As Oregon lawmakers stare down a deficit of at least $373 million over the next two years they asked all state agencies to create lists of ways to cut 5% of their legislatively approved budgets.
The Trump administration has instructed states that authorized full November nutrition assistance benefits to return a portion, another unprecedented reversal for a program that helps 42 million people afford groceries. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said her state will not comply.
The Washington County Board of Commissioners voted to declare two separate states of emergency in response to federal actions, one over food insecurity and the other over a sharp increase in ICE activity in the county.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will pay about half of November benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, though benefits could take months to flow to recipients, the department said Monday in a brief to a federal court in Rhode Island.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek on Wednesday declared a state of emergency over hunger and directed $5 million to food banks across the state, seeking to avert the impending November loss of food stamp benefits for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians under the federal government’s ongoing shutdown.
Federal funding for SNAP will run out Nov. 1 if the federal government remains shut down, leaving more than 757,000 Oregonians without the support they rely on to buy groceries.
The one in six Oregonians who rely on federal SNAP food and nutrition assistance to pay for groceries each month will be left with nothing in November due to the ongoing government shutdown, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Department of Human Services.
After Judge Karin Immergut’s Saturday order preventing mobilization of the Oregon National Guard, the federal government ordered first California and then Texas troops to Portland.
A recent rulemaking process from the Department of Land and Conservation Development could have limited what can be sold at farm stands, but an outsized public response to the potential rules put the process on an indefinite pause.
