Local Leaders Facing New Reality
Though much remains unknown, imminent cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and schools have leaders tracking policies and planning for funding cuts.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Federal regulations — especially ones like the “Big Beautiful Bill” that mark fundamental changes in the relationship between federal and state governments — generate reams of estimates and projections prior to passage.
After passage, however, is when the real work begins. Until federal regulations that spell out how a bill’s laws will be carried out are written, there are far more questions than answers about what’s to come.
Local leaders are waiting for regulations to be written, but they are not waiting for final versions to begin preparing for what’s to sure to come — cuts to critical services that will affect the most-vulnerable people in Virginia.
Seniors
Patricia Holland has spent more than three decades at Healthy Generations Area Agency on Aging. She became executive director six years ago and has seen demand for services explode.
Since COVID, the number of clients Healthy Generations serves with home food delivery has gone from 48 to 871. The organization also receives about 20,000 unique phone calls a year from people looking for information and guidance.
Those numbers worry Holland under current conditions. Those concerns will grow beginning in the fall of 2027 (fiscal year 2028), when reductions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) take effect.
States whose SNAP payment error rates — either underpayments or overpayments — exceed 6% will be required to pay for a minimum of 5% of SNAP benefits. That may not sound like much, until one considers that in the most recent fiscal year, the SNAP program in Virginia used $1.76 billion.
What bothers Holland about the coming changes is that it’s predicated on a belief that the SNAP program is ripe with fraud.
In reality, many of the errors are caused by honest mistakes. Holland notes, for example, that many older people don’t see Social Security payments as income and don’t report it on their application. They equate income with money collected from a job.
Those mistakes can cause Virginia huge dollars.
If the change were to go into effect today, Virginia — with an error rate over 10% — would be required to pick up 15% of the $1.76 billion Virginia spends on SNAP. If the state can’t meet that obligation, then it has no other option than to cut services.
Already too few seniors who are eligible for SNAP use it, says Holland. Depending on how much of its portion of SNAP Virginia is able to fund, some of those people may well lose their benefits.
Further, new work requirements associated with SNAP could place unusually trying burdens on select seniors.
For example, adults with children over the age of 14 in the house will have to work in order to receive benefits. While Holland doesn’t have numbers, she sees a growing number of grandparents taking care of children. Many have taken over raising kids from parents who are struggling with addiction, or other challenges.
“Lots of grandparents have pseudo-custody,” she told the Advance. “They just take the kids without … taking the legal path,” she continued. They’re “afraid of the system, and it’s expensive.” The cost to gain custody can easily run into five figures.
If those grandparents receive SNAP and are caring for kids over 14, they will be required to find work to continue receiving those benefits.
“COVID brought a lot of good things to light,” Holland said. “It showed us how important … proper nutrition is. People do not have the funds” and the consequences of losing services can prove dire.
Medicaid is another concern, because seniors under the age of 64 will need to recertify every six months instead of annually.
“To have people recertify every six months,” Holland said, “is going to cause problems.”
Many older adults are already confused by Medicaid and what federal agencies can and cannot do. There’s a common misbelief, for example, that if you are on Medicaid and go into a long-term care facility, the government can take your home.
The fear is unfounded, but once fears like these take hold they are hard to shake and make people are unnecessarily suspicious of programs designed to help them.
There are also concerns about how efficient these new requirements will be in terms of recertifying people effectively.
A good example of what can go wrong is evident in the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Funded through the federal government and administered by the states, Healthy Generations currently isn’t able to get people enrolled because of a glitch in the system. Not only can new people be brought on, but currently enrolled people aren’t receiving benefits. It’s been a problem since June 1.
Bottom line, seniors already struggling to make ends meet and overwhelmed with the complexities associated with programs like Medicaid may well find themselves losing their Medicaid by failing to understand and meet the new requirements.
Note everything is a loss, however. Holland is thankful that some of the programs her organization depends on have apparently been spared from cuts.
“The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) was on the chopping block,” Holland said, “but I believed it has been saved. This helps people pay for their electric bills.”
The Older Americans Back to Work Training program, also known as Title V, has also been saved, so far. But Holland acknowledges funding will decline.
The falls program that Healthy Generations teachers — all of them evidenced-based programs proved to reduce the number of injuries due to falls — have been saved.
It will take a year or two to really understand how seniors are going to be affected by these changes. We do know, however, that the long-term consequences associated with the coming cuts are likely to become more dire in coming years.
“Virginia will soon have more seniors than people under 19,” Holland says.
In short, these cuts — both those that intentionally move people off public assistance and those that move people off because of the increasing complexities and requirements associated with them — are going to hit seniors at the very time that the population is soaring in the state.
Already, the commonwealth needs at least an additional $10 million to provide services and eliminate waiting lists for the same.
The Hungry
The Food Banks in Virginia are already feeling the cuts imposed by the Trump administration. At the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank, for example, CEO and president Dan Maher tells the Advance that food banks across the state are still feeling “lingering food commodity issues from before the bill.”
In April, the Trump administration cut $1 billion in funding to two programs that provide food to schools and food banks — the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program.
Today at the Fredericksburg Food Bank, the aforementioned cuts to SNAP are front-of-mind.
There is a bit of “communal panic at this point,” Maher told the Advance, about the coming cuts. Right now, he continued, we are “reassuring people that we’re going to do our best to keep resources and supplies as strong as possible…. But at the same time, we all need to be ready for some resource reductions.”
“The whole national network is in a wait and see mode,” Maher continued, “to see how those impacts play out, how the state legislators handle it all.”
The worry in the wait-and-see approach, says Maher, is that “the depth of those cuts, even softened by the Senate version,” can effectively wipe out the impact of food banks. “The charitable assistance network does not have the capacity to help people keep up.”
As Eddie Oliver, executive director of the Federation of Virginia Food Banks, told the Advance in June, the federal government will look to the states to backfill the $300 billion cut to SNAP. “The federal government in Congress is calling it a cost shift to states, and the estimates we’re looking at in Virginia would now be responsible for anywhere from between $350 million to $450 million per year.”
If the state couldn’t come up with that, then upwards of 200,000 Virginians would lose benefits. “We [the food banks],” Oliver said, “would have to essentially triple our output [to meet this loss]. That means three times the number of trucks, three times the number of warehouses. We distributed over 170 million pounds of food last year to over 700,000 people. To make up for the SNAP cuts, we’d have to triple that.”
This pressure is forcing food banks to consider new approaches to deal with the growing numbers of people turning up seeking support.
“Food banks don’t exist to buy food,” Maher said, “but to muster the charitable resources of our community.” Still, he continued, “The only way to fill these gaps quickly is by purchasing food, which is antithetical to our mission.”
In addition to trying to broaden and strengthen the networks of organizations that the food bank depends upon to contribute food, food banks across Virginia are starting to look at ways to purchase food.
They have some experience with this, thanks to statewide efforts through the new healthy pantry initiatives. But it’s nowhere close to being enough to cover the rise in demand that the loss of SNAP benefits will create.
“We know we can never buy our way into wholeness,” Maher said.
It’s not just the loss of SNAP funding that worries the food bank, however.
Potential cuts to feeding programs for public schools could add to pressure on food banks to fill gaps.
As we have learned from our summer feeding program, Maher told the Advance, “whenever school is out the community absorption of food resources rises. That’s an analogy for what happens if school lunches go away.”
It’s going to put more pressure on food banks to provide food for people who currently can depend on schools to help out.
Moral Issue
While previous administrations have made cuts to the social safety net, the ones coming courtesy of the Big, Beautiful Bill are unprecedented in their depth and scope.
“We need to be ready as a society to recognize that there will be significant impacts,” Maher said. “The depth and form may not be immediately obvious, but based on projections, if all elements move forward as projected, it could become a perfect storm affecting community health. Food and basic healthcare are basic human rights.”
“Traditionally,” Maher continued, “hunger, especially childhood hunger, has been a unifying cause on both sides of the aisle. To politicize what is really a moral issue is a tragedy in its own right.”
Food insecurity is often described as a hidden problem, because many people working full-time jobs do not have the financial ability to meet their dietary needs. In addition to the unemployed, teachers, first responders and more are regular visitors to the food bank.
Seniors are another group whose challenges are largely hidden from society.
“As soon as our hair starts going white,” says Holland, “and as we age and have signs of aging, we are forgotten or left to our own devices. Seniors … have given us so much; they have stories and ideas and want to be part of communities, but these are largely shunned.”
The depth of the damage to the social safety net isn’t clearly known. But local leaders know enough to realize that unprecedented challenges await Virginia, and the nation.
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