Amid the everyday chaos coming out of Washington, D.C., the policies of the current administration are being felt locally, and the impacts, much like the Trump tariffs, are bringing uncertainty and fear.
Start with health care. The budgets for Santa Cruz County and for local health providers are uncertain, at best, as the administration and DOGE consider reducing funding for Medicaid and other programs.
Estimates from local providers are that one-third of Santa Cruz County residents, or nearly 90,000 people, are beneficiaries of Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid implementation program.
They warn if the program is destabilized, it will have far-reaching impacts on the local health care system, such as overwhelmed emergency departments. Cuts to the program would land particularly hard on providers such as Watsonville Community Hospital, where a high proportion of patients are enrolled in Medi-Cal.
Then there’s a cutoff of food supplies to Second Harvest Food Bank Santa Cruz County.
The local nonprofit’s CEO Erica Padilla-Chavez reported the food bank was missing about 177,000 pounds of food derived from the emergency food assistance program — food that would have amounted to about 1 million meals in the community.
Padilla-Chavez told the Sentinel it was unclear if the deliveries were delayed or canceled, but in either case “the food is not making its way to the food bank.” She added Second Harvest was not notified that their orders had been impacted and discovered the missing food only after checking the program’s website and saw that the shipments had been labeled as “returned.”
Why?
Because three key federal programs that had been keeping food banks stocked have either been canceled or frozen.
The Trump administration has discontinued the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools cooperative agreements and frozen the Emergency Food Assistance Program.
This latest DOGE-inspired outrage has led a delegation of 45 federal lawmakers from California, spearheaded by Rep. Jimmy Panetta, to demand in a March 28 letter that a cabinet-level official in the new federal administration reestablish the flow of food to local distribution nonprofits.
The members wrote that 49 food banks in all 58 counties across the state have seen more than 300 food loads paused or canceled, including Second Harvest Santa Cruz County.
According to the legislators’ letter, the administration’s backtracking on the three federal programs threatens the livelihoods of more than 600 California farmers and jeopardizes food assistance for more than 6 million Californians.
Will the administration, including Musk, listen to Democrats’ pleas?
Since they don’t even listen to legislators in their own party about the havoc being wreaked by Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, the answer, for now, is obvious.
As bad as these actions are, there’s also the impacts upon science, including weather forecasters, marine scientists, public health professionals and medical researchers.
Draconian cuts by the Trump/Musk team to research funding led nearly 2,000 prominent American scientists, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners, to put out an open letter containing a stark warning that the U.S. lead in science is being “decimated” by the cuts to research and a growing “climate of fear” that jeopardizes independent research.
The letter from members of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said, “Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.”
We’re at least somewhat encouraged legislators and scientists are speaking out forcefully — and that increasingly, many Americans are protesting policies starting to hit home.
