Within days of Christmas, families in Iowa and Nebraska received some troubling news. Republican Governors in those states have announced that they’re opting out of a summer Federal food assistance program. The program would provide thousands of low-income families with an additional $40 per month in food assistance to cover the months when school lunch programs aren’t available.
Republican Governor Kim Reynolds said the program wasn’t sustainable and blamed the decision on her belief that the program didn’t do enough to address the obesity epidemic. “Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” she said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press.
Nebraska’s governor was more to the point in his critique of the program, admitting that he just didn’t like welfare programs. “In the end, I fundamentally believe that we solve the problem, and I don’t believe in welfare,” Governor Jim Pillen told the Lincoln Journal Star.
“MAGA Republicans in Iowa and Nebraska are putting politics ahead of the well-being of our children, rejecting critical funding from the Biden-Harris administration that would put food on the table for hungry kids,” said DNC National Press Secretary Sarafina Chitika, in a statement. “This shameful stunt is just the latest example of the GOP’s cruel, extreme MAGA agenda at work – one that lines the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and takes money out of the pockets of working parents who are trying to do right by their families.”
Efforts to dismantle assistance programs to low-income Americans are nothing new. And, with most pandemic-era policies obsolete, conservative states have wasted no time chipping away even further at the welfare state.
Although race hasn’t been brought up in this conversation explicitly, it’s an undercurrent of any discussion over welfare. White Americans are the overall largest benefactors of welfare, but the conflict has always been incredibly racially coded. From former President Ronald Reagan decrying the mythical “welfare queen” to Senator Tim Scott implying welfare has been worse than slavery for Black people, it’s impossible to avoid the racial undertones in these conversations.
The fight against providing services and welfare in the United States has been raging for decades. And children of all races living in poverty in the Midwest appear to be the latest casualties.