The GOP's war on starving Americans ramps up

The White House needs to throw own now

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

House Democratic leaders, according to a new report, are at odds with the White House over the use of the term “Bidenomics” and have refused to actively use it for months.

Taking credit for an economy in which so many people are still struggling may not be the smartest idea; for all the charts and talk about lowering inflation, things still cost far more they did in 2019. Instead of celebrating the economy, the goal should be to make it truly work for everyone, something the Biden administration can do without any permission or legislation.

Tonight, we’ll talk about the right’s’ quiet attempts to shatter of our social safety net and what’s required to stop them.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep Progress Report afloat and sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you. Please help us fight the good fight.

---

---

Conservatives are quietly waging the most significant war on the social safety net in generations.

Nearly 12 million Americans have been kicked off Medicaid since April.

The nation’s 43 million SNAP beneficiaries have lost around $90 per month in food stamps.

Nearly a million Americans have been booted from the program since October.

And increasingly, as a result of enormous bureaucratic delays caused by ideological cruelty, those who do qualify for SNAP are nonetheless being abandoned to navigate strained food banks or simply starve.

Hotline to the Abyss

This summer, while working on a story about the Medicaid unwinding, I connected with a woman in rural Georgia named Tiffany. In July, she was thrown off of the low-income health care program without so much as a word from the state.

A mother of four who several years earlier left her abusive husband, Tiffany cleaned houses for a living, hard work that did not provide health insurance or pay enough on its own to break the cycle of paycheck-to-paycheck poverty. Losing Medicaid for any extended period of time would be devastating, but she didn’t hold out much hope that the state would correct the obvious error.

Months earlier, Georgia’s Division of Family & Children Services had erroneously removed her from the SNAP program, denying her the assistance needed to feed her children. She called the 800 numbers promoted by the state, which offered little help, while her caseworker never answered the phone or returned a voicemail.

Tiffany would have driven to her office, but unlike in the past, caseworkers were not located in the communities they were supposed to serve. Instead, this phantom social worker was located three hours away, firmly out of her client’s reach.

Tiffany’s mom worked for another part of the Division of Family & Children Services, and when she looked up the status of Tiffany’s applications, she discovered that the case worker had not even opened the email. Meanwhile, food continued to get precarious, and it was only through the help of friends and family were Tiffany and her kids able to consistently get enough to eat.

Once Tiffany heard that her unopened application expired, I got her in touch with a state Senator in Georgia who I figured could help her sort the situation out. State Sen. Nabilah Islam didn’t represent her district, but went to bat for Tiffany anyway. Georgia’s Division of Family & Children Services is so underfunded and labyrinthian that it took Sen. Islam weeks to get SNAP and Medicaid restored.

Tiffany’s case was solved, but by and large, conservatives have rigged the system to fail. There are now more than 30,000 low-income Georgians who should be receiving food stamps but are instead spending the holiday season unsure of where their families are going to get their next meal.

The state blames technical problems with its benefits database system, and conveniently, a delay caused by the $350 tax cut check sent to residents as Gov. Brian Kemp ran for re-election. What officials fail to acknowledge is that there was a backlog of 10,000+ struggling residents waiting for SNAP benefits in summer 2022.

This was a choice, designed to deny essentials to the vulnerable, just like Georgia Republicans’ insistence on instituting a limited Medicaid expansion with work requirements.

“We are sailing the Titanic”

What Tiffany experienced was not some cascade of bad luck, but the logical endgame of decades of chipping away at America’s threadbare safety net.

Republicans are using bureaucracy to end the socioeconomic contract, but it hasn’t always been so quiet.

Ronald Reagan used the stereotype of “welfare queens” to push through giant budget cuts to poverty aid programs; a decade later, Bill Clinton’s so-called reforms took a wrecking ball to those programs, in part by short-circuiting cash assistance and handing over power to individual states. Empowering the states was an idea inserted by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The federal government’s various stimulus bills during the pandemic produced a sudden and dramatic expansion of the social safety net, providing Americans with a rare lifeline for a few years. When those benefits expired, states were once again given control of determining eligibility and distributing benefits.

In Texas, for example, whistleblowers revealed last week that it is sometimes taking the state more than six months to process food stamp applications, a task that federal law requires to be completed within 30 days.

The backlog of applications continues to grow, too, which is partially a product of SNAP paperwork being handled by the same department that processes Medicaid applications. Because Texas requires people to renew their food stamps every six months, there is little relief in sight.

“With our current agency leadership, we are sailing the Titanic filled with our most vulnerable citizens into certain disaster!” concerned employees wrote in an email to a local news network in late November.

More than 1.4 million people in Texas have been thrown off of Medicaid since April, including over 720,000 children. Most have lost their insurance due to procedural errors, or some kind of missing paperwork, not because they are ineligible. The state is following a policy of self-sabotage by declining opportunities to use things like data-matching, a process known as ex parte, to verify eligibility automatically.

Advocates there have for months been asking the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees and in theory regulates the process, to step in on behalf of so many people hanging in limbo.

“It would be great if the administration did more to ensure in states like Texas, where we refuse all streamlining strategies, that we are still meaningfully held to federal timeliness standards,” Stacey Pogue, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit organization Every Texan, told me last week.

“It should not be okay for states like Texas to refuse all options to streamline, kick a bunch of eligible people off who’ll have to re-apply, and then force eligible people in need to wait for health care and food assistance due to big paperwork backlogs.”

As it turns out, the federal government has had eyes on the Texas Health and Human Services Commission for quite a while — not that it’s made much of a difference.

This weekend, news broke that the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service has been monitoring Texas’s all the way back to 2018, with periodic check-ins to assess how quickly its distributing what are mostly federal dollars. That the monitoring has continued since then is an indicator that the state hasn’t gotten its act together, possibly because it hasn’t faced any consequences.

The feds met with the state welfare commission this past week, following the commission’s submission of a 62-page plan that it promised would expedite assistance to those who need it most.

Gov. Greg Abbott has promised to address the backlog by hiring new call center employees and shifting resources, but years of deliberate underfunding hardly inspires confidence; even in summer 2022, when states couldn’t kick anyone off of Medicaid, Texas had a backlog of nearly 300,000 applications.

Montana, Missouri, and other states have major SNAP backlogs, as does New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams has slashed budgets to the bone in order to award billions in no-bid contracts to friends.

None of this required an act of Congress, a presidential executive order, or even laws passed by the states. It’s just a relentless drive by the conservative movement to use every ounce of power it can to make life difficult for working class Americans and further incinerate our social contract. No matter what one wants to call the White House’s economic program, stopping this attempt to further turn the US into a feudal state is essential.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

This is a second full-time job, and I’m looking to expand. There are no corporations, dark money think tanks, or big grants sponsoring this work. It’s all people-powered. So, I need your help.

For just $6 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes premium member-only newsletters with original reporting and analysis.

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!