Katy for Kansas
June 8, 2026 · Newsletter
We Grow the Food. Why Can’t We Feed Our Kids?
Kansas is an agricultural state. We grow wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, and cattle. We feed the country and we used to help feed the world—before the Trump Administration threw USAID’s Food for Peace program out the window alongside a complicit Congress. Yet one in seven Kansas children lives in a food-insecure household. One in seven.
Moreover, last year amid rising prices across the board due to Trump’s tariffs, Congress decided it was the right time to cut food assistance. Rep. Ron Estes voted for that bill and Kansans are paying the price.
Let’s start with SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In February of this year, according to the nonprofit Hunger Free America, 170,894 Kansans relied on SNAP to help put food on the table. The average benefit worked out to about $2.05 per meal. Two dollars and five cents. Think about your last trip to the grocery store. Think about what two dollars buys today.
I am so tired of Republicans in power painting SNAP recipients as people living lavishly on government benefits. They’re working families, seniors on fixed incomes, veterans, people with disabilities, parents trying to stretch a paycheck to the end of the month, and children who had no say in the circumstances they were born into. And don’t get me started on the fact that the formula used to calculate the poverty threshold needed to qualify for these benefits hasn’t been updated since the 1960s—that’s a topic for a whole other article.
Under the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that Ron Estes supported, future SNAP benefits would no longer automatically adjust in the same way to keep pace with rising food costs. At a time when families are already feeling squeezed, Washington’s answer is to make that squeeze even tighter.
Equally as troubling as the SNAP cuts is the fact that now lawmakers are targeting the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Children (the WIC program). More than 47,000 pregnant women, infants, and children under five in Kansas participate in WIC. If you’re not familiar with WIC, it’s one of the most successful public health programs we’ve ever created. It improves maternal health and birth outcomes. It helps ensure that young children receive proper nutrition during the most important years of their development.
The House Republican agriculture appropriations bill would eliminate the fruit and vegetable benefit on which these families rely. So many of the folks who claim to want to “Make America Healthy Again” are the same folks who want to take fresh fruits and vegetables away from pregnant mothers, babies, and young children who can’t afford them on their own.
This is where I struggle. For years, many of the politicians supporting these cuts have described themselves as fiercely pro-life. They speak passionately about protecting children and campaign on family values. Yet when faced with a choice about whether pregnant women and young children should have access to healthy food, they voted to take that support away. The hypocrisy isn’t lost on me.
Maybe some people will argue that these cuts are necessary to reduce spending. If that’s the argument, then let’s have an honest conversation about it. But let’s also be honest about what we’re talking about cutting. We’re talking about healthy food for pregnant mothers and young children. We’re talking about whether families already struggling should have a little help putting groceries on the table in a state where food insecurity remains stubbornly high despite the fact that we produce more food than most places on Earth.
That’s not common sense. It’s cruel. And Kansans deserve better.
I can’t promise to fix everything that’s broken in Washington. But I can promise this: I’ll never vote to make life harder for Kansans who are already struggling to make ends meet.