The people going hungry to pay for (a small fraction of) Trump’s wars and upper-class tax cuts

Republican priorities cannot be laid out more starkly than this:

As spring hit Maine and the lobstermen prepared for the summer season by repairing their traps and replacing their rope, state lawmakers set out to mend a widening hole in the American social-safety net.

Last year’s passage of the massive federal tax-and-spending One Big Beautiful Bill Act has set in motion one of the biggest transformations of the welfare state that the United States has seen in decades. For more than a generation, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which provides roughly 40 million Americans with money for groceries — has served as the country’s dominant vector for direct payments to people struggling to eat. But SNAP’s era as arguably the nation’s preeminent anti-poverty program may be ending. Already 3.5 million people nationwide have been booted from the program and, as the law’s new eligibility terms take effect this year, more are likely to follow, while others will be abruptly sent back into a workforce for which they are unprepared. Parents of teenage children and adults in their 60s will now be expected to find a job and prove they are working. Roughly 45,000 people in Maine, including veterans and homeless adults — briefly granted a reprieve from work requirements during the Biden administration — will be newly required to work or volunteer. Costs to states will balloon, as they are expected to kick in more funds to administer the program and for the first time pay part of the cost of benefits themselves.

In few places has the response been as swift as in Maine, where Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, legislative leaders and state nonprofits seven years ago committed to a 2030 goal of ensuring Mainers always have enough to eat. Now that ambitious objective — one that officials and activists believed was within reach for a small state with a motivated government, even after pandemic-era setbacks — seems even further away.

Instead, lawmakers, nonprofits and bureaucrats now see themselves spending the remainder of the decade trying to manage the impact of a federal law that will make it harder for millions of people to obtain federal nutrition assistance and health care while passing significant costs onto states. The Maine legislature passed a $500 million supplemental budget this spring that will raise revenue through a new tax on millionaires, fund increased staffing to administer SNAP and create a $30 million contingency fund to keep federal food assistance running in the event the program lapses as it did during last year’s record-setting government shutdown.

“What makes it difficult is knowing it’s not sustainable,” said Maine Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau at the state house, bleary-eyed in a worn long-sleeve tee and vest after presiding over several days of late-night sessions in April to deliver the budget and other priorities.

And the fact that these savage cuts to the food safety net are happening as Trump’s policies increase the price of groceries makes it all that much worse.