Rural Organizers Are Building Power by Fighting Cuts to Federal Funding

Filed 20h ago · Via Daily Yonder · The Buffoon Desk

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Glee Club Polka

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Federal cuts to SNAP and Medicaid under the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ are shifting costs to state and local governments, with North Carolina alone projected to pay $420 million a year in new SNAP administrative costs. Rural counties, with smaller tax bases and heavier reliance on these programs, face the sharpest squeeze, and Medicaid cuts nationally could pull $137 billion out of rural healthcare against just $50 billion set aside to soften the blow.

Down Home NC, a grassroots organizing group, has used local budget fights to build pressure on elected officials, including a campaign in Alamance County that turned back a proposed 19% cut to EMS, libraries, and schools after members mobilized hundreds of residents. Similar efforts are underway in Cabarrus and Johnston counties, pushing for budget transparency resolutions and public hearings on the impact of federal cuts.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When Washington cuts a check and leaves the county to explain it to the ambulance crew, somebody has to show up to the meeting. Turns out three hundred people at a commissioners' meeting can move a budget faster than a trillion dollars in projected cost-shifting can move Congress. That's not a triumph of policy, it's just what happens when the bill finally lands on a desk close enough for people to see it.

Source: Read the original at Daily Yonder → Scored: Glee Club Polka · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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