stuck holding the bag too.

Some states are talking about quitting food stamps entirely

This spring, the Urban Institute and a group of state human-services agencies surveyed every state's SNAP office. The answers should worry anyone who eats.

29% of states said they might have to narrow who's even eligible.
11% said pulling out of SNAP altogether is a real risk.

Think about that. Because of a law Republicans passed, some states are now weighing whether to walk away from feeding their own people.

Oklahoma's Republican Governor Kevin Stitt didn't seem worried. He said churches and food banks would handle it, and openly wished for the old days when getting food help came with "a little stigma so you were a little bit embarrassed." He added, "Maybe we should go back to a little bit of that instead of just making it so easy."

That's the mindset behind this. Not "how do we feed people," but "how do we make it harder."

The people who actually get hurt

The families on SNAP aren't an abstraction. In Massachusetts, nearly 175,000 people lost benefits in less than a year, and short-staffed offices were dropping residents' phone calls. In Alabama, more than 52,000 people have already lost food help, and the state could owe an estimated $170 million.

"We are putting paper pushing over people," said LaTrell Clifford Wood of the nonprofit Alabama Arise.

All of this is happening while grocery prices are still high. Republicans campaigned on lowering the cost of living. Then they passed a bill that takes food help away from millions of people and threatens to take it from millions more — and told the states to figure it out.

The bottom line

Food stamps were a federal promise for 60 years. Republicans broke that promise to make their budget math work, buried the change behind a confusing "error rate" formula, and set it to hit in 2027 — safely after the election. The result is baked in: fewer families fed, bigger bills for your state, and a real chance some states quit the program.

When the grocery-line cuts come, remember it started with a vote in Washington.

Source

Kevin Hardy, Food stamp changes will cost states billions, raising fears about SNAP's future, Stateline / Pennsylvania Capital-Star, July 9, 2026. Lead photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Zach Nunn Promised to Protect Medicaid and SNAP. One Year After His 'Big Beautiful Bill' Vote, Iowa Is Still Paying.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:10:32 +0000

One year ago, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed HR 1 — the bill he called the "One Big Beautiful Bill." Zach Nunn voted for it. This week, the DCCC marked the anniversary by adding up what that vote has cost Iowa: closed clinics, higher premiums, and thousands of families losing help buying groceries.

But to understand what Nunn did, you have to start three weeks before his vote — with a promise.

The promise

On May 2, 2025, Nunn stood inside MercyOne Medical Center in Des Moines and announced his "Defending Medicaid and SNAP Resolution." It would block the House from even considering any budget bill that cut Medicaid or SNAP enrollment or benefits for children, seniors, pregnant women, or people with disabilities.

His own words:

"Medicaid gives more than 150,000 people in our communities access to medical care, while SNAP ensures that 60,000 individuals know where their next meal is coming from... my legislation will ensure D.C. cuts do not impact vulnerable Iowans."

The vote

Twenty days later, on May 22, 2025, Nunn voted yes on the very kind of budget bill his resolution was written to block — a bill cutting nearly $1 trillion from federal health programs and making the largest cut to SNAP in history. On July 3, he voted yes again on final passage.

Three weeks after promising to block cuts like these, he voted for them. Twice.

The congressional Joint Economic Committee estimates the law's health cuts will cost about 27,300 people in Nunn's district their coverage — 12,000 losing ACA marketplace plans and 15,300 losing Medicaid. Statewide, more than 106,000 Iowans are projected to lose coverage.

"A myth"

When Iowans worried out loud that these cuts would close rural health care facilities, Nunn had an answer. Last July, he told WHO13 that rural hospital closures were a "myth."

Here's what's happened in his own district since:

Ottumwa: MercyOne closed its Ottumwa Family and Internal Medicine Clinic in February — seven months after Nunn's "myth" comment. Patients were told their records would be moved to a clinic in Centerville.
Centerville: Then Centerville got its own bad news. River Hills Community Health Center announced its Centerville clinic — women's health, pediatrics, behavioral health — will close on July 31, citing rising costs and "reimbursement challenges." So the town that was supposed to absorb Ottumwa's patients is losing a clinic of its own.

When Iowa Starting Line asked Nunn's campaign about the closures, it didn't immediately respond.

Meanwhile, health insurance keeps getting more expensive for the Iowans who buy their own. The Iowa Insurance Division says carriers filed 2026 rate increases from 12.6% to more than 25%, as the enhanced subsidies that kept premiums down reverted to lower levels.

The food assistance he promised to defend

Remember Nunn's number — SNAP "ensures that 60,000 individuals know where their next meal is coming from"?

In the twelve months after his vote, nearly 25,000 Iowans lost SNAP. Enrollment statewide fell from 272,747 to 247,907 — people dropped by new eligibility rules or buried in the law's new paperwork until they gave up. Food pantries are picking up the pieces: one Iowa pantry reports a 36% jump in households served since the law was signed — more demand than it saw during COVID-19.

Who actually won?

The Congressional Budget Office added up who gains and who loses from the law Nunn voted for. The poorest 10% of households lose about $1,200 a year — the health and food cuts take more than the tax cuts give back. The richest 10% gain about $13,600 a year.

A year later, voters know exactly what this was. Navigator Research's battleground polling finds the law still underwater by 11 points — unpopular even in districts Trump won by double digits.

And if Nunn's constituents want to ask him about any of this face to face? Good luck. He refuses to attend constituent-organized town halls, dismissing them as "taxpayer-funded protest events." At least one constituent flew to Washington, D.C. just to speak with him.

Zach Nunn told Iowans his legislation would make sure "D.C. cuts do not impact vulnerable Iowans." Then he voted for the cuts, called the fallout a myth, and stopped answering questions. The clinics closing in his district aren't a myth. Neither are the 25,000 Iowans who lost help buying food.

We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on the DCCC release: "One Year Later: Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn's Big, Ugly Bill Remains Deeply Unpopular As Iowans Suffer" (July 2, 2026), with additional reporting from Iowa Public Radio, Radio Iowa, Iowa Starting Line, and federal data linked above.

One Year After Her 'Big Beautiful Bill' Vote, Mariannette Miller-Meeks' District Is Losing Clinics — and She's Still Calling It a Win

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:09:32 +0000

One year ago, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed HR 1 — the bill he called the "One Big Beautiful Bill." Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted for it. Twice, actually: once when the House first passed it in May, and again on final passage in July.

This week, the DCCC marked the anniversary by tallying up what that vote has cost Iowa. The list is long: clinics closing, premiums jumping, and thousands of Iowans losing help buying groceries.

Here's what makes Miller-Meeks different from most of the Republicans who voted yes: she's a doctor. An ophthalmologist. She chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Health. If anyone in Congress should have understood what cutting health care funding does to a rural state, it was her.

She voted for it anyway.

What the bill did

HR 1 paired massive tax cuts with the largest Medicaid cut in history. It's expected to strip health insurance from 17 million Americans. It made the largest cut to SNAP food assistance in history.

In Iowa, the congressional Joint Economic Committee estimates the health care cuts will cost more than 106,000 Iowans their coverage across the state's four districts. In Miller-Meeks' own district — Iowa's 1st — that's about 24,700 people: 11,600 losing ACA marketplace coverage and 13,100 losing Medicaid.

The damage in her district

This isn't a forecast anymore. It's happening.

In March, MercyOne announced its Clinton Medical Center — in Miller-Meeks' district — would stop delivering babies. The last delivery was in May. The hospital blamed increasing costs, staffing shortages, and "reimbursements that do not cover the full cost of care." Medicaid pays for 40% of all births in the United States — and the National Rural Hospital Association has blamed rising costs and Medicaid cuts for closures like this across the country.

So in Clinton, Iowa, the local hospital no longer offers labor and delivery. Expecting mothers have to go somewhere else to have their babies.

Health insurance is getting more expensive too. The Iowa Insurance Division says carriers filed 2026 rate increases ranging from 12.6% to more than 25%, and the enhanced subsidies that kept coverage affordable reverted to lower levels — meaning higher premiums for nearly everyone who buys their own insurance.

And it's not just health care. In the twelve months after the law passed, nearly 25,000 Iowans lost SNAP food assistance — enrollment fell from 272,747 in June 2025 to 247,907 in May 2026. Food pantries are swamped: one Iowa pantry reports a 36% jump in households served since the law was signed, with demand outpacing what it saw during COVID-19.

What she says when Iowans ask about it

Miller-Meeks spent months avoiding her constituents entirely — she told local Republicans she'd hold an in-person town hall "when hell freezes over."

When she finally held one in November, a constituent asked her directly: "Why did you allow your committee to put in place the largest cuts to Medicaid in the program's entire history?"

Her answer:

"Thank you for the applause for the Energy and Commerce Committee voting to strengthen and preserve Medicaid."

The room booed. People walked out shaking their heads. After 50 minutes, she left the stage to more boos.

That's her story, one year in: the largest Medicaid cut in history was actually "strengthening" it. Tell that to the mothers in Clinton.

Who actually won?

The Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on who gains and who loses from the law. The answer is blunt: the poorest 10% of households lose about $1,200 a year, because the Medicaid and SNAP cuts take away more than the tax cuts give back. The richest 10% gain about $13,600 a year.

That's the trade Miller-Meeks made: groceries and health coverage for her constituents, in exchange for tax cuts tilted to people at the top. It's worth remembering who funds her campaigns: medical industry PACs are among her biggest donors.

A year later, voters haven't come around. Battleground-district polling by Navigator Research finds the law still underwater by 11 points — and unpopular even in districts Trump won by more than 10 points.

Miller-Meeks is a physician who took an oath to do no harm. Then she voted — twice — for a bill that is closing delivery rooms and taking food assistance from her own patients' neighbors. And when they asked her why, she thanked them for their applause.

We deserve better.

Source

One Year Later, Wisconsin Is Still Paying for Tom Tiffany's 'Big Beautiful Bill' Vote

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:58:37 +0000

One year ago, on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed HR 1 — the bill he called the "One Big Beautiful Bill." Tom Tiffany voted for it. Now he wants to be Wisconsin's governor.

This week, Wisconsinites marked the bill's first birthday. Not with a party. With a protest.

On June 30, members of Indivisible and the healthcare union SEIU Wisconsin parked a decommissioned ambulance in front of the Wisconsin Republican Party headquarters in Madison. The message: this is what happens to healthcare when a bill cuts $1 trillion from programs people depend on.

Jean Grow, co-leader of Indivisible's Milwaukee chapter, put it plainly:

"Who in this state is primarily responsible for these cuts? Tom Tiffany."

What Tiffany voted for

HR 1 wasn't a small bill. It paired $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years with $1 trillion in cuts to federal healthcare programs, plus deep cuts to food assistance.

Tiffany voted yes, along with the rest of his party in the House. Here's what that yes vote means for the state he now wants to run:

The bill is expected to strip health insurance from 17 million Americans — including an estimated 258,000 Wisconsinites, with over 148,000 Wisconsin Medicaid recipients losing coverage by 2034.
It made the largest cut to SNAP in history — a 20% cut by 2034, about $187 billion. In Wisconsin, SNAP is called FoodShare, and roughly 330,000 Wisconsin households count on it.
Medicaid — BadgerCare here in Wisconsin — covers people at or below the poverty line and pays for long-term care, including home healthcare for seniors and people with disabilities.

At a press conference this week focused on Tiffany's record, Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski said the bill "has been brutal for Wisconsin families" — with potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites losing healthcare and tens of thousands losing FoodShare.

The damage has already started

Most of the Medicaid changes don't even kick in until 2027. But the bleeding has begun. Federal data tracked by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families shows that more than 75,000 Wisconsin Medicaid recipients left the program in just the first five months of 2026.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin explained how the bill does its damage: new work-reporting requirements and paperwork that bury people in red tape until they give up.

"They're trying to kick people who are fully eligible off the program," Baldwin said.

A family doctor from Birchwood, Dr. Kristen Dall-Winther, warned what comes next: when funding drops, healthcare providers take the financial hit — "especially in rural areas where many of our facilities are already operating on razor-thin margins." That should worry Tiffany's own voters: he represents Wisconsin's rural, northern 7th District.

Who actually won?

The bill's defenders — Tiffany included — said the cuts would only target "waste, fraud and abuse." The numbers say otherwise.

The Congressional Budget Office found the law makes the poorest 20% of households worse off: they lose more from the healthcare and food cuts than they gain from the tax cuts. The bottom 10% will see their incomes fall by about $1,200 a year. The top 10%? Their incomes rise by an average of $13,600 a year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported in February.

That's the trade Tiffany made: healthcare and groceries for working Wisconsin families, in exchange for tax cuts tilted to the wealthiest households.

Even Republicans seem to know how it looks. After critics started calling it "the Big Ugly Law," the GOP rebranded the bill in September as "The Working Families Tax Cut." You can change a bill's name. You can't change what it does.

He's done this before

The HR 1 vote isn't a one-off. It fits a pattern on Tiffany's record:

In January 2026, he voted against restoring lapsed ACA subsidies — even though 17 of his fellow Republicans crossed over to support them, and letting them expire is driving Wisconsin premiums up 30% to 800%.
He's called the Affordable Care Act a "problem" — while more than 313,000 Wisconsinites get their insurance through the ACA marketplace.

Now he's asking Wisconsin to make him governor — the person in charge of the state programs, like BadgerCare and FoodShare, that his own vote squeezed.

One year in, the bill's results aren't a talking point. They're an emptied ambulance parked outside his party's front door.

Source

This post is based on reporting from the Wisconsin Examiner: "As Trump's 2025 signature bill marks an anniversary, Dems use it as a cudgel" by Erik Gunn, July 3, 2026. Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner.

What Arkansas's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Out of 50 states, Arkansas ranks 49th on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, schools, and more. That's not an accident of geography. It's the result of choices, and a lot of those choices are made in Washington by the six people Arkansas sends to Congress.

Here's the honest version: these numbers describe where Arkansas already stands. The new part is what our own members of Congress just voted to cut on top of it — and who gets hurt when they do. Let's go through it.

They voted to gut the thing keeping rural hospitals open

Arkansas stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. That money is what keeps the lights on at rural hospitals — and in Arkansas, many of them will simply shut down when it disappears.

Arkansas is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for overall health, women's health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, obesity, and life expectancy. Researchers warn the proposed Medicaid cuts would hurt rural areas, including Arkansas kids, the hardest. When the nearest hospital closes, a heart attack or a difficult birth becomes a much longer drive. For a lot of families, that drive is the difference.

The hungriest state in America — and they cut food help anyway

Arkansas has the highest food insecurity rate in the country. Nearly 1 in 4 kids here faces hunger every single day. 240,000 Arkansans rely on SNAP — food stamps — every month, and a University of Arkansas report found that nearly 30% of Arkansans face food insecurity.

So what did our delegation do? They voted for a budget law that cuts SNAP and hits Arkansas's already-dwindling surplus. In the hungriest state in America, they made it harder for families to put food on the table. You can see what hunger already looks like in Arkansas — and the people who voted to make it worse represent the very towns where it's worst.

They picked a trade fight that's crushing Arkansas farmers

Farming is the largest industry in Arkansas, contributing over $24 billion to the state economy — about 14% of everything Arkansas produces. And right now, Arkansas farmers are getting squeezed.

The tariff fight has Arkansas soybean farmers reeling, watching their biggest export markets dry up. Then came a plan to send billions in aid to Argentina — a direct competitor — which sparked outrage among American farmers who are struggling to hang on. Our delegation backed the policies that started the squeeze, and Arkansas growers are paying for it.

DOGE bragged about cuts. Arkansas paid the bill.

DOGE claims it "saved" Arkansas $237 million — but look at what that actually meant on the ground. DOGE disrupted the federal response to the bird flu outbreak that directly hit Arkansas. And it destroyed USAID, which through its Food for Peace program normally buys around $2 billion of American crops a year to feed impoverished countries. Arkansas grows roughly 40% of all the rice in the United States — so when that buyer vanishes, Arkansas farmers lose a customer.

Meanwhile, there were 178,000 layoffs in Arkansas in 2025. Our delegation didn't stand in the way of any of it.

One of the most dangerous states — and all six took the gun lobby's money

Arkansas is one of the worst states in the country for violent crime, murder, and firearm deaths. After the mass shooting in Fordyce, Arkansas leaders offered thoughts and prayers. What they haven't offered is action — and there may be a reason. All six Arkansans in Congress accepted NRA donations.

Who voted for this

These are the members of Congress representing Arkansas who voted for the budget law behind the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, backed the trade policy hurting farmers, and stood by while DOGE tore through the state:

Tom Cotton — U.S. Senator
Rick Crawford — U.S. Representative
French Hill — U.S. Representative
Steve Womack — U.S. Representative
Bruce Westerman — U.S. Representative

Arkansas ranking 49th isn't destiny. It's the score so far. In 2026, every one of these seats is on the ballot — and Arkansans get to decide whether the people who voted to make a hard situation harder get to keep doing it.

Compare Arkansas to Other States →