So one thing that often happens when a civic effort settles on “create new entity X” is that the part you mention wherein the right stuff/authority is transferred to that entity is half-assed, leading to a scenario wherein we now just have N+1 dysfunctional institutions. Who do you think are the kinds of people philanthropy needs to enroll in these design efforts - people who understand the operational burden of both “do” and “launch” - to ensure we don’t wind up with Yet Another Task Force, and what IYO is the structure of the philanthropic imperative such that it’s actually set up to succeed (eg realistic timelines, some actual operational load-bearing authority, or other things?)
Personally I don't think it is a "kinds of people" problem. You need to cut the budget of the more dysfunctional institutions and transfer that budget to the more functional ones.
You will never be able to control things in advance so intelligently that you prevent a group of people from becoming dysfunctional. What you can do is have a system that tends to allocate money in the more-functional direction over time.
I'm in the middle of reading The Science Of Second Chances, and I'm struck by the addition of meaningless piddly reporting requirements for parole, which don't make anybody safer, make it more difficult and more expensive for parole staff, and cause people to go back to jail a lot more, which leads to them doing more crimes anyway.
I think when we feel out of control, there's an urge to add process to make it feel more under control. Like the way you wind up in a situation where CAHSR has had literally dozens of audits performed, and the solution everyone comes up with to fix the spiraling costs is to do more audits, because they imagine that a man in a domino mask and striped shirt is running off with all the money, and they just have to find him.
I couldn’t agree more that our administrative processes and state need change to provide less expensive and better services. What exactly do you mean by philanthropies going upstream. Can you explain and provide an example? Also, which national political figures do you believe understand this and are already working on the ways to do this? Thank you.
I looked a bit into philanthropy opportunities around providing food, here in the Oakland area, and I ended up somewhat frustrated. It seems like basically all of the "food bank" type organizations have more money than they are capable of usefully spending on providing food to the hungry. So they branch out into funding other causes. Which, I'm sure many of those causes are great, but it also doesn't really make sense to donate to a charity that is going to use your money to fund something else entirely.
So I'm actually not sure, on the margin, how much are food stamps actually enabling people to buy food? Or are they essentially equivalent to a cash transfer with some hoops to jump through on the part of the recipient.
Another way to look at it is, to put it bluntly, Americans of all social classes suffer more from obesity than from undernourishment. If we cut food stamp programs would that actually make Americans less healthy?
I don't know, food stamps as a program made a lot of sense in the 1960's, but it isn't obvious to me that it is still having a positive impact today, when chronic undernutrition is no longer a large public health problem.
I think you misunderstand what such a program does. Everyone needs food. Food costs money. People are not necessarily buying less.food if they are not part of SNAP. They are just spending a larger proportion of their income on food than on other necessities.
Maybe, but the point I was making is that eliminating SNAP is not going to have an impact on obesity. The problem it's trying to address is poverty, not healthy diets.
This part is the most chilling: “the reality is that many Americans voted for leaders they knew were willing to gut the system, and I can’t help but think that says something about how it was working for them.”
What’s working for them is their lack of imagination (and empathy, of course) on what it could possibly be like to live a life that’s different from their own, safe and secure one.
I’ve seen it in my own immediate family (so many times over.) My senior, disabled mother on food stamps and her son not supporting the program because of “fraud”. He’s fortunate enough to have room in his budget to cook my mom meals and thinks that should he enough. My father-in-law thinks the church food pantry he volunteers at should be enough.
Oh gosh, what a great piece! I agree that protecting SNAP as an institution can’t become more important than protecting people’s ability to eat, and that philanthropy can’t fill holes at government scale. But: I keep getting stuck on who gets to design the replacement.
Systems tend to work for the people with the authority to define the problem, write the rules, and decide what counts as failure.
If government leaders and systems are actively unwilling to meet Ameican's basic humanitarian needs, I'm not sure a clean-slate institution is necessarily more humane. It might simply make it easier to encode a narrower public obligation going forward.
So the work can’t just be better institutional design. It also has to include durable public guarantees, a level of institutional power for recipients, meaningful appeals processes that produce accountability, and a constituency capable of defending the system when political leadership becomes hostile.
How do we build something adaptive without making people’s survival depend on the goodwill of whoever temporarily holds the pen?
Jen, hope you're well! 👋 I'm curious if there's a tradition you think this approach fits within? You probably remember how frequently I tried to re-situate CfA within a good governance tradition and I wonder if this is or could draw from that too.
I’m lost on the “lean in” piece here. This policy is going to stop lots of people from getting benefits for the next 3 years in all likelihood and anything that could be rolled back by a Dem Congress would be limited to smaller changes. So what is anyone supposed to “lean in” on? Also, you’re proposing a politics that’s driven by elite philanthropy and non profit advocacy to government, not “democratic” reform. I wonder how that squares with your claims around people voting for reform. And finally I don’t think you can say as cleanly as you claim that people “voted for this.” No one except a conman likes the idea of fraud. But most people also don’t like kids going hungry. Most people who voted to end the fraud didn’t vote to
Make kids go hungry. The fact that politicians lied about how this would all work and who it would hurt and help isn’t an argument for “leaning in.” If you’re about providing better government services, be about that.
More than 685,000 people in Florida lost federal food assistance over the past year. Enrollment dropped by roughly 23%, falling from nearly 2.97 million participants in June 2025 to about 2.28 million by June 2026, according to state data tracked by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (And, for the very food-secure, Free Florida has 1,000-year trust funds to avoid paying taxes.)
Subsidiarity works, and that's an American institution we should lean in to. One of our States (probably about as populous, definitely as rich, as the UK) could implement a direct cash replacement. Or could they? What federal laws (regulations?) could we change to allow a State to lump SNAP and TANF and Section 8 and Disability into one replacement program?
I want to mention another example of costs being shifted to the state, which is, perhaps, more niche, but I happen to know someone working on this in Washington State.
As I understand it, one of the provisions in HR1 limits the ability of non-citizens to qualify for Medicaid, ending eligibility for some categories of lawfully present immigrants, including asylees, refugees, and survivors of domestic violence and trafficking.
In Washington state there are around 15,000 people affected by that. Of those around 1,300 are currently receiving long-term care, meaning that they need assistance with daily living (either at home or in a nursing facility).
The Washington state legislature budgets money to continue care for most of those people. However, that budget was made with the expectation that people would lose coverage in a rolling process. Eligibility is normally reassessed annually and the expectation was that the new rule would apply when that reassessment happened. However, current federal guidelines say that all of them should lose coverage on October 1st, so the money budgeted for the current fiscal year will only cover around 10% of the population.
The remaining people don't have many options unless they can get a green card between now and October 1st, they will lose life-sustaining support on October 1st.
Some of them are being moved to hospice care. For others, what may happen in many cases is that when they have a health crises they will go to the Emergency Room, which is required to admit them and provide care.
Hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients unless they have a safe place to go for recovery. Without long term care, there may not be a way to discharge them.
The grim line I have heard is that people should avoid going to the hospitals in October or November because they may be overwhelmed dealing with the results of this.
I don't know how other states are covering those long-term-care needs, but I suspect this will be a problem nationally.
In theory that need could be handled by a variety of state programs and philanthropy but, in practice, having a sudden cutoff on October 1st for people currently receiving care is going to be horrifying.
Changing institutions, processes, policies and incentives is the only path to real change. The same is true for K12 education - address the embedded pathologies or the disease never goes away - like the inability to fire bad teachers and pension accounting that steals from the future and would make an Enron accountant blush.
I share the frustration with the terribly administered programs, and the wish that we could build something better. But I am frustrated that many of these situations result in cuts at the federal level, followed by (often highly inefficient albeit well-intended) efforts to mitigate at the state level. But we have 50 states and a constitutional right to travel, so devolving all this to the state level seems to me to create perverse incentives. I think it would be great if different states could try different models out and see what works, but the funding needs to be done at the federal level so that everyone shares the responsibility to help feed hungry Americans. The UK does not have that issue. (Or, we need to be allowed to keep more of our federal tax dollars in-state.)
The smallest state in the USA in population, Wyoming, has a population of 588,753, which is similar to and larger than the smallest member state of the EU in population, Malta (at 574,300). And yet most policies, including healthcare is done at the member state level even in the Schengen Area which every EU member state except Cyprus and Ireland are a part of.
Yes this creates "perverse incentives" for people to simply move to other states, or for some states to not pass policy as quickly or as thoroughly as others (or at all)- that is how a basic free market works. The EU has the same incentives for most national policies, yet it has not caused a collapse of their welfare state.
I would say in fact that 90% of the current political issues of the US, including the terrible administration of its public programs, are the result of too much power centralized in a federal government lording over the 3rd largest population in the world at over 340 million, that is uniquely distrustful of such strong central government.
Disagree, subsidiarity works. Why is the Leviathan of our federal government trying to feed people? This should be a state responsibility, like education. Ex California has the highest functional poverty rate in the U.S. - tied with Louisiana. This is not because it is a poor state, rather because the state tax and regulatory regime raises costs to exorbitant levels and immiserates a material part of the population. Why should the federal government pay to effectively subsidize bad governance?
Because a lot of states are poor, and making it so poor states have to spend more on these social programs makes the problem worse?
And to be clear, food isn't that much more expensive in California. California has stupid housing policy, which makes the cost of living incredibly high there. This is an argument against the government providing section 8 factors to subsidize barnacle-ass landlords there. It's not an argument for localizing food stamps.
So one thing that often happens when a civic effort settles on “create new entity X” is that the part you mention wherein the right stuff/authority is transferred to that entity is half-assed, leading to a scenario wherein we now just have N+1 dysfunctional institutions. Who do you think are the kinds of people philanthropy needs to enroll in these design efforts - people who understand the operational burden of both “do” and “launch” - to ensure we don’t wind up with Yet Another Task Force, and what IYO is the structure of the philanthropic imperative such that it’s actually set up to succeed (eg realistic timelines, some actual operational load-bearing authority, or other things?)
Personally I don't think it is a "kinds of people" problem. You need to cut the budget of the more dysfunctional institutions and transfer that budget to the more functional ones.
You will never be able to control things in advance so intelligently that you prevent a group of people from becoming dysfunctional. What you can do is have a system that tends to allocate money in the more-functional direction over time.
Great points... Highlights the need for deeper structural solutions like an article five constitutional convention
I'm in the middle of reading The Science Of Second Chances, and I'm struck by the addition of meaningless piddly reporting requirements for parole, which don't make anybody safer, make it more difficult and more expensive for parole staff, and cause people to go back to jail a lot more, which leads to them doing more crimes anyway.
I think when we feel out of control, there's an urge to add process to make it feel more under control. Like the way you wind up in a situation where CAHSR has had literally dozens of audits performed, and the solution everyone comes up with to fix the spiraling costs is to do more audits, because they imagine that a man in a domino mask and striped shirt is running off with all the money, and they just have to find him.
I couldn’t agree more that our administrative processes and state need change to provide less expensive and better services. What exactly do you mean by philanthropies going upstream. Can you explain and provide an example? Also, which national political figures do you believe understand this and are already working on the ways to do this? Thank you.
By going upstream, I mean philanthropy should support advocacy efforts to reform government, not just try to make up for the losses in government programs. See https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/philanthropys-willie-sutton-problem
I looked a bit into philanthropy opportunities around providing food, here in the Oakland area, and I ended up somewhat frustrated. It seems like basically all of the "food bank" type organizations have more money than they are capable of usefully spending on providing food to the hungry. So they branch out into funding other causes. Which, I'm sure many of those causes are great, but it also doesn't really make sense to donate to a charity that is going to use your money to fund something else entirely.
So I'm actually not sure, on the margin, how much are food stamps actually enabling people to buy food? Or are they essentially equivalent to a cash transfer with some hoops to jump through on the part of the recipient.
Another way to look at it is, to put it bluntly, Americans of all social classes suffer more from obesity than from undernourishment. If we cut food stamp programs would that actually make Americans less healthy?
I don't know, food stamps as a program made a lot of sense in the 1960's, but it isn't obvious to me that it is still having a positive impact today, when chronic undernutrition is no longer a large public health problem.
I think you misunderstand what such a program does. Everyone needs food. Food costs money. People are not necessarily buying less.food if they are not part of SNAP. They are just spending a larger proportion of their income on food than on other necessities.
If SNAP has the same effect as just giving people money, then it's an inefficient program, and we should get rid of it.
Maybe, but the point I was making is that eliminating SNAP is not going to have an impact on obesity. The problem it's trying to address is poverty, not healthy diets.
This part is the most chilling: “the reality is that many Americans voted for leaders they knew were willing to gut the system, and I can’t help but think that says something about how it was working for them.”
What’s working for them is their lack of imagination (and empathy, of course) on what it could possibly be like to live a life that’s different from their own, safe and secure one.
I’ve seen it in my own immediate family (so many times over.) My senior, disabled mother on food stamps and her son not supporting the program because of “fraud”. He’s fortunate enough to have room in his budget to cook my mom meals and thinks that should he enough. My father-in-law thinks the church food pantry he volunteers at should be enough.
Oh gosh, what a great piece! I agree that protecting SNAP as an institution can’t become more important than protecting people’s ability to eat, and that philanthropy can’t fill holes at government scale. But: I keep getting stuck on who gets to design the replacement.
Systems tend to work for the people with the authority to define the problem, write the rules, and decide what counts as failure.
If government leaders and systems are actively unwilling to meet Ameican's basic humanitarian needs, I'm not sure a clean-slate institution is necessarily more humane. It might simply make it easier to encode a narrower public obligation going forward.
So the work can’t just be better institutional design. It also has to include durable public guarantees, a level of institutional power for recipients, meaningful appeals processes that produce accountability, and a constituency capable of defending the system when political leadership becomes hostile.
How do we build something adaptive without making people’s survival depend on the goodwill of whoever temporarily holds the pen?
Jen, hope you're well! 👋 I'm curious if there's a tradition you think this approach fits within? You probably remember how frequently I tried to re-situate CfA within a good governance tradition and I wonder if this is or could draw from that too.
Also, some of your working through the problems makes me think of this piece: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-swallow-frogs
I’m lost on the “lean in” piece here. This policy is going to stop lots of people from getting benefits for the next 3 years in all likelihood and anything that could be rolled back by a Dem Congress would be limited to smaller changes. So what is anyone supposed to “lean in” on? Also, you’re proposing a politics that’s driven by elite philanthropy and non profit advocacy to government, not “democratic” reform. I wonder how that squares with your claims around people voting for reform. And finally I don’t think you can say as cleanly as you claim that people “voted for this.” No one except a conman likes the idea of fraud. But most people also don’t like kids going hungry. Most people who voted to end the fraud didn’t vote to
Make kids go hungry. The fact that politicians lied about how this would all work and who it would hurt and help isn’t an argument for “leaning in.” If you’re about providing better government services, be about that.
More than 685,000 people in Florida lost federal food assistance over the past year. Enrollment dropped by roughly 23%, falling from nearly 2.97 million participants in June 2025 to about 2.28 million by June 2026, according to state data tracked by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (And, for the very food-secure, Free Florida has 1,000-year trust funds to avoid paying taxes.)
Subsidiarity works, and that's an American institution we should lean in to. One of our States (probably about as populous, definitely as rich, as the UK) could implement a direct cash replacement. Or could they? What federal laws (regulations?) could we change to allow a State to lump SNAP and TANF and Section 8 and Disability into one replacement program?
I want to mention another example of costs being shifted to the state, which is, perhaps, more niche, but I happen to know someone working on this in Washington State.
As I understand it, one of the provisions in HR1 limits the ability of non-citizens to qualify for Medicaid, ending eligibility for some categories of lawfully present immigrants, including asylees, refugees, and survivors of domestic violence and trafficking.
In Washington state there are around 15,000 people affected by that. Of those around 1,300 are currently receiving long-term care, meaning that they need assistance with daily living (either at home or in a nursing facility).
The Washington state legislature budgets money to continue care for most of those people. However, that budget was made with the expectation that people would lose coverage in a rolling process. Eligibility is normally reassessed annually and the expectation was that the new rule would apply when that reassessment happened. However, current federal guidelines say that all of them should lose coverage on October 1st, so the money budgeted for the current fiscal year will only cover around 10% of the population.
The remaining people don't have many options unless they can get a green card between now and October 1st, they will lose life-sustaining support on October 1st.
Some of them are being moved to hospice care. For others, what may happen in many cases is that when they have a health crises they will go to the Emergency Room, which is required to admit them and provide care.
Hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients unless they have a safe place to go for recovery. Without long term care, there may not be a way to discharge them.
The grim line I have heard is that people should avoid going to the hospitals in October or November because they may be overwhelmed dealing with the results of this.
I don't know how other states are covering those long-term-care needs, but I suspect this will be a problem nationally.
In theory that need could be handled by a variety of state programs and philanthropy but, in practice, having a sudden cutoff on October 1st for people currently receiving care is going to be horrifying.
“Philanthropy needs to go upstream.” 💯🎯
Changing institutions, processes, policies and incentives is the only path to real change. The same is true for K12 education - address the embedded pathologies or the disease never goes away - like the inability to fire bad teachers and pension accounting that steals from the future and would make an Enron accountant blush.
I share the frustration with the terribly administered programs, and the wish that we could build something better. But I am frustrated that many of these situations result in cuts at the federal level, followed by (often highly inefficient albeit well-intended) efforts to mitigate at the state level. But we have 50 states and a constitutional right to travel, so devolving all this to the state level seems to me to create perverse incentives. I think it would be great if different states could try different models out and see what works, but the funding needs to be done at the federal level so that everyone shares the responsibility to help feed hungry Americans. The UK does not have that issue. (Or, we need to be allowed to keep more of our federal tax dollars in-state.)
The smallest state in the USA in population, Wyoming, has a population of 588,753, which is similar to and larger than the smallest member state of the EU in population, Malta (at 574,300). And yet most policies, including healthcare is done at the member state level even in the Schengen Area which every EU member state except Cyprus and Ireland are a part of.
Yes this creates "perverse incentives" for people to simply move to other states, or for some states to not pass policy as quickly or as thoroughly as others (or at all)- that is how a basic free market works. The EU has the same incentives for most national policies, yet it has not caused a collapse of their welfare state.
I would say in fact that 90% of the current political issues of the US, including the terrible administration of its public programs, are the result of too much power centralized in a federal government lording over the 3rd largest population in the world at over 340 million, that is uniquely distrustful of such strong central government.
Disagree, subsidiarity works. Why is the Leviathan of our federal government trying to feed people? This should be a state responsibility, like education. Ex California has the highest functional poverty rate in the U.S. - tied with Louisiana. This is not because it is a poor state, rather because the state tax and regulatory regime raises costs to exorbitant levels and immiserates a material part of the population. Why should the federal government pay to effectively subsidize bad governance?
Because a lot of states are poor, and making it so poor states have to spend more on these social programs makes the problem worse?
And to be clear, food isn't that much more expensive in California. California has stupid housing policy, which makes the cost of living incredibly high there. This is an argument against the government providing section 8 factors to subsidize barnacle-ass landlords there. It's not an argument for localizing food stamps.