Republicans Hate Smart Government
Which is why we have to defend it and the people it serves.
Coyote Run Farm at the Des Moines Downtown Farmers Market in 2012. Notice the sign indicating that we accepted the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) EBT card. People with these benefits could use them to purchase food from our farm.
Trigger warning, this is a rant. I’m pissed off. Republicans are advancing stupid government to prove their case that government is the problem.
We do need to improve government at all levels. I will never argue that we have perfected how we implement government through representative democracy anywhere in the United States. We can always do better in every jurisdiction.
But, I will declare from the mountaintop that in a representative democracy, the government is our best tool for advancing a hopeful and abundant future. It’s not the only tool. There are lots of tools. But it is our biggest tool, and collectively we need to make sure we are using it for the betterment of all of us.
Republicans are doing just the opposite. They are using it for the betterment of the few at the expense of the rest of us.
Their goal is to shrink the services provided by the government. They use their power to pursue stupid government as a way to undermine the citizenry’s attitude about the government. After all, if the government delivers good services in a cost effective and efficient way, then the old Ronald Reagan adage that government is the problem falls apart.
Since President Trump and House Republicans are now on record with their reconciliation package to cut the SNAP program as a means to “finding” the money to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, I’m going to take you on a SNAP journey.
I’ve been a fan of SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, for a long time. Back in May of 2020, Robert Leonard, Beto O’Rourke and I wrote this piece for the New York Times, Americans Are Lining Up for Food. What Is Team Trump Doing? We were arguing that funding food banks while not expanding food stamps is a solution driven by ideology rather than effectiveness.
We also wrote this at the end of the year at TIME, Millions of Americans Face Food Insecurity. The Biden Administration Must Make Helping Them a Priority. The Biden Administration did make it a priority, expanded SNAP, and it worked.
For every dollar delivered in SNAP benefits, the economic multiplier is conservatively 1.5 times. The cost of delivering that dollar is less than five cents. We no longer print food stamps. Benefits are delivered on an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card which functions like a credit card. People buy food in grocery stores. Grocery stores get paid electronically. Benefits can be added or subtracted electronically as the participant’s eligibility changes. This is efficiency.
The story I’m telling is grounded in real data from the Nodaway Valley School District in Greenfield, Iowa. Two hundred eighty-three students were eligible for free and reduced lunch in 2023-2024. But it’s a hypothetical story because Governor Kim Reynolds chose not to implement the SUN Bucks program, also known as Summer EBT, last year in Iowa.
That program would have provided students eligible for free or reduced school lunch with $40 per month in SNAP benefits for June, July, and August. Those benefits would have been added to existing household EBT cards or provided on new cards to be used just like regular SNAP benefits.
Again this year, Iowa’s Governor requested a waiver for SUN Bucks to implement something that is unproven and untried. Unlike last year, the Trump Administration has approved her alternative to the efficiency of empowering eligible families to purchase food at the grocery store of their choice. As the State of Iowa pursues a food box model, I want everyone to know what Governor Reynolds chose to forgo last year. She’s chosen to pass on it again this year.
Last year, she refused to implement SUN Bucks, which would have provided $29 million to eligible Iowa families. This year she’s been approved to provide locations where eligible families can go to select $40 worth of “healthy foods” rather than simply sending the benefits to families so they can purchase $40 worth of food at the grocery store each month this summer.
The Food Research and Action Center reports that the state of Iowa estimates that the Governor’s “Healthy Kids Iowa” program will serve 65,000 children. This leaves behind 175,000 children who would have been served if the state would simply implement Sun Bucks. Iowa Capital Dispatch has a story here with additional details.
The reason I’m looking at Nodaway Valley School District is because a year ago this month, the community of Greenfield was recovering from a devastating tornado. They were in need of an enormous amount of support. People were donating water, food, clothing, and basic hygiene products.
Had Reynolds chosen to request and implement that program in January 2024, 283 students in the Nodaway Valley School District headquartered in Greenfield, would have qualified for $40 each per month for June, July, and August just days after a massive tornado hit that town on May 21. That’s $33,960 worth of groceries.
Using public data on Iowa students receiving free and reduced school meals and shopping for food online in November at the Fareway store in that town, I’m sharing what Governor Reynold’s choice meant for this community hit by that devastating tornado.
I didn’t have a way to go back and see what the price of groceries was at the Fareway in Greenfield back in June, July, and August. But I could go online and look at the prices in that store in November, 2024, which I did.
Here is the list of the kinds and volumes of food that Governor Reynolds took away from those families by refusing to implement SUN Bucks. To arrive at what could have been purchased, I used a mix of proteins, grains, fruit, vegetables, and dairy. This tracks the recommendations that USDA provides to beneficiaries of SNAP. I also added some sugar and ranch dressing to spread the dollars beyond just the food groups. And I challenge anyone reading this to see how far from this list your own family's grocery cart strays.
You can view this as a PDF here.
Let’s talk about milk. Of all the food I could purchase, I chose to spend the second highest amount of the $120 on 2% milk. I budgeted for three gallons. I spent a little more on bread, buying five loaves. For all eligible families in Greater Greenfield, that’s 849 gallons of milk and 1,415 loaves of bread.
I’m confident that milk is a good candidate to be one of the top purchases for families using SNAP. In early 2014, I had an opportunity to see a list of the 100 most purchased items with SNAP from a Des Moines supermarket . That wasn’t public data, but one of the Drake University Agricultural Law students, where I worked at the time, asked a grocery store if they had data and if they could share it. They did.
This was in response to then Iowa Department of Public Health Director Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ comment at the Iowa Hunger Summit in October 2013 that “The No. 1 food item bought with food stamps is Mountain Dew.”
I was on a panel immediately after her opening keynote. I wasn’t in the room to hear her comments. I was outside of the ballroom talking with some people in the exhibit space. The panel I was on following the keynote was about AARP’s recent poll about public support for the state of Iowa’s efforts to fight hunger. Seventy-two percent of Iowans supported the state government (Iowa SNAP program) working with private and public efforts to fight hunger.
When we finished the panel, someone asked about the data that Mountain Dew was the number one item purchased with SNAP.
I went off. Remember, I wasn’t in the room when the Iowa Public Health Director made this unfounded claim. I didn’t realize I was countering Iowa’s top public health official. I thought I was just countering the kind of crazy talk that one could find then and now on Facebook.
I said something like, “There is no evidence that the number one item is Mountain Dew. There is this conspiracy on Facebook that all the kids on SNAP in Kentucky have Mountain Dew mouth and are losing all their teeth because their families spend all their SNAP benefits on pop. It’s just not true. There is no evidence for this. What there is evidence for is that SNAP families purchase relatively the same kinds of foods with SNAP that other families in their community buy with cash. There really is very little difference.
“SNAP families tend to buy some foods a little higher in fats and sugars based on those foods are a little cheaper per calorie. So the attack on SNAP families buying all this pop is really about stigmatizing those families. People that perpetuate those stereotypes are saying more about how they think about these families than about public health.”
After the panel session, someone came up to me and said, “Did you know that Public Health Director Miller-Meeks made the comment in her keynote about Mountain Dew just before your panel?”
Nope. Had I known that, I would most likely have not been as blunt. I would have pulled my punches. But the fact is she had no scientific evidence about this very declarative statement. She even had to admit it when the press actually covered these remarks in January 2014.
I sort of helped break this story, which wasn’t in the press in October but showed up in January as Miller-Meeks was getting ready to launch her campaign for her first and unsuccessful run for Congress. She is now Iowa’s member of Congress in the First Congressional District, and she voted last week to cut SNAP benefits in the budget reconciliation bill.
Mike Wiser with the Cedar Rapids Gazette called me about a two part story they were doing on nutrition assistance in January 2014. He asked about the comments by Miller-Meeks. You can read that here with a subscription to The Gazette: Do food stamp cuts make sense? I explained.
“To an extent, ideology is driving the discussion instead of data,” said Matt Russell, state food policy project coordinator at Drake University's Agricultural Law Center. “Cuts sound logical, but when you peel it back and see who these folks that aren't working - they're seniors and kids - it seems kind of Draconian.”
That story was followed by coverage in the Des Moines Register. Laura Belin, as she often does, did a deep dive into the story in Bleeding Heartland. Where did Miller-Meeks get her "fact" about food stamps and Mountain Dew?
I encourage you to read Belin’s excellent story, however, if you don’t have time, the answer is just like I said, she pulled it off the internet.
The rhetoric we are seeing with SNAP by Republicans right now isn’t new. And it isn’t grounded in reality. It’s grounded in stigmatizing beneficiaries in order to junk up one of the federal government’s most cost effective programs.
Now, moving on from Mountain Dew and back to milk. I can’t say that the number one item purchased by Iowan’s using SNAP in 2014 was a gallon of milk, but I can tell you the number one item at a major grocery store in Des Moines in the poorest voter precinct in the city was a gallon of milk. Pop did show up on the list of 100 items. But the top five items were dairy and meat.
In 2024, Governor Reynold’s kept needed food from families with kids at Nodaway Valley School District. Of course she didn’t know there was going to be a tornado. But that’s the point. Republicans in Congress, including all of our Representatives Zach Nunn, Randy Feenstra, Ashley Hinson, and Miller-Meeks are taking away food through cuts to SNAP that will have similar consequences.
They don’t know what these families will be facing. They don’t know how stretched food budgets are going to become for working class families and those struggling to get out of poverty. They don’t know what economic and natural disasters await the majority of Americans who will lose more than they will gain if the Budget Reconciliation Bill passed by the Republicans in the House last week becomes law.
The official name of this bill that cuts programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and will lead to cuts in Medicare is called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Republicans in the House of Representatives are like compromised members of a crime family. They keep doing more and more ridiculous things to please boss man Trump and make wilder and wilder claims that aren’t grounded in reality. Their claims are grounded in fiction to make people who are entitled to benefits look undeserving, so they can justify cutting benefits.
President Reagan did this with the depiction of welfare queens driving Cadillacs filled with kids.
Iowa Director of Public Health Miller-Meeks, now a US Member of Congress, did it with Mountain Dew and SNAP families.
Governor Reynolds did it by suggesting that SNAP beneficiaries buy all this unhealthy food with their benefits. That’s why she wasn’t going to let those families go to the grocery store. They need to make a special trip to a feeding site to pick up their package of healthy foods.
And on the Medicaid front Representative Hinson said this doozy as justification for voting for cuts to the program as reported in The Cedar Rapids Gazette on May 19.
“The intent of Medicaid is to protect those with disabilities, seniors and single mothers with children,” Hinson said. It’s not there for “29-year-old men playing video games on their mothers’ couch in the basement.”
The tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful that passed in 2017 and that Trump is trying to extend provided a very small bump in economic growth. The economic expansion which started in 2009 created the longest period of economic expansion in US history. However, the year to year growth was anemic. You can see charts about that here.
The COVID pandemic ended that expansion. However, the response to COVID also kicked off a huge recovery that had made the US economy one of the strongest of any country in the world by the time Trump took office in January 2025.
Tax cuts from 2017 were still in place, but they hadn’t kick started the economy. What kicked off growth in late 2020 and 2021 was government spending like expansions of Medicaid and SNAP especially focused on the lowest income earners. This was followed by infrastructure investments in transportation, energy, environmental benefits, agriculture, broadband, etc.
Here’s a fact during the last 45 years. Republicans wreck the economy. Democrats fix it. At the end of the George H. W. Bush presidency the economy had stalled. At the end of Clinton’s presidency, we’d rebounded. At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, we had the Great Recession. During Obama’s presidency the recession ended and growth continued.
When Trump began his first term, the economy continued to grow only slowly, even with Trump’s massive tax cuts. Then, COVID created a global economic crisis. Trump fumbled that crisis and voters chose Biden. During the Biden presidency, massive investments were made, especially in spending on the lowest income earners and the middle class. The economy grew. Employment soared. Real income was rising. Inflation also rose creating challenges, but we were overcoming many of those challenges as 2024 ended.
In just 100 days, Trump has stalled the economy and levied unprecedented attacks on all aspects of the Federal Government. The Republicans are telling tall tales about government waste, fraud, and abuse. This is to serve their goal of doing stupid government to prove their point that government is the problem.
Yeah, I’m pissed. And one of the reasons is that I was a free lunch kid in high school back in the 1980s farm crisis. I wouldn’t have starved without that support, but I figured up that over the years me and my brother and sister were getting free lunch at school, my family saved at least $2000. Those dollars didn’t get put into stocks and bonds. Those dollars got spent locally on shoes and meals at home and gas in the car.
We aren’t going to change the minds of Republicans who are choosing the wealthy over ordinary Americans. What we can do is change what we’re doing.
Democrats, we can’t start with the data and the charts and the scholarly articles. We need to tell stories about real people and smart government. And then repeat it. We must talk about gallons of milk and lives changed.
While Greenfield, Iowa was trying to recover from the tornado, Governor Reynolds kept 849 gallons of milk and 1,415 loaves of bread from getting to these families. Using my same calculations, with an estimate of 240,000 eligible children in Iowa in 2024, she personally prevented Iowa families from being able to purchase 720,000 gallons of milk, 1.2 million loaves of bread, 2.4 million pounds of potatoes, 480,000 lbs of apples, and 720,000 lbs of pork roast.
And those families would have still had an additional $17.2 million to spend on additional foods at the grocery store of their choice, like the Fareway in Greenfield.
And when Republicans punch back with their lies and historical revisions, tell them to shut up and do the math. Make them show their work. Because their math doesn’t add up. The data doesn’t support their arguments.
There isn’t time to wait until the midterms. The time is now. Republicans want us to believe that government is the problem. They are using their power to make government stupid in order to prove their point.
If we let them do it, they will. And we’ll return to the Gilded Age, which was only golden for those with the gold. The rest of Americans were working long, unsafe hours for little pay, drinking shitty water, stuck in place without upward mobility, under-educated, and dying early from a lack of health care.
Republicans are taking us back to that America. They are intentionally undoing the successful investments in public spending and public regulations that our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents fought for and even died for.
While Republicans led by Trump rant and rave about made up shit, we need to rant and rave about what we’ve done and who we are. That’s what this is about. They are undoing the smart-government that Democrats have advanced every time we’ve had power.
I’m not suggesting we abandon policy and data, but if we’re going to defend smart government, we need to tell more stories about meat and potatoes and the people like most of us who have at least once in our life had a little help from smart government putting them on the table.
I’m a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Please take a look at this amazing group of Iowans publishing their work on Substack who are keeping community-based local journalism and commentary alive. It’s an honor to be among this group.
You write well when ticked off!!!! Keep it up! Thanks for your data. I ll use it in today’s phone calls to our crime family senators. I’d make up a name but it would insult Sicilians.
Such a beautiful rant deserves repeating. You’re my Howard Beale, straight out of the 1976 movie “Network,”telling us to open our windows and shout to the world, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That’s exactly how I feel right now. Fourteen locations in Polk County to pick up the anointed box of food. 14. Waste, fraud and abuse? When Raygun began selling T-shirts with Reynolds’ likeness depicted as “Cruella Des Moines” I thought it a perfect fit. I wear it walking past Terrace Hill, and frequently receive honked horns and thumbs up. Encouragements help, but very little.
But, as you so vividly describe, this cabal of malevolence is broader and runs much deeper. My disbelief at their ability to dispense poisonous decisions, with absurd logic and false moral equivalency, has proven my inability to grasp how much they truly don’t give a damn about…..anything. Transparency? I don’t think their image is reflected by a mirror. Is that the definition they use? Please keep venting your spleen Matt, and keep us informed about your latest findings. It’s like a balm for my mental health. At least until tomorrow.