July 09, 2025 12:18 PM UTC

Slashing Federal Funding Turns Out to Be a Bad Idea

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• by: Colorado Pols

Now that President Trump has signed his “big, beautiful, bullshit bill” into law, we’re getting a better sense of just how bad things are going to get as a result of cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from social safety net programs so that rich people can finally get a nice tax break.

There is already much concern about what will happen to rural hospitals and the 17 million people who stand to lose healthcare access thanks to a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. In fact, we noted on Monday that pending Medicaid cuts are already creating problems here in Colorado.

The bad news keeps coming as news outlets continue to report on the fallout from the Republican budget bill. Axios Denver examines how cuts to SNAP (food stamps) will be a significant blow for Coloradans:

Around 27,000 Coloradans are at risk of losing at least some food assistance due to President Trump’s newly signed megabill, per estimates from the left-leaning Center on Policy and Budget Priorities.

Why it matters: It’s a historic cut to the social safety net, which Republicans claim will weed out waste, fraud and abuse. But experts warn the move could leave more people hungry and uninsured.

The big picture: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often called food stamps, helps low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities buy groceries.

By the numbers: More than 617,000 Coloradans, about 10% of the state, were enrolled in SNAP as of March 2025, per federal data. [Pols emphasis]

In Denver, nearly 119,000 people receive the benefits, according to the city. About 43% of Colorado SNAP households have children, Feeding America figures show.

Hundreds of thousands of Coloradans rely on SNAP benefits just to feed their families. You can do the “Old man yells at clouds” thing and complain that many of these people should get a job and wean themselves off of government cheese, but that’s easier said than done — and it punishes innocent children regardless. We don’t know what Colorado Republicans who supported these cuts will say once the food disappears; based on the nonsense we’ve already heard from the likes of Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton), the plan is probably just to tell people that they aren’t really hungry.

This should all be part of a bigger conversation around what happens when the federal government stops, um, governing. Writing for The Colorado Sun, Mike Littwin plays out that question in a column pegged to the devastating floods in Texas that have killed at least 115 people and left at least 160 others missing.

Littwin notes that it’s hard to blame someone else for your own failures when the stakes are this high:

As you might have expected, in the immediate aftermath of the flood, some Texas officials reflexively blamed the feds and the weather service for insufficient warning, but then remembered whose feds are actually running the weather service these days.

Trump, who has made disastrous cuts to FEMA, to NOAA, to the NWS and to many more initialed federal weather agencies, wanted to blame the problem on Joe Biden — “That was Biden’s setup,” Trump said — but then caught himself, realizing that he was president before Biden when nothing was improved. [Pols emphasis]

So he didn’t blame anyone.

Instead, in a cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump said the response to the storm that he led, along with Abbott, saved many lives, particularly because of the warm bond he shares with the Texas governor.

Try on this Trump quote and see if you can figure out exactly what he’s saying: “The response has been incredible. And, the fact that we (Abbott and Trump) got along so well, I don’t know. That’s … I don’t even think that’s a political thing. But, we got along so well and it was so unified. I think a lot of lives have been saved. That could have been as bad as it was. And you could almost double or triple. This thing was just, really horrible.”

As Littwin continues, the flooding in Texas — and the much-discussed lack of warning for people in the area — should be a different type of siren for all of us:

More to the point, we should consider this disaster a warning for what will come — and already has come — of the irresponsible cuts made by Elon Musk and his DOGE team and the cataclysmic impact of the passage of Trump’s Big Ugly Contemptible Bill government-wide. [Pols emphasis]

Pretending to cut fraud and waste while giving giant tax cuts to the wealthy, Trump has cut health insurance once guaranteed by Medicaid and Obamacare. He has cut funding for federal food assistance for U.S. children, for USAID that will likely see millions of children die, for the National Institutes of Health and for university medical research that will be felt in America and around the world for years.

Elections have consequences, and so do budget cuts.

This is what happens when you elect people who don’t care about what happens to everyone else.