Can I Be Frank? is a thought leadership and community engagement platform authored by HALA’s Executive Director, drawing on more than 20 years of experience advancing food justice initiatives. The platform is designed to elevate community-informed perspectives, document lessons learned from long-term systems change work, and strengthen public understanding of food equity challenges and solutions.

Through reflective analysis and mission-aligned storytelling, this initiative supports HALA’s broader goals of increasing access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food, fostering community leadership, and promoting equitable food systems. The blog serves as both an educational resource and a tool for stakeholder engagement, encouraging civic participation, volunteerism, and philanthropic investment in community-led food access strategies.

Here is Frank Tamborello’s First Entry: 

Happy New Year 2026.

One would be forgiven for not realizing that it’s a new year at all; in many ways it’s such an extension of the shitstorm that began with the inauguration of Trump that there’s been no sense of any transition to a new year much less a reason to celebrate.

In the realm of ending hunger there are certainly dark clouds on the horizon as the United States begins the process of unraveling it’s safety net supports for hungry residents, a system that is remarkable in it’s innovative possibilities, it’s universal scope, and it’s use of the private sector to distribute the actual food benefits.

This is happening simultaneously with new recommendations for diet that certainly can’t be achieved without an adequate income or reliable source of food.

Ever since the modern SNAP program began as Food Stamps, becoming nationwide only in 1977, there have been vigorous attempts by those philosophically and fundamentally opposed to the idea of giving people a hand with their grocery bill to either dismantle the program altogether or to make the process of receiving benefits so burdensome that people will just give up.

This was in spite of the fact that the program originally had bipartisan support, with Senator Bob Dole being one of it’s strongest boosters in the early days (coming as he did from the farm state of Kansas.)

President Reagan made some notorious cuts in the 1980s. The welfare reform bill passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, with his re-election looming, removed huge numbers of legally present immigrants from the rolls, as well as instituting work requirements for jobless, childless adults.

The work requirements are a perfect example of moving the goal posts so that compliance was almost impossible. Participants had to work 20 hours per week or be in 20 hours of certified volunteer activity, and could receive benefits for a maximum of three months of any 36-month (3-year) period in which they didn’t comply with those requirements. This meant for example that someone newly unemployed and in need of food could apply for benefits and if they didn’t have at least a part time job within 90 days would have to go the remainder of 3 years with no ability to get food stamps. Anyone who has been fired or laid off from a job that just barely paid the rent knows that it may take more than 3 months to acquire even part time work.

Even with our country becoming identified as a collection of “red” and “blue” states beginning around 2004 (with the Bush-Kerry election campaign), state governments recognized that this restriction wasn’t helpful in mitigating the hunger that they knew existed even if it was politically unviable to talk about it publicly. A series of state-optional exemptions and waivers were instituted that ensured, in many states, that the population of jobless childless adults (age 18 to 50) were still able to access food aid.

President George W. Bush himself actually passed legislation that restored eligibility for food stamps to many of the immigrants cut off in 1996. However as the country became more divided, the dismantling of the safety net became once again a priority.

The Trump administration had proposed a re-invigorating of the work requirement rules, with a token period of time for public comment to support or oppose. These new requirements were on the verge of implementation when the COVID pandemic swept in. Panicked at the effects on the economy, Republicans and Democrats alike voted to suspend all kinds of regulations in public benefit programs in 2020.

Donald Trump on the campaign trail repeatedly denied any connection to Project 25, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for essentially a Cultural Revolution in the United States. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill HR1 that passed last summer expanded the work requirements in SNAP to include people with children over the age of 14, and severely limited the ability of states to pass exemptions and waivers from the work requirements.Those are the rules that will begin to see people cut off from the program here in California beginning around the first of April. The notice that your food benefits will be cut will be no April Fool’s joke for thousands of families here.

Thousands of humanitarian refugees will be removed from the program as well. And in addition to the food program cuts, many of the same participants will be dropped from Medi-Cal health insurance which will have similar work requirements.

But it doesn’t stop there. Some of the most costly cuts to the program will come not in human terms but in financial terms for the states that will hobble their ability to administer the program and create a strong disincentive to the idea of stepping in with state funds to restore lost benefits.

These include:

• Especially for people with incomes that fluctuate month to month or sudden changes in housing or utilities costs that may go unreported by the participant, cases may have to be adjusted constantly, much to the frustration of participants who find that they’ve been “overpaid” and must repay the benefits.

• If states’ error rates are too high, the federal government will require that the state pay ALL of the costs of the entire state’s SNAP benefits for participants, which in the case of California would be at least $2 billion.

How does our state cover the losses from federal cuts and at the same time create or sustain additional improvements to the programs, while dealing with a budget deficit?

The rosiest budget scenarios depend on the continued business investments in AI and other technologies that won’t in fact lead to an improved employment situation. If AI is in fact a “bubble” destined to pop soon that could spell further trouble for the California economy, and thus also revenue and programs.  With all of this arrayed against us we may be tempted into total despair. But we owe it to ourselves and future generations to fight, using not just courage and determination but creative thinking:

• New revenue streams including the proposed billionaires tax, although that tax has already seen some of the wealthiest flee the state and even the Governor is opposed to it (see LA Times article Commentary: California made them rich. Now billionaires flee when the state asks for a little something back.)
  • From that article though we glean the following point---although the actual amounts of the tax sound high, as a percentage of income the billionaires would pay less than the poorest of California families:
  • “According to the California Budget & Policy Center, the bottom fifth of California’s non-elderly families, with an average annual income of $13,900, spend an estimated 10.5% of their incomes on state and local taxes. In comparison, the wealthiest 1% of families, with an average annual income of $2.0 million, spend an estimated 8.7% of their incomes on state and local taxes.
  • "It’s a matter of values,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) posted on X. “We believe billionaires can pay a modest wealth tax so working-class Californians have Medicaid.”

(from op-ed by Lorraine Ali, “California made them rich. Now billionaires flee when the state asks for a little something back.”)

• We should not lose sight of the big picture that the causes of hunger are rooted in high housing costs, inadequate wages, and high health insurance premiums. Dealing with those issues will have the ancillary benefits of putting more money in people’s pockets to buy the food they need.
•  California is one of the top agricultural states and absolutely number one in fruits and vegetables. Solutions that support the farm economy while feeding food insecure residents keep money circulating in the state and maintaining or even increasing revenues that can be used for vital programs.
• We should also avail ourselves to potential solutions that are outside the realm of tinkering with the existing programs. While we must as a matter of principle defend the SNAP program as a manifestation of the idea that the government must assist the poorest, we get locked into a box when the federal government has shown such an easy ability to simply stop the benefits from flowing.
• As great as the SNAP program is in it’s ability to reach large numbers of people that we could not dream of feeding strictly through emergency food assistance, trapping ourselves in a mindset that only the federal government can solve this problem may prevent us from thinking creatively about alternative means to handle hunger in the Golden State.