This July 4th wasn’t just the 250th birthday of the United States. It was also the one-year anniversary of the signing of House Resolution 1, aka the Big Brutal Bill, which will cut hundreds of billions of dollars from basic food assistance and health care to provide yet more tax cuts for the very wealthy and pour more money into repression.
Cuts to health care alone have been estimated by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania to cause 51,000 premature deaths each year when fully implemented due to disenrollments from Medicaid and Medicare, rolling back nursing home staffing rules, and cuts to premium benefits from the Affordable Care Act.
According to the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform, around 700 rural hospitals—one third of the total—are at risk of closing. For around 300, the risk is immediate.
The damage is only beginning but will get much worse over the next several years. It’s a gift that keeps on taking.
The most immediate damage is from people losing SNAP food assistance. More than 4 million have lost benefits since Big Brutal was signed. In 12 states with available data, 700,000 of those who lost food aid were children as of May 2026. The total number is anyone’s guess. SNAP changes may also reduce the eligibility of kids from low-income families to access free school meals or summer benefits.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates the SNAP rolls in West Virginia have declined by 5.3 percent or around 15,000 individuals between the bill signing and March 2026. That’s more than the entire population of Tucker and Pocahontas counties. And these are just the beginning of sorrows.
Another threat to food security in West Virginia caused by the bill is the cost shift to states based on SNAP error rates with error rates of over- or underpayments over 6 percent. In 2025, our error rate was 6.69 percent, better than the U.S. average of 10.62 percent but still enough to cost the state around $30 million, assuming the governor and the legislature have the political will to make up the difference.
(I’m not sure I’d bet the farm on that happening.)
There is one thing that our congressional delegation, which unanimously voted for the bill, can do to reduce at least some of the harm by way of the federal Farm Bill, which is now being considered in the Senate. It’s pretty simple: give states more time to bring down error rates to avoid hits to state budgets and/or making more people hungry. And our senators could make that happen.
SNAP benefits are not generous and never have been. In West Virginia, they amount to less than $6 per person per day, around the cost of a happy meal from McDonalds. But they are a lifeline for over 270,000 West Virginians or more than one out of six of us. And they help support local jobs, businesses, and farms all over the state.
I hope that matters this time around.
This piece was originally published by the Charleston Gazette-Mail on July 8, 2026.