Rural Communities

In the dead of night, House Republicans forced a vote on Trump’s horrifying Big Billionaire Handout budget along party lines. The budget will have massive impacts for rural Americans, just to make us pay for another giveaway to billionaire elites.

This bill will increase costs for rural American families by thousands a year. Let’s take a look at how this is going to make life more difficult for our communities—only to give away our hard-earned dollars to the ultrawealthy:

1. Upward of 40 percent of rural children across the country get healthcare from Medicaid. This bill plans to cut access to those programs, leaving millions of Americans and their children without healthcare while cutting critical funding for rural hospitals and clinics, which could force them to close their doors or reduce services.
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will make healthcare more unaffordable for millions while also making it harder for people in rural communities to find healthcare.
    
2. More than 15 percent of families in rural and small-town America rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but this bill includes more than $300 billion in cuts to SNAP, leaving millions of Americans without food.
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will make food even more unaffordable while prices for groceries are already skyrocketing because of his tariffs.
    
3. Our local governments rely on federal funding to help provide things like healthcare, transportation, postal services, and fire and emergency medical services, but this bill will cut that funding, making it even harder for rural and small-town America to receive these services.
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will make rural communities harder to reach and less safe.
    
4. Our local public schools are the hubs of rural communities, but this bill would divert crucial funds away from students in public schools to pay for private school tuition vouchers, even though these schools are far away and hard to reach for most of the kids in our communities. 
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will create a federal voucher program, giving millions of public school dollars to private schools that don’t serve our kids.
    
5. Rural communities are being revitalized across the country because of billion-dollar investments in things like manufacturing and clean energy production, but this bill will stop all those investments and increase our energy costs by more than 7 percent.
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will take money and jobs out of our communities and increase our utility costs.
    
6. Small and family-owned farms and ranches are already struggling because of Trump’s tariffs and corporate greed, but rather than supporting our farmers and ranchers, this bill is just another handout to big, corporate farms, with no plan to pass a Farm Bill. 
   
   Trump’s Big Billionaire Handout will force more farmers and ranchers to lose their livelihoods so Republicans can prop up agribusiness and big, corporate farms.