President Trump and/or his minions in Congress have done a lot to hurt people this year. Firing workers who protect public health, canceling projects to spur economic development, slashing protections for children with disabilities and protections against housing discrimination, and the Big Brutal bill with its drastic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP while shoveling trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy – these are unprecedented attacks on millions of Americans. 

Americans don’t like these attacks. And as they learn more about Trump’s and minions’ refusal to prevent giant increases in health insurance costs and refusal to prevent loss of SNAP food assistance benefits, they are registering their dissatisfaction in polls, and by their votes in this week’s elections. 

This is the time to make sure that every representative and senator know how much constituents want the harm to stop. You can help – and we’ve put together state data from several sources, here: The Struggle to Pay for Health Care and Food is Getting Worse – so you can tell your rep and senators that they must act now to protect their constituents from unaffordable health care and food costs.

Trump has used the government shutdown to intensify the hurt. They could have agreed to extend the enhanced premium tax credits for individual health insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act when they passed all their other tax breaks, but they didn’t. That refusal has led to higher prices for everyone using the ACA Marketplace, because insurers have recognized that big reductions in the tax credits will drive healthier people to drop their insurance, leaving a sicker pool with higher health care costs. That’s what people are seeing since open enrollment started November 1. Congress can still prevent millions of people from losing their insurance or paying drastic increases – but they need to act now.

As for SNAP food assistance, the Trump administration announced it would discontinue SNAP entirely in November if the shutdown continued. In response to lawsuits by states and nonprofits, two courts ordered the administration to pay at least partial benefits, using a contingency reserve set up for this purpose, and made clear that the administration had the authority to transfer additional funds to SNAP, enough to pay full benefits this month. Skilled analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that the Trump response to the court orders has been to make less money available than the courts ordered – resulting in a 60 percent cut of average benefits, instead of CBPP’s estimate that the contingency fund has enough in it to pay for November benefits reduced only by about one-third (35 percent). The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s responded with a revised plan, which still requires complex changes by states that will cause unnecessary delays in distributing the urgently needed funds. (To reiterate – the courts affirmed that USDA can use funds from various sources to pay full benefits in November, but that at minimum, they must fully use the contingency reserve.) 

All this hurt is tangled up in the government shutdown. Your voice is needed to tell your rep and senators that they need to take immediate action to protect their constituents, by voting right away to continue the ACA enhanced premium tax credits, and by demanding that the Trump administration release full November SNAP benefits now. Ending the shutdown without these assurances does not stop the harm. 

You can use the state data assembled from expert sources in CHN’s table to make your case to your rep and senators. For example, if you live in West Virginia, you can say (the columns in the table to find the data are shown): 

Over 273,000 (Column M) of your constituents were receiving SNAP as of last May. We need you to demand that the Trump administration fully funds SNAP in November. Rising food costs have hurt our state. The most recent data (from Sept/Oct 2024) showed that fully 15.5 percent (Column K) of our people said that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous week – that’s 185,520 people (Column N). Losing SNAP would cause serious, needless harm to the people of West Virginia.   

As your constituent, I call upon you to tell your leadership to schedule an immediate vote to extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits. People in West Virginia will see their premiums skyrocket if this level of tax credit is allowed to expire. A 60 year-old couple with an income of $85,000 would see an unaffordable increase of $47,463 (Column D) in their annual premium, up from $7,225 this year. A 3-person family with an income just under $40,000 would see their premium rise from 0 to $1,675 (Column J) if you do not act. More than 67,000 (Column K) West Virginians use the ACA Marketplace for their insurance. With open enrollment underway now, Congress must vote to extend the tax credits so people will be able to afford their premiums and not become uninsured. 

These steps to protect our people from rising health care and food costs must be your top priorities, and you must include enforceable provisions to prevent the Trump administration from refusing to fund programs as legislation passed by Congress requires. I am counting on you to demand that these steps are part of the long-overdue vote to end the government shutdown. 

This is just a sample – use your own words; use other information about your state, or stories about people you know. You can also mention other critical issues – Head Start, home energy assistance through the LIHEAP program, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program, Meals on Wheels – all these and more are facing cuts as the shutdown continues. Federal workers and contractors in your state are going without pay, hurting your state’s economy. All are examples of people in your state struggling to make ends meet, with Congress making it harder each day it fails to act. Tell Congress they need to keep health care prices down and make food affordable now. Write this directly to your members of Congress (to send an email, go to www.house.gov or www.senate.gov – look up your rep and senators; you’ll find the way to email them). Another way to spread the word: send a message like this as a letter to the editor or place an online comment in a local news outlet.

You are needed to add to the growing recognition that these actions must be part of the plan to reopen government. Then Congress should get to work to provide enough funding to meet basic needs and protect us from harm.