Kentucky’s SNAP benefits in danger? Not as important as football or prisons | Opinion
Things are a tad dire around here. The government shut-down is into its third week, which means pretty soon, Gov. Andy Beshear warned, the state won’t have the federal funding it needs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps more than 600,000 Kentuckians buy groceries.
The state recently found funding for a senior meal program, but Kentucky currently is facing a more than $305 million budget shortfall.
Now, you can blame who you want for the government shutdown. Republicans control all three branches of government, so the Democrats are using the shutdown as a maneuver to ward off massive cuts to healthcare.
It’s hard to know what’s going on because the U.S. House of Representatives has been in recess since Sept. 19, a break expected to last until Oct. 26.
No more money for SNAP seems dire because one in eight Kentuckians currently gets help from it. Not to mention the millions of dollars it injects into local economies through grocery stores where people actually buy this food.
Make no mistake: It would have a very ominous ripple effect on employment and on local agriculture.
Are the folks we elected to go to Washington worried? Not especially.
Sen. Mitch McConnell is making sure our army bases can still hold high school football games, and Rep. Hal Rogers, who represents a vast swath of folks facing SNAP benefit losses, is currently much more concerned that his memorial prison won’t be built in Letcher County.
As Herald-Leader reporter Austin Horn pointed out, building prisons is a favorite pastime for Rogers, currently the longest serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As Austin pointed out:
“Federal prisons in Clay, Martin and McCreary counties have all been built on Rogers’ watch, and have been billed as a way to bring jobs and stem population loss,” Horn wrote. “That conclusion is contested by a report from the progressive-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, which found that neither poverty rates nor median incomes improve in counties that built prisons.
That’s why, in the wake of the coal industry’s downturn, so many of Rogers’ constituents depend on both SNAP and Medicaid, which will also see enormous cuts under Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which Rogers supported. Medicaid covers roughly one in three Kentuckians, but that percentage climbs to 44 percent when it comes to Rogers’ 5th District.
Democrats have said they will not relent on the shutdown until Republicans agree to stop the cuts to the ACA tax credits, which according to Kentucky Health News, would affect more than 100,000 Kentuckians who get their health coverage through Kynect, the state’s ACA marketplace. Without the subsidies, those people will face huge increases in their insurance plans, starting as soon as open enrollment begins on Nov. 1.
“What ties this all together is the cost of living crisis that people are increasingly facing ... grocery costs and health care costs are at the center of it,” said Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. “Congress can easily prevent additional burdens in both areas.”
Some Kentucky GOP legislators urged Beshear to fund a senior meal program, which had been cut. He did, but warned about the state’s $300 million budget shortfall, and problems ahead.
Rogers accused Democrats of wanting $1.5 trillion in free health care for illegal immigrants. This, needless to say, is a lie, but it doesn’t change the fact that this argument has turned into a very high stakes stalemate.
There has to be a better way to run a government than playing chicken when real people’s lives are on the line.
This story was originally published October 22, 2025 at 4:42 AM.
