Council Member Marilyn Balcombe stated it perfectly: she cast the county’s recent special SNAP appropriation as a “response to federal chaos.”
The recent federal shutdown was due to deliberations concerning lifting the debt ceiling. Without congressional authorization to borrow even more money than it already has, the government shut down due to lack of funds. As happened during previous impasses, factions within Congress hold hostage certain federal programs as the price for raising the debt ceiling. While SNAP wasn’t the direct target of congressional ire, the government shutdown drained SNAP of its necessary funds—leaving many MoCo families without critical assistance.
Needless to say, this isn’t the last federal shutdown. Neither MAGA nor the progressives have any sense of fiscal discipline, so there will be more debt-ceiling showdowns and shutdowns for the foreseeable future, and that means more threats to the SNAP program. There is also the possibility that the federal government wants to exit SNAP entirely.
Any locality, including MoCo, needs to learn a difficult lesson. Protection of the most vulnerable starts with local budgets. The federal chaos is baked into the Constitution, and delegating critical services such as food, housing, and education to the federal chaos is completely irresponsible.
Fortunately, food is relatively cheap, and MoCo can easily absorb the entire responsibility for funding SNAP. MoCo SNAP reimbursements are about $154 million each year. That is only 4.3% of the public school’s monstrous $3.6 billion budget.
As our council members often say, budgets are statements of values. To me, SNAP funding is a far higher value than the luxury components of MCPS, such as International Baccalaureate, top-of-the-line infrastructure, and electric buses. Let’s hope our council members will start giving higher priority to the hungry and less emphasis to the cushy elements of our public schools.
