Kansas will give the federal government personal data for hundreds of thousands of food assistance recipients after spending months fighting the release of the data. 

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked Kansas for the names, birthdays, personal addresses and Social Security numbers of Kansans who have received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits since Jan. 1, 2020. 

The federal government said the data will help it find waste and fraud and ensure only eligible Kansans are getting the money. 

Gov. Laura Kelly originally refused to hand over the data, saying the state couldn’t legally hand it over. Now, the state has agreed to give the personal data, saying it got additional privacy protections. 

At first, Kelly’s administration was worried that data would be used to create one large database of residents and that the information would be used for other reasons not involved with food assistance — like checking people’s immigration status. 

They have now been told that the SNAP data will only be used for the SNAP program. It previously seemed that Kansas wouldn’t hand out any data until a lawsuit challenging the request was finished. 

Laura Howard, secretary for the Kansas Department for Children and Families, previously said that releasing the information before the lawsuit was final could open Kansas to lawsuits. 

“I honestly believe that if I were to release that data, then the courts find in favor of the states, then I’m putting the state at liability for releasing the personal information of more than 700,000 Kansans,” Howard told the Kansas Reflector.  

About 187,000 Kansans — roughly 6% of the state’s population — currently receive SNAP benefits. The federal government is seeking information on people who received those over a six-year period.

The lawsuit challenging the request is ongoing, and the about two dozen states that sued have a series of victories. 

The federal government has threatened to withhold SNAP funds from states that don’t send over the data. A judge ruled last Thursday that the federal government couldn’t do that. A day later, Kelly allowed the data to be released.

The judge did say that federal law allows limited data sharing and only to people “directly connected with the administration or enforcement” of food assistance. 

Republicans say Kelly folded after spending months fighting to keep this data private. 

“Governor Kelly refused to release SNAP eligibility data the federal government required, dragged the state through months of unnecessary legal fights, and wasted taxpayer dollars in the process,” said Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins, a Sedgwick County Republican, in a Feb. 27 press release. “That’s not leadership. That’s political theater at your expense.” 

Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach agreed. 

“Her claim that she obtained some sort of victory because it won’t be shared with foreign governments is laughable,” Kobach said. “The United States government was never intending to share SNAP recipient names with foreign governments and would have absolutely no reason ever to do so.”

Kelly’s office said it has secured a major victory in the SNAP data case. They disagree with Kobach and Hawkins and say they received promises that weren’t originally on the table. SNAP data will only be used for SNAP administration — that was not true when the information was requested last year.  

The information hasn’t been handed over yet, and previous comments from state officials said it could take time to process the request. But reaching an agreement means the federal government will stop trying to strip away SNAP dollars from Kansas — something it already couldn’t do.

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BERGER, Missouri — When he walked into the warehouse on Zero Road, Jason Eaklor had no idea the sacks of powder stored inside were contaminated with heavy metals.

A contractor and Berger city alderman, Eaklor had been asked by a solar company interested in buying the property to tour it and evaluate how much work would need to be done before it could move in.

Despite being a city official and the owners knowing he was coming to tour the building, Eaklor said he heard nothing from Missouri regulators, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Duncan family — the building’s owners — about the true nature of the material inside.

He toured the building in 2013 with nothing more than “a tape measure and notebook.” He wore no mask or other equipment to protect him from the toxic powder that, according to a Missouri report, had begun to spill out of its containers by the end of the year.

Eaklor was far from the only person to unknowingly expose himself to the material and its contaminants, including lead, chromium and cadmium — heavy metals linked to cancer and other health problems. Local children were known to sneak onto the property to play or vandalize it, Eaklor said.

Around the time the material was shipped to the warehouse from Mississippi, “there were some kids out there trying to set the side of the building on fire with pine needles and stuff that was laying around there, and we had to run them off,” said Eaklor, who is now Berger’s city clerk. 

Children might have also been able to get into the building, according to a 2015 report from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. 

“They found lights on (in) there and a BB gun was found inside. A Daisy BB gun. My guess is kids,” said Sheriff Steven Pelton. 

In addition to local children, “it was common for people to be down there stealing copper wire and plumbing parts,” Eaklor said. 

‘That place was like a homeless encampment’

Berger, once a thriving rural community, had seen businesses and residents leave after the factory — which produced rubber stripping for car doors — shuttered its doors in 2002. They left behind abandoned stores and homes scattered across town. 

For years after that, homeless people stripped the abandoned buildings of copper wiring and pipes to sell, according to Glenn Vollertsen, a longtime Berger resident whose wife, Chris, is a city alderwoman. He said the factory was also a target.

Joe Davis, an EPA on-scene coordinator, said he’d heard stories about the regular break-ins at the facility even before the material was stored there. 

“There was a story of a chase that occurred when these people had hooked up a chain to some wiring in the building and were ripping it out with a pickup truck,” Davis said. “The police showed up and they chased them all around the county roads while they were pulling like 100 feet of cable behind them.”

Vollertsen said he also knew people who lived in the building for days at a time. 

“Believe it or not, for a while, that place was like a homeless encampment,” he said. 

Asked whether people were living there between 2013 and 2019, when the hazardous material was stored there, he said: “Oh, absolutely.”

“They were all just staying there. You might’ve had 10, 20 people down there at a time,” Vollertsen said. “They’d spend days down there, pulling copper out. There was a lot of copper in there.”

Through a public records request, KBIA and The Beacon obtained reports from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department’s visits to the site between 2013 and 2019.

Four reports were made about the Zero Road facility during that time. One of them, filed a month after the BB gun was found inside the building in 2015, was created when Penny Duncan reported that five propane gas canisters had been stolen from a locked cage inside the warehouse.

According to the report, Penny also informed an officer that she had “been having more recent problems out at her warehouse.”

“She believes young adults are partying there, mentioning that alcohol, tobacco and used condoms were located inside the warehouse,” Deputy Darrin Jones wrote in the report.

In February 2016, another deputy, Brandon Erisman, filed a report that a passerby had found the glass front door to the building shattered. Erisman said he found “a rock about the size of a baseball laying on the floor just inside this door.”

“The doors were also unsecured, and I was able to gain entry,” he wrote. “It should be noted that I have checked this building in the past on routine patrols and know the 100,000 sq ft facility is not kept very well secured.”

The building had been vulnerable since the material was moved there — two years earlier, in March 2014, Penny Duncan requested extra patrol from the sheriff’s department after a “No Trespassing” sign and cones in the driveway had been stolen.

Penny went back to the sheriff’s department shortly after to report that a week after she’d requested extra patrol, two AC units had been stolen from the outside of the warehouse.

Pelton, who has worked in the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department for almost 35 years and has been sheriff for nine, said the building’s alarm system was known to trip regularly. 

“We’ve had quite a few alarms sounding down there over the years,” he said. “Critters are getting in there, birds set the alarms off, and sometimes we meet with the (owner) out there, but nothing other than that.”

“Sometimes we don’t take reports of alarm soundings if it’s a repetitive alarm,” he added. “I know there’s a lot more (than the four reported visits), because I’ve responded a couple times.”

Vollertsen said it’s sometimes hard to get a sheriff’s deputy to drive the 40 minutes from the county seat in Union to Berger, even in emergency situations.

“We are all the way on the wrong side of Franklin County and they will not respond out here,” he said. “We had gunplay in town the other day, but they weren’t going to come.”

‘Nobody here knew that’

In late 2013, the only indication that anything was out of the ordinary was the occasional semitrailer driving down Berger’s Market Street, detouring from the usual back-road route to the warehouse.

“I’m the guy that sits on the porch, and I watch everybody,” Vollertsen said. “Did we all know they were putting it in there and what it was? Nobody here knew that.”

They’d eventually find out through articles from a local newspaper, the Missourian out of Washington, Missouri. 

“That was a surprise when it first came out,” Vollertsen said. “That was one of the articles that was in the Washington paper, that they did find all that stuff in there, and what it was.”

But the first article came out in 2017, after federal prosecutors announced charges against Raymond Williams, the then-CEO of U.S. Technology, and Daryl and Penny Duncan, the partial owners of the building, for illegally transporting hazardous waste. 

Other stories followed as the Duncans, a well-known family in Washington, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of placing someone in danger of death or serious bodily injury from a hazardous waste. They were sentenced to probation in 2018.

That was years after the material was moved into the warehouse in 2013.

That year, after Mississippi notified Missouri about the shipments, Missouri Department of Natural Resources staff came to inspect the site and found used sandblasting powder spilled outside the building. 

In their December 2013 report, inspectors also noted that “many of the super sacks were damaged and leaking (spent blast media) onto the floor.” 

Missouri then referred the site to the EPA, which sent out its own inspectors, who found that the material was hazardous and the building had been “basically abandoned.”

“That’s when EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division got involved with it as well,” said the EPA’s Davis, who oversaw the cleanup of the facility. “In 2014, (EPA investigators) came out, did some sampling and started building a case against U.S. Technology.”

“It was just amazing when I first walked in. I tell people, if you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark),’ in the final scene with the warehouse, it was like that,” he added. “We were up on an elevated platform at one corner of the building looking out over thousands and thousands of bags.”

That investigation would go on for several years before the EPA and U.S. Tech finalized a RCRA settlement in 2016 that ordered the company to clean up the facility. 

But according to a statement from the EPA, U.S. Tech “failed to submit an approvable work plan.” That’s when officials referred the site to the Superfund program — the part of the EPA that cleans up hazardous waste sites — which did its own inspection of the site before ordering a cleanup. 

KBIA and The Beacon asked EPA officials about the extent of their public outreach efforts. 

In an email, Shannan Beisser, an EPA spokesperson, said that under federal law, the EPA is required to create and make public an “administrative record” with information about sites being cleaned up.

The agency also published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the cost recovery settlement in March 2025, six years after the cleanup. That notice included a request for public comment, but no one submitted any comments, according to Beisser.

The administrative record and cost recovery notice “constitute the record of outreach efforts for the site,” Beisser wrote. 

Davis told KBIA and The Beacon that, as part of the site evaluation and cleanup process, he also spoke with the Franklin County Local Emergency Planning Committee and the facility’s immediate neighbors, including a house and farmstead. 

But no one from the EPA spoke with anyone from Berger, the town two miles down the road.

“We didn’t know nothing until (the newspaper) put it out,” said Shanell Hudson, a Berger resident. “Nobody came and told us. … We didn’t know about the chromium and all that stuff. We did not know what the hazardous material was.”

Lynelle Phillips, a former public health adviser for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the fact that Berger residents learned about the site’s contaminants through news articles “is not OK.”

“It seems like the community should hear from the government first before it’s out in the news,” said Phillips, who is now a public health professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

She said there are a few different ways to do public outreach about contaminated sites, but a critical piece is surveying the community and addressing residents’ specific concerns.

“You might get all the way through this thing and that community is like, ‘We’re really concerned about brain cancer. It seems like a lot of people have brain cancer,’” she said. “And we can say, ‘Well, none of these contaminants cause brain cancer, but you might have increased cancer risk, and with all cancers, there’s always a risk to metastasize to the brain.’” 

“Something like that.”

‘All sorts of bad s—’

EPA testing revealed that inside the warehouse, sampled powder contained as much as 600 parts per million of lead, 1,200 parts per million of cadmium and 2,500 parts per million of chromium. A part per million is roughly equivalent to a drop of water in a large household bathtub.

All three are heavy metals. Exposure to this kind of material “is associated with learning deficits, behavioral problems, just a whole raft of health issues,” according to Mark Lipton, a professor at Purdue University who specializes in organic chemistry.

Lead, a probable human carcinogen according to the EPA, has been found to affect almost every organ and system in the body, but especially the nervous system. Its effects are particularly profound in children, who show reduced cognitive function even with very low blood lead levels. 

Of the heavy metals found in the warehouse, cadmium is the only one for which the EPA has determined a safe lifetime exposure limit. The agency found that exposure to 0.005 ppm of cadmium over the course of one’s life is not expected to have any adverse effects. 

Cadmium is “a heavy metal that causes neurological problems, developmental problems,” Lipton said. “It’s especially problematic for pregnant women and small children.”

And according to the EPA, breathing high levels of cadmium — a known human carcinogen — can severely damage the lungs, while long-term exposure to lower levels of the metal is linked to kidney disease. 

The chromium in the sandblasting powder was hexavalent chromium, a more toxic variety of the element. Another known human carcinogen, it was the subject of a 1993 lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric over the poisoning of a California town’s groundwater supply. 

The case — which charged that PG&E had knowingly exposed the community to hexavalent chromium, causing multiple cancers and other health issues — was later dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.” 

“Hexavalent chromium is a slightly different kettle of fish,” Lipton said. “It’s a known potent carcinogen, and it’s very environmentally persistent, so once in the environment, it doesn’t go away.” 

“If it’s packaged as a solid or powder, then the issue becomes breathing and respiratory exposure … (that’s) incredibly dangerous,” he added. “All sorts of bad s— can happen when that happens.”

Economic development

Federal investigators questioned whether Daryl Duncan and his wife, Penny, had created Missouri Green Materials for the sole purpose of accepting and storing the waste. But Duncan told them he had bigger plans. 

He said he hoped to recycle the material and bring new life to the Zero Road factory — which his grandfather had built — and the city of Berger. 

“We are trying to develop that into an industrial park … We are trying to put (a) railroad tie business in there,” Duncan said.

During that 2014 interview with investigators, Duncan said he had an interested customer, a company called Encell Composites that he said had an order from Union Pacific for railroad ties, supports that keep train tracks in place. The company hoped to make the concrete for those ties with Missouri Green Materials’ sandblasting powder.

Before Duncan and Williams agreed to ship the material to Berger, the Zero Road facility had been put up for sale. It had been vacant for years after its last tenant, GDX Automotive, moved to nearby New Haven in 2002.

When federal investigators asked why the property was still for sale as Duncan was trying to start a new business there, he said: “I am hoping (that now that) we got this business … it won’t be for sale anymore.”

But after state officials shut down Missouri Green Materials’ operation, the property stayed on the market and received some buzz, including from the solar company that asked Eaklor to tour it. It ultimately decided not to buy it because too many renovations would be needed to make it usable.

The cleanup

The building’s condition would keep getting worse. 

“It started becoming clear that this probably posed a public threat, because this building was getting vandalized,” said Davis, the EPA employee. “It was becoming more and more decrepit.”

“Things were getting in bad shape. Bags were falling over, they were breaking open. People had been vandalizing them, knocking things down, cutting bags open, spilling the contents,” he added. “We could see where the contents of some of these bags were actually being released out through the cargo doors.”

He said the break-ins were one reason the site was referred to the EPA’s Superfund program for emergency cleanup. Another major factor was the fact that the warehouse is in a 100-year floodplain. 

According to local residents and officials, that section of the Missouri River did not flood between 2013 and 2019, when the material was stored there. 

It did have a history of flooding, however. During the Great Flood of 1993, Zero Road was engulfed by floodwaters, temporarily shutting down GenCorps’ operations at the facility. 

“We didn’t want this to become a bigger incident,” Davis said. “If we had another big flood event and this was washed out, the Missouri River is within a half a mile and we didn’t want all the sediment getting out and the contaminated material getting into the river and washing downstream. That was a big threat.”

If it had flooded while the material was there, the contaminated water would have threatened the species that live in and around the river, as well as the humans who fish or hunt them, said Phillips, the former CDC employee.

Another concern would have been groundwater contamination, which she called “one of the biggest problems we have in this state.”

“A lot of people in rural Missouri have private wells, so you get a plume of contamination in the groundwater, and it migrates just like water does, and it intercepts private wells, and people are drinking this stuff, and they don’t know they’re drinking it,” she said. 

While floodwaters never got inside the warehouse, other water did as the building’s condition deteriorated. In his 2016 report about the broken front door, Deputy Brandon Erisman said he did not venture far into the building “as the interior is in very poor condition and smells of moisture and mold.”

Between March and June 2019, more than five years after the first trucks hauling sandblasting powder arrived at the Zero Road facility, EPA officials rebagged and removed all of the material from the building and surrounding area and sent it to a disposal facility near Chicago.  

That cleanup cost $4.2 million. It was done, in part, with money from Williams and U.S. Technology. But the federal agencies Williams worked with would eventually pay for it, too, years later, with taxpayer dollars.

---

Dumped In Berger is a collaboration between KBIA and The Beacon examining the U.S. Technology Superfund site in Berger, Missouri. Stories will publish daily the week of Dec. 15.

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For years, stories circulated around Joplin, Missouri, about the city’s homeless population and how they arrived in the city. 

Calls would come in to city officials following a recurring theme. 

“People were coming to the City Council meetings and saying, ‘I don’t know why you guys don’t know this, but I’m witnessing busloads of people being dropped off in our town,’” said Joplin Mayor Keenan Cortez. “‘Buses are coming in, stopping at gas stations, unloading and the buses are turning around and going back.’” 

The city commissioned a study to investigate. But it came back with no hard evidence. 

Still, the reports kept coming in. So the city took a deeper look.

Officials collected video evidence of out-of-state law enforcement vehicles dropping people off at truck stops. Some medical systems seemed to be involved, too. They also gathered signed affidavits from people who were new to Joplin, saying they were given promises of a shelter bed or resources at the end of their ride. 

“We were starting to hear from people in our community that, ‘I was brought to Joplin and just dropped off. I was in trouble over there. That community didn’t deal with me. They put me in a car, a van, a bus and said there’s help for you,’” Cortez said. 

Instead, they were left without their support system, in a new city with limited resources and few places to turn. 

Cortez said city officials aren’t sure how many people shared similar stories. 

“At the end of the day, I don’t know if it was 15, if it was 50,” Cortez said. “As a mayor, it doesn’t matter.” 

Joplin officials put their heads together with the city’s legal team. After sending cease-and-desist letters to the organizations they believed were dropping people off in the city, the City Council started considering legislation to ban the practice. 

The City Council passed an ordinance at the beginning of November. It isn’t uncommon for medical systems to refer patients needing specialized treatment, or for victims of domestic violence, to be sent to a shelter in another town. The ordinance includes exemptions for those situations. 

So far, Cortez and city officials think the letters and new ordinance appear to be working. They haven’t had any reports of people being dropped off since the ordinance was passed. But the trend points to a larger problem Missouri’s cities are facing as homelessness rises across the state. 

Missouri’s reliance on larger cities for services for the homeless population

It is fairly common for smaller, rural areas to rely on the services in larger cities for things like shelters, medical care or mental health treatment. 

From 2023 to 2024, the number of unsheltered people grew 9% in Missouri, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development point-in-time counts. In Kansas, the number grew by 6%, while Oklahoma saw an 18% jump. 

Columbia is similar to Joplin when it comes to being a regional hub for services and shelter beds. 

Columbia began working more closely on reducing homelessness in 2023 by establishing a program within Boone County’s Department of Public Health to connect people with resources. City officials also created a homeless outreach team within the police department to try and divert people from the justice system. 

Now, the city has launched the Ride Home program, which gives homeless or impoverished community members free rides back to their hometowns or to support systems up to three hours away. If someone needs to travel farther, the city will purchase a bus ticket to get them to where they need to go. 

Since the launch in October, the city has provided three rides, said Austin Krohn, public information specialist at the Columbia & Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services. 

“People come in for mental health services, or if there is a facility that can only do a certain type of screening for them,” Krohn said. “People are coming here from all over Missouri to get services, and then they’re stuck here.” 

Local service providers and shelters can refer people to the program to receive a free ride. People must have verifiable support at the destination, a referral, photo ID and no outstanding warrants in the county. 

Studies have shown that voluntary transport to a support system can be instrumental in improving someone’s housing situation. 

San Francisco runs a robust transportation program, similar to Ride Home in Columbia. In fiscal year 2024, the agency that runs the program gave 230 rides. 

San Francisco officials followed up with riders 90 days after their ride, and found that of the 230 served, 61 found housing, while 29 had another or unknown location. The remaining riders were unreachable or declined to be surveyed as part of the program. 

“When I was doing direct service 30 years ago, people called it Greyhound therapy,” said Jeff Olivet, the former executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. “Get a bus ticket to another town, just get out of here, basically. Sometimes that can be incredibly helpful if people are really wanting and needing to get back to family and social supports.” 

But if someone is transported or coerced to leave town against their will, it can lead to poorer outcomes, Olivet said. 

“Transportation can be critical,” Olivet said. “But if it’s basically, ‘Get out of town or we’re going to arrest you,’ that doesn’t solve homelessness for anybody. It just moves the problem around.” 

One 2023 study modeled over 20 U.S. cities concluded that involuntary displacement of people experiencing homelessness — things like encampment sweeps or involuntary transport to another area — could lead to substantial increases in morbidity and mortality. 

The study linked involuntary displacement with worse outcomes for overdoses and hospitalizations and a decrease in getting connected with treatment for opioid use. It said the displacements could contribute to deaths of homeless people who use drugs. 

A 2017 investigation from The Guardian analyzed nearly 35,000 relocation journeys over a six-year period. The investigation found that most riders were relocated to places with a lower median income. 

How Missouri fares 

And as homelessness rates rise across all of Missouri, cities may need to start thinking about how to address these gaps, Olivet said. 

“In the case of rural areas, or even suburban areas, where there aren’t as many shelter options for people, there aren’t as many mental health treatment programs, there aren’t as many supportive services. Oftentimes, the only way to get help is by going to a larger urban area,” Olivet said. 

“That speaks to a tremendous gap when we don’t have good services, support and housing options for people in rural areas. They have to go somewhere else, even if they are from that rural area.” 

In Missouri, the numbers aren’t improving. 

The state’s continuum of care — a group of agencies that work under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to address homelessness — found in its most recent report that homelessness is rapidly increasing across the state. 

In Region 9, which includes the southwest corner of the state (but does not include metro areas like Joplin or Springfield, which run their own continuums of care outside of the statewide framework), 2023 data found a 133% rise in unsheltered homelessness and a 100% rise in sheltered homelessness from 2022 to 2023. 

The area also saw family homelessness increase by 100% from 2022 to 2023. 

Region 10, which represents the counties surrounding the Kansas City area, 2023 point-in-time data showed a 3% increase in unsheltered homelessness and a 119% increase in sheltered homelessness from 2022. Family homelessness increased by 173%. 

In the group’s annual report, every region saw at least one metric of homelessness, sheltered or unsheltered, increase from 2022 to 2023. 

It rings alarm bells with Mary Kenion, the chief equity officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. 

“At least half of all people experiencing homelessness in largely rural continuums of care do so outdoors, in unsheltered locations,” Kenion said. “We’re also seeing family homelessness on the rise, in rural communities specifically.” 

And in their report, the Missouri continuum of care providers noted that while larger towns were better equipped to handle homelessness, it highlights the lack of resources in more rural areas. 

The report found a positive relationship between the number of beds available in permanent housing situations and the length of time someone was homeless. For every 1% increase in permanent housing beds, there was a 54-day decrease in the length of time someone was homeless. 

Although solutions like access to permanent housing show promise, roadblocks remain. 

A coalition of nonprofits and local governments recently sued the Trump administration, arguing it created unreasonable restrictions on state continuums of care across the country. The lawsuit argues that the administration is looking to shift funding away from proven solutions that improve homelessness and that it could force up to 170,000 Americans into homelessness. 

The new rules change what types of projects are eligible for funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the criteria for selecting projects and the conditions grantees have to accept to receive the funding, the lawsuit argues. 

Ultimately, Joplin Mayor Cortez and other experts said that following up with someone after they receive care or resources is key in reducing homelessness.

Cortez is excited about a new development of 16 tiny homes dedicated to providing permanent housing situations for Joplin. But addressing the issue takes everyone coming together, he said. 

“This is an ongoing thing that everybody in the community is involved in —– the health care community, the religious community,” Cortez said. “We have some passionate champions in our community working to resolve this problem.” 

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The goal was to build out high-speed internet using whatever technology was best, though fiber-optic cables are considered the gold standard of internet infrastructure. 

States could use any technology that worked best. Fiber delivers the fastest internet speeds but is more expensive to install. The savings come decades down the line when that infrastructure outlasts other types of internet projects.

Then came the 2024 election, and the Trump administration wanted to drive costs down.

“To guarantee that American taxpayers obtain the greatest return on their broadband investment … the full force of the competitive marketplace must be utilized,” the new guidance said. 

The administration told states to rethink how they spend the money and urged them to focus on any type of project that increases internet access. In Kansas, that has meant less fiber investment. 

“The overarching policy went from what are we going to get that is the best value … (to) what is the cheapest thing we can do,” said Erik Sartorius, executive director of the Communications Coalition of Kansas. “As you see in your own life and in road building or anything else, cheap does not generally equal the best solution.”

The grant could fund a variety of infrastructure projects: 

• Fiber projects, which have a cable buried in the ground or hung on poles.
• Fixed wireless, with devices like cellphone towers that deliver internet.
• And low Earth orbital satellites that beam down the internet from space, like Elon Musk’s Starlink. 

In response to the Trump administration’s instructions, Kansas submitted a grant proposal requesting to spend just $252 million. Under the proposal, 50.8% of projects would be fixed wireless or a hybrid of fixed wireless and fiber, 46.2% of projects would be fiber and 3% of projects would be satellites. 

The Beacon asked for a copy of the original grant proposal under Biden-era rules, but the Kansas Broadband Office didn’t reply to those requests. 

Matthew Godinez, the assistant secretary of quality places for the Kansas Department of Commerce, said he isn’t sure how much less fiber Kansas will invest in, but there will be less. 

The project does fund rural internet programs, but there are also projects in metro settings where some people still lack quality internet. Twelve percent of Kansas households don’t have broadband. 

The final grant proposal still has to be approved by the federal government, so the amount of fiber could be tweaked more. 

Godinez said if money were no issue, every household in Kansas would get fiber internet. 

“The amount of capacity on that fiber cable is almost unlimited,” said Larry Thompson, the CEO of Vantage Point Solutions, a company that does engineering and consulting work for rural broadband providers. “You won’t outgrow that in the next 30 to 50 years.”

That’s important because the internet infrastructure being built for today is for projects that don’t even exist yet, he said. Broadband was being installed in 2002, before the rise of smartphones and TV streaming services. 

The demand for internet in the home rose and those projects needed to meet the demand. The future will likely need even more internet capacity as AI or virtual reality becomes more popular. 

Kansas is also well suited for fiber projects. The cables can be buried, and Kansas has good soil to dig into — just ask all the farmers planting fields of crops. Wireless towers are certainly useful, but they have a shelf life of about five years, Thompson said. 

The towers themselves can stand for decades, but the electronics on them need to be replaced more often. Sometimes, that’s because weather wears down components or a tree grows too large and blocks the signal. 

Homes also need antennas to get a wireless signal. Bad weather or terrain can slow down speeds. Entire neighborhoods also have to share that wireless signal. The speeds slow down as more people use the service. 

Thompson also doubts that wireless towers could deliver the required speeds. 

“If you want to give your rural customers the same service that they could get in Kansas City … you would give them fiber,” he said. “In those metropolitan areas, it’s gigabit speeds they can get. If you’re in a rural area and you say, ‘I think these guys should be second-class broadband citizens’ … then you’re going to go wireless.” 

Sartorius, with the Communications Coalition of Kansas, said each technology has its place. But he said the state isn’t getting its money’s worth with this grant program and it will drive less economic development. 

The most recent grant proposal would use only half the allocated grant money. There is a chance Kansas can keep that money and spend it elsewhere, but a bill in Congress has already been introduced to claw back any unused funds. 

Sartorius said the Kansas Broadband Office did all it could with the rules in front of them. 

“Being able to do things in a cost-effective manner is important,” he said. “When we look at this in five to seven years … we are going to look at this and wish about what could have been.”

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To Mike Schultz, Kansas ranchers are stuck in velvet handcuffs.

Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery retailer and private employer, recently expanded into the U.S. beef industry with its own processing plant in Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The opening of the Walmart-owned plant in July marked a turning point for the company and the nation’s cattle industry.

Schultz, a cattle rancher in Brewster, Kansas, — a state that accounts for roughly 4% of the nation’s cattle supply — said for now, local ranchers are likely to have better prices with Walmart bidding against other beef giants.

But Walmart is known for cheap prices and Schultz believes the Arkansas-based retailer will soon look to drive down the price it pays for cattle.

“If you want a race to the bottom to produce cheaper than anybody else, Walmart’s your guy,” he said.

This year, the nation’s beef industry is at a crossroads. Ranchers and agricultural experts warn the nation’s already stunted beef industry could be falling under more corporate control. 

The domestic herd is at a record low as the U.S. imports more beef than ever before. Brazilian meat giant JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, recently became a publicly traded company with access to U.S. capital, and consumers are spending record prices on beef at the grocery store.

Walmart is now poised to become a significant player in the beef industry, owning cattle from slaughter to sale. This comes at a time when ranchers have fewer buyers for their cattle and declining inventory. 

Nine out of 10 states that make up the majority of the nation’s beef supply have seen a decline in the past decade, according to a review of USDA data.

Kansas has seen the largest loss, from 1.4 million in 2016 to 1.2 million in 2025, a 21% decline. 

Mike Callicrate, owner of Ranch Direct Foods in Colorado Springs and an advocate for family farms, believes Walmart’s entry into the beef industry at the same time JBS went public on the New York Stock Exchange is the “last domino” to fall for independent ranchers.

Beef is a heavily consolidated industry, with four companies controlling nearly all of the nation’s supply. The federal government attempted to rein in the power of the consolidated meat industry in recent years, but under the Trump administration, guidelines for preventing and investigating antitrust violations in agriculture were scrapped. 

“I think our industry is in real trouble until we start enforcing antitrust laws and breaking up concentrated power,” Callicrate said. “You cannot let Walmart control the supply chain.”

The power of Walmart

Walmart’s Kansas beef plant is not the first time the company has dipped its toe into owning parts of the nation’s beef supply chain. It is, however, the first time they’ve had full control. 

In 2020, it opened a Thomasville, Georgia, beef processing facility. Owned by a separate food company, the facility’s employees process beef to be case-ready — taking large cuts and slicing them into smaller portions before packaging them for the meat case at their grocery stores.

An independent ranching company supplies the Georgia plant with meat from multiple herds across the region.

Walmart fully owns and operates its new Kansas plant and also holds a minority stake in Sustainable Beef, the Nebraska-based cattle company that sources cattle within a 250-mile radius, including Kansas.

The Kansas plant will provide beef for Walmart stores in Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to the company. 

Walmart’s foray into the beef industry is not adding new cattle to the market, but rather competing for cattle in an overwhelmingly consolidated market.

JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Marfrig control roughly 85% of the U.S. beef industry, according to industry estimates. 

Walmart’s buying and processing of its own beef will initially compete directly with these companies. It could also reduce the amount of meat it buys from Tyson and Cargill, according to the company’s statements.

Walmart accounts for such a large portion of Tyson’s sales – almost 20% – that Tyson has said in SEC filings that if this were to be disrupted, it would “have a material impact” on their operations. Tyson did not respond to a request for comment on Walmart’s expansion into the beef industry.

Walmart first announced its plan to enter the beef industry in 2019, stating it wanted to create an end-to-end supply chain for Angus beef, which led to its Georgia and Kansas plants. 

“It’s important to build more resiliency and capacity in the industry,” a Walmart spokesperson said in an email statement to Investigate Midwest. “Opening a case-ready facility fully owned and operated by Walmart allows us greater control over the products entering our stores so we can continue to bring the highest quality offerings possible.”

Walmart said it has no plans to open another beef processing plant in the future, according to the statement. The company did not answer specific questions about its role in the concentrated meat industry and who it sees as competitors in this space.

Schultz, the Kansas rancher, said it’s an appealing prospect for ranchers to sign on with Walmart, as it’s likely offering better prices than competitors.

“Ranchers are going to make some money for a little bit, but once they’ve got their hooks in you, you’re done,” he said. 

This isn’t the first time Walmart has captured a section of its food supply. Walmart opened a Fort Wayne, Indiana, milk-processing plant in 2018 to cut out major milk processors. Grocery stores Kroger and Albertsons also opened milk-bottling plants in 2017.

Greg Foran, former Walmart CEO of American stores, said the company decided to enter meat and dairy spaces because of the consolidated nature of those industries, speaking to CNN in 2019.

“What drives a decision like that is if we start to see a consolidation in supply,” Foran said. 

Foran noted that Walmart’s prices for milk had risen and the company aimed for “leverage” with its distributors when finalizing contracts. 

Austin Frerick, an agricultural antitrust expert and author of the book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” said Walmart is known for its power in the food supply chain because of the volume of products it purchases, often dictating the prices of many food items.

“The most powerful person in the food system is Walmart and entering the beef industry only adds to their power,” Frederick said.

‘The writing is on the wall’

While Walmart expands into the U.S. beef industry, foreign companies are filling in gaps left by the nation’s declining cattle herd.

The U.S. increased its beef and veal imports by 38% from 2015 to 2024.

Spurred by rising costs and prolonged droughts in recent years, the U.S. cattle herd sits at just under 28 million, the lowest since 1962. 

Brazil’s impact on the nation’s agriculture sector has caught the attention of the United States Trade Representative, USTR, the nation’s negotiating office for global trade. 

The USTR held an investigative hearing on Sept. 3 into Brazil’s trade practices and any related harms to the U.S. economy. Representatives of the U.S. beef industry spoke at the hearing, saying Brazil has not been transparent in its sourcing and animal health practices in the beef industry.

“The United States holds all trading partners to the highest science-based standards, and Brazil should not be the exception,” said Kent Bacus, executive director of government affairs for the nation’s beef industry trade group, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, at the hearing. 

Since the beginning of this year, Brazil, a major cattle-producing country, has imported a record number of beef into the U.S., despite ongoing tariffs and trade disputes.

JBS, the world’s largest meat company, headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, benefits from these imports and a declining cattle herd in the U.S., and will now have access to the country’s domestic capital markets after becoming a publicly traded company on the U.S. Stock Exchange in July.

According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, JBS’s North American beef segment is the largest revenue producer for the company, coming in at over $13 billion at the end of June.

The company’s SEC registration documents note the beef industry is volatile, and JBS avoids volatility by not owning cattle, unlike its poultry and pork segments. 

The nation’s beef industry has skirted the problems its protein counterparts, chicken and pork, have faced in recent decades, leaving American ranchers one of the few remaining independent animal farmers.

The majority of the nation’s chicken is produced under contract, meaning the farmers are essentially independent workers who raise animals for a corporation, while 74% of hogs raised in the country as of 2020 were raised under contract. Contract farming has been linked to a decline in competition and an increase in economic exploitation.

Currently, the nation’s beef herd is not under contract, but beef industry experts worry Walmart’s expansion is a step in the wrong direction. 

“What Walmart is doing will lessen competition in the beef industry,” said Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF, a cattle producer-only trade association. “It’ll mean less competition. It’ll mean fewer producers and it’ll mean a more concentrated and centralized food production system that is contrary to the national security of this country.”

Bullard said continued concentration and capture of the beef industry will make ranchers exit the industry or go the way of poultry or pork.

“The writing is on the wall,” he said. “We will continue to see more ranchers exit the industry and we will continue to see fewer cows in the U.S beef cow herd. Walmart is simply just another step in the road to fully integrated, industrialized food production.”

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AXTELL, KANSAS — When visiting his wife’s hometown of 400 in northern Kansas, Bob Lozier would joke with the owners of the grocery store that when they were ready to retire, he’d take over. 

He didn’t really expect to actually take over the store — but he did. 

In 2022, the owner of the only grocery store in Axtell decided to sell. The space had served as the town’s store since 1905. Suddenly, the residents of Axtell were facing a future without one. 

About 40 investors, including Lozier’s wife, came together to raise nearly $500,000 to demolish and rebuild the store. They found more funding through the Kansas Healthy Food Initiative, which provides financial assistance to rural grocers. And Axtell residents donated their labor and skills to finish the project in under a year.

For Lozier, the timing worked out. His father-in-law was getting older. And leaving Tacoma, Washington, for a close-knit rural community in Kansas seemed like a great idea. 

His relationship with the community has made the store a success. From the record-setting Axtell High School football team, to breakfasts for the American Legion and firefighters, Lozier makes feeding the community a priority. 

“It’s more than just a little town,” Lozier said. “Everybody is family here.” 

That’s just the type of community investment program the Kansas Healthy Food Initiative looks to foster across Kansas. The program is part of Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative, which aims to increase access to healthy food statewide. 

Axtell Community Grocery serves as a crucial — and increasingly rare — link in the rural food chain, and community buy-in is key to its sustainability. 

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“That’s one piece of what we do, just to ensure that the projects we are supporting are embedded in the community and not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Rial Carver, the rural grocery initiative’s program director. 

“We’ve seen that every community varies,” Carver said. “And for a rural grocery store to be successful, it has to harness those local characteristics and local strengths.” 

Kansas lost 105 rural grocery stores from 2008 to 2018, when the healthy food initiative launched. Since then, the program has awarded $5.3 million in land and grants for 75 projects in 45 counties aimed at keeping local stores open and addressing food insecurity in Kansas. 

In 2023, Kansas had a food insecurity rate of 11.4%, lower than the national rate of about 14%, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data. In Axtell’s Marshall County, an estimated 12.5% of county residents reported food insecurity in their household, the Associated Press analysis found. 

Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October 2025, saying the numbers had become “overly politicized.” The decision comes in the wake of federal funding cuts for food and nutrition safety net programs nationwide.

If not for Axtell Community Grocery, the town’s residents would have a nearly 30-minute drive to get to the next closest store, which would be a major challenge for keeping and attracting young people. 

“They want the young families to keep coming. They want to get bigger,” Lozier said. “This town was booming years and years ago: three grocery stores, an ice cream parlor and a movie theatre. It was big.”

Grocery stores as community anchors 

U.S. Department of Agriculture research found that the median number of grocery stores per capita decreased by 40% for rural and small urban counties from 1990 to 2015, the most recent data available, while dollar stores and supercenters became more popular. 

It’s a story that Blue Rapids, Kansas, knows all too well.

After a Dollar General opened down the street from the supermarket in the town of less than 1,000, the store’s owner had a warning for the community. 

“Three years after Dollar General opened, the supermarket closed, which he predicted,” said Jan Bergkamp, who owns Riverside Market, a Kansas Healthy Food Initiative project in Blue Rapids. 

“He warned everyone that would happen,” Bergkamp said. “And little by little, it did. Of course, we were without anything.” 

At the time, Bergkamp was running a floral business with her daughter. She was approached about opening a grocery store, but had never been in the business before.  

The program helped her hire a grocery consultant to run a survey of the community and help her to design the store. She also has a small deli where she serves coffee, sandwiches and baked goods, and a freezer full of premade meals. 

“We try to keep our profit margin as low as possible, just to compete.” 

Jan Bergkamp, co-owner of Riverside Market

Competition from large retailers isn’t the only thing that makes being a small grocer difficult in 2025. Other factors like affordability and proximity to customers play a large role in their success — and their impact on food insecurity in the communities they serve. 

“Grocery stores have razor-thin profit margins,” said Carmen Byker Shanks, the principal research scientist at the Center for Nutrition and Health Impact. “There’s not a lot of room to sell food and make money and stay in business.” 

Bergkamp’s revenue is balanced among florals, grocery and the deli counter. The store sources a few aisles of shelf-stable goods and some local products like dairy, meat and produce. 

Some local products are more expensive, Bergkamp said. But her customers are willing to pay more if they know where the food is coming from. 

“The items aren’t cheap, but people like them, and like where they are made,” she said. 

The same is true in McCune in the southeast corner of Kansas.

Kaynee Everman stopped by McCune Farm to Market around lunchtime with her baby. She lives in town and said Walmart — about 30 minutes away — is her only other grocery option. 

McCune Farm to Market includes a small grocery section on one side of the building and a restaurant on the other. Head back behind the kitchen and you’ll find a bakery.

Other grocery stores just started delivering to McCune, and Everman does use that option. But she prefers shopping locally. She’s a working mother who doesn’t have time to spend an hour driving to and from the grocery store.

“For us to be able to drive down the road is a really big deal for locals,” Everman said. “It’s fresh and it’s better quality.”

Cherie Schenker, the store’s owner, was able to at least triple produce sales because of the Kansas Healthy Food Initiative grant. 

Schenker buys produce locally. There’s one pecan farmer who doesn’t have space to store all the pecans he grows, but now they sit at McCune Farm to Market. She said the massive increase in cold storage is only possible because of the KHFI grant. 

“I have a friendly banker, but he’s not quite that friendly,” Schenker said.  

What other resources are needed to tackle food insecurity in rural Kansas? 

A grocery store is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing America’s struggle to put food on the table. 

“Rural food insecurity is really driven by a lot of things,” said Byker Shanks, the nutrition researcher. “It’s a web of overlapping factors like low wages, limited job opportunities, long travel distances, aging and lack of access to social services.” 

And even when small towns have a grocery store, that doesn’t always mean that families have the ability to buy fresh food.

The Kansas Healthy Food Initiative surveyed its grocers in 2021. At the time, only 4% of grocers reported that produce sales made up 15% or more of their sales. For 46% of the grocers, produce sales were anywhere between 6% to 10%, on par with industrywide averages in the Southeast and Midwest. 

“I’ve visited a lot of rural grocery stores, and can say that sometimes when fresh produce is available, it’s either not affordable or it’s not something that someone would want to purchase because it’s been sitting on the shelf for so long,” Byker Shanks said. 

Families and grocers push up against affordability frequently. Assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to help low-income Americans afford nutritious foods, but there’s not always a lot of uptake in rural communities because of social stigma. 

“People say all of the time that it’s hard to be on SNAP in rural communities, because everyone knows our business,” Byker Shanks said. 

Another common problem is many families make too much to qualify for assistance, but not enough to live comfortably. 

“You watch a family and a parent work really hard to do well at their job and succeed and move up,” said April Todd, the executive director of the Pony Express Partnership for Children. “And when they do, it’s actually harmful to their family.” 

Brian Walker, the president and CEO of the Kansas Food Bank, said the number of families it serves has not returned to pre-pandemic levels and they try to make their dollars stretch farther. 

“What we are noticing are a lot more seniors,” Walker said. “Their fixed incomes aren’t enough to keep up with the cost of goods.” 

Some community-driven solutions are underway to help families deal with food inflation. Prices for food and beverages are 25.7% higher than in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In Marshall County, a partnership between the Farm Bureau and the Pony Express Partnership for Kids resulted in four donated cows annually and anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 pounds of ground beef that can be given away for free in the community. 

Ultimately, community relationships are keeping rural grocers afloat. The question is how to scale them. 

“It’s not just a business, it’s a way of life,” Lozier said. “I hear people say, ‘I could get this cheaper elsewhere,’ and I said, ‘You probably can, but remember, we’re five minutes away.’” 

Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report. This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved: The Beacon, Capital B, Enlace Latino NC, Investigate Midwest, The Jefferson County Beacon, KOSU, Louisville Public Media, The Maine Monitor and MinnPost. The Rural News Network is funded by Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation, among others.

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Missouri’s 67 rural hospitals are pondering a dramatically different future under President Donald Trump’s new budget plan.

The recently approved budget bill will slash federal Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion over the next decade. By some estimates, it could lead to 8.6 million people nationwide losing health coverage. 

Various estimates conclude that between 130,000 and 170,000 Missourians could lose coverage under the state’s Medicaid program, known as MO HealthNet, over the next decade. 

And even if you have commercial insurance, the impact on hospital operations and finances could still affect your health care. As people delay treatment for their health conditions due to a lack of insurance, they’ll start relying more on the emergency room as their primary form of health care, experts say. 

That will lead to more crowded emergency departments. Moreover, the burden to pay for uninsured patients will shift onto the hospitals that provide the care, and eventually back to patients. 

With the budget plan in motion and spending cuts materializing, Missouri’s hospitals are now taking a look at their finances and preparing for an uptick in costs. 

For rural Missourians, even those who aren’t on Medicaid, it means the types of health care available to them in the form of obstetric units, primary care providers or specialty providers could be changing. 

Or their nearby hospital could be gone altogether.

“We are likely going to see rural hospital closures,” said Sheldon Weisgrau, the vice president of health policy at the Missouri Foundation for Health, in a press briefing. 

“We have not had any rural hospitals close since we expanded the Medicaid program,” he said. “We are likely to see rural hospitals close because they operate on the financial edge.” 

What do worsening hospital finances under Medicaid cuts mean for you? 

Mercy, which is based in the St. Louis area, operates 112 hospitals and emergency rooms across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas and has a large footprint in rural Missouri. Mercy estimates that the budget will lead to bigger revenue losses every year. 

Five years from now, they estimate, they’ll lose $300 million in revenue annually. 

“That’s going to mean we’re going to have to radically look at how we deliver care differently — that is still responsive to our communities,” said Cheryl Matejka, the executive vice president and chief financial officer at Mercy. “It’s going to be different for us to survive and thrive.” 

Under the plan, Missouri stands to lose an estimated $23 billion in federal funding over the next decade, according to the Missouri Foundation for Health.* Much of Missouri’s federal money covers the cost of Medicaid for the Affordable Care Act expansion group, which voters approved coverage for with an amendment to the state constitution in 2020. 

The new federal budget restricts how states and hospitals can pay for the services they provide by limiting the fees that states can collect from health care providers. It also puts limits on what states can pay hospitals to help them fill gaps in their finances for treating Medicaid patients. 

Broken down by year, Missouri’s federal funding for Medicaid will drop about 20% annually as the plan moves forward, Weisgrau said. 

“All of this is going to have a disproportionate impact in rural communities,” Weisgrau said.  

The Missouri Foundation for Health analyzed the budget plan, he added, and found that rural health care providers could lose 21 cents of every dollar they currently get from Medicaid. 

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According to KFF, hospitals overall had an operating margin of 5.2% in 2023. For rural hospitals, that margin was 3.1%.  

The bulk of the concern stems from an expected rise in uncompensated care — hospitals treating patients even if they cannot pay. 

“When folks lose their insurance coverage, it doesn’t mean they don’t continue to get sick,” Weisgrau said. “A lot of them stay out of the health care system because they know they can’t afford it.” 

Once their health deteriorates to a certain point, they go to the emergency room, where they are required to be treated, even if they cannot pay for that care. 

Mercy, for example, sets aside part of its budget to account for that cost. 

“We give away about half a billion dollars of uncompensated or unreimbursed care,” said John Mohart, the executive vice president and chief operation officer for Mercy. “Some of that is for Medicaid patients already, because it doesn’t cover the costs that we have.” 

But for smaller hospitals, the flexibility to provide that uncompensated care isn’t there. Fewer insured people will only increase costs. 

“If you see an uninsured patient, then you probably have to assume that there is a pretty good chance you’re just going to have to eat those costs,” said Timothy McBride, a public health expert and economist at the Washington University School of Public Health.  

As a result, even those covered by commercial insurance could see their premiums rise to help cover the care. 

“These costs are passed on to the rest of us,” Weisgrau said. “We will see private insurance premiums going up. Even folks who have good coverage from their employers and think they might be immune from some of these Medicaid cuts  will see impacts of this down the line.” 

How far will the rural hospital fund go in saving at-risk hospitals? 

To help offset some of the costs rural hospitals are taking on, senators in Washington lobbied for the inclusion of a rural hospital stabilization fund. The budget included $50 billion for rural hospitals over the next five years with the possibility of renewing the fund in the future. 

Half of it will be distributed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, while the other half will flow to states to then send to hospitals. 

But the fund won’t be enough to offset the losses rural hospitals are anticipating.

Medicaid spending in rural parts of the country is expected to fall by $137 billion over the next decade — $87 billion more than was allocated to the rural hospital fund, according to KFF. 

And even those estimates, KFF said, are modest because they don’t account for how states may change the way they fund Medicaid. 

During negotiations surrounding the budget bill, senators asked the University of North Carolina Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research to analyze how many rural hospitals may be at risk under the plan. 

Their report found that nearly 340 rural hospitals were at risk nationwide, based on the rate of Medicaid patients they serve and their consecutive years of financial losses. 

In Missouri, four hospitals were considered at-risk, while in Kansas, six hospitals were listed. 

One of those hospitals is Bothwell Regional Health Center in Sedalia, the city’s largest employer with more than 1,000 employees. 

In 2024, the hospital posted its first profit since 2018, Bothwell CEO Lori Wightman said in a press release in July. Notably, Medicare and Medicaid provided 78% of the payments for its patients. 

“These programs pay well below the actual cost of providing care,” Wightman said in the release. “Commercial insurance alone cannot close the gap, and that is where subsidies available to rural hospitals are essential. Unfortunately, the cost of providing care, from personnel to technology, continues to rise making a difficult situation harder to stabilize.”

Other Missouri hospitals included on the list were Scotland County Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Parkland Health Center in Bonne Terre and Lafayette Regional Health Center in Lexington — Sen. Josh Hawley’s hometown. 

Studies show that after a rural hospital closure, low-income and elderly patients were more likely to defer or skip their health care altogether because of transportation challenges. 

Rural hospital closures also lead to a loss of physicians. One study found that the closure of a rural hospital led to an 8.3% drop in primary care physicians and a 4.8% drop in obstetricians and gynecologists. 

“Health care providers are big employers,” Weisgrau said. “They are big users of local supplies and commodities. All of that will have to be reduced. People will lose jobs. Economies will decline as a result of these cuts.” 

* Meg Cunningham’s coverage of rural health is funded by the Missouri Foundation for Health. 

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This story was updated with additional numbers from the state.

Federal proposals to cut food stamps would jeopardize food assistance for 27,000 Kansans, Gov. Laura Kelly’s office estimated.

That number was accurate as of Wednesday afternoon, before congressional Republicans proposed additional changes to the cuts.

Congressional Republicans are trying to pass President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The sweeping proposal would cut things from electric vehicle tax credits to stabilization funds for rural hospitals, and it has the largest cut to the food assistance program ever. 

Takeaways

1. Proposed federal SNAP cuts would shift significant costs to Kansas without the funds to cover it, risking benefit losses for residents.
2. The proposed cuts could impact vulnerable populations. Nearly half of SNAP recipients in Kansas are children.
3. Food insecurity would worsen under the bill, Democrats warn, as local food banks can’t fill the gap left by reduced federal aid.

The bill wants states to pay part of the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. Kansas is currently expected to pay around 15% of the cost of SNAP. The bill is changing as lawmakers try to pass it by July 4 to meet Trump’s demands, making it hard to pin down the exact cost states could pay until a proposal passes.

That would cost Kansas $63 million a year in benefits and comes with an additional $15.5 million in annual administrative costs, the state estimates. 

The cuts to food assistance are pitched as ways to save taxpayers money, but Kelly said that the cost shift is too much. The state won’t be able to add money back into the program, and people will lose benefits. 

“The idea that states will respond to massive cuts of federally appropriated dollars by backfilling with state resources is total bunk,” Kelly said. “We don’t have the money.”

State lawmakers spent the last legislative session finding cuts to the Kansas budget. Months of work ended with a projected $700 million budget shortfall by 2029. SNAP costs also rose after the COVID pandemic. 

In 2019, Kansas received $265.3 million in SNAP benefit costs. That jumped to $488.5 million in 2021. 

The current federal proposal also requires states to pay a larger portion of SNAP benefits if they have an error rate of 6% or more. Kansas had a 12% error rate as of 2023. Error rates are improperly made payments, which include paying too much in benefits or not enough. 

Kelly asked federal lawmakers to reject the bill, and she was joined by U.S. senators and governors from other states. 

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, said she knows a grandmother who will lose $200 a month in food assistance. The grandmother is raising her grandson, and cuts to SNAP would force her to “make a decision about whether she’s gonna pay for her grandson’s school supplies, be able to pay rent or buy groceries.” 

She knows another 61-year-old-man who was recently laid off and has diabetes. He’s trying to find a job, but that’ll become more complicated if he can’t find healthy food to manage his illness.

In Kansas, 46% of people on SNAP were children, according to state data. 

Local food banks won’t be able to meet the demand. For every meal a food bank provides, SNAP benefits provide nine. That’s in addition to cuts to food banks earlier this year. 

People are also healthier with SNAP. They miss fewer days of work because of illness, pregnant mothers give birth to fewer low-weight babies, elderly people on SNAP are 30% less likely to take prescription medication, and children who got food assistance were 16% less likely to be obese as an adult, a National Institutes of Health study said. 

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said the currently proposed cuts would take away food assistance from 4 million Americans and reduce benefits for tens of millions of additional Americans. 

“The bill would affect every single one of the 42 million Americans who come on SNAP to put food on the table,” she said. 

Congressional Republicans originally pitched larger cuts in the bill. About $41 billion in cuts were struck down in a Senate rule-making process, but congressional Republicans are rallying to put more cuts back in. 

U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told Fox News that the cuts to SNAP are about restoring integrity to the program. That includes work requirements, for example, which would ensure only the neediest people are getting the assistance — though Kelly blasted the work requirements. 

“We’ve achieved something we haven’t been able to do in a very long time,” Thompson said in May, “and that is restoring the intent of Congress, not by cutting or taking people off the roll for the nutrition programs, but restoring program integrity.” 

The post Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill would kick Kansans off food assistance appeared first on The Beacon.

PILSEN, Kan. (RNS and NPR) — Nestled between rolling prairies and wind turbines about 60 miles north of Wichita, the rural farming community of Pilsen has no post office, gas station or stoplight. What it does have is the Chaplain Kapaun Museum and St. John Nepomucene Church, which draws a couple hundred visitors here each month — a number that is likely to grow significantly in the coming years.

The visitors come because of the Rev. Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest and Korean War hero who’s under consideration by the Vatican for sainthood. Earlier this year, Pope Francis named Kapaun “venerable,” bringing him one step closer to canonization. The road ahead is long, but it could bring big changes to his hometown.

On a recent Friday afternoon at Kapaun’s museum — housed in the rectory where he lived as a young priest in the early 1940s — volunteer tour guide Melissa Stuchlik flipped through the museum’s guest book, filled with names from Kansas, Texas, California and beyond. In the church next door, more than a dozen young men gathered for Mass after making a 75-mile pilgrimage on foot in Kapaun’s honor.

Stuchlik says the journey to Pilsen is a spiritual experience for many visitors.

“There’s something special about driving away from the commotion of the city,” she said. “It’s focusing.”

As an Army chaplain in World War II and the Korean War, Kapaun didn’t carry a gun. But President Barack Obama, while awarding him a posthumous Medal of Honor in 2013 for his bravery on the battlefield, said the priest wielded the mightiest weapon of all.

“A love for his brothers so pure,” Obama said, “that he was willing to die so that they might live.”

Kapaun dragged injured soldiers to safety during the Battle of Unsan. As enemy forces closed in, he allowed himself to be captured so he could continue to care for his men. In the Korean prison camp where they were held, that meant stealing food and medicine to keep them alive and tending to the sick — just as much as it did offering spiritual guidance to men from a wide range of faiths. Kapaun reportedly prayed not only for his fellow prisoners of war, but also for the guards who held them captive.

After falling ill and being denied medical attention, Kapaun died in the camp in 1951 at the age of 35.

As Stuchlik walked a tour group through the Pilsen church, she pointed out the crucifix Kapaun carried as an altar server and the baptismal font in which he was baptized. Both would become second-class relics if — or as Stuchlik says, when — Kapaun is named a saint. Relics are objects venerated by the church due to their connection with a saint, including physical remains and personal artifacts. They serve as tangible points of connection with the holy.

“We’ve had kids (from) as far as South Korea come to be baptized in our baptismal font,” Stuchlik said.

Visitor numbers have picked up in Pilsen since Kapaun was declared venerable. Stuchlik says adding more tours requires keeping the church open every day, meaning higher air conditioning bills in the hot Kansas summer. But it’s nothing compared to what could happen later — the relics of saints can draw tens of thousands of pilgrims to holy places each year. That could mean big changes for Pilsen.

“I think it would be a lot of bed and breakfasts popping up all over the place,” Stuchlik said. “We joke about the McDonald’s and the Hyatt.”

She says there’s a lot for the town to gain — and maybe lose.

“Because right now, if you sat outside on our front porch, you would hear the quiet and the peacefulness. And we’d want to keep some of that.

“But,” she added, “there will always be a place in Pilsen for Father.”

The Vatican declared Kapaun a Servant of God in 1993, beginning a formal investigation into his cause for sainthood. But his cause began to look rosier in 2021 when his remains — thought to be lost in a mass grave in Korea — were identified in an unmarked grave in Hawaii. His body now lies in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita.

The next step on the path to sainthood is beatification, which could jump-start an effort to build a shrine to Kapaun.

“Beatification is really the step where things start to change,” said Scott Carter, coordinator for Kapaun’s cause for sainthood. “I think there’s a great desire to have a shrine to Kapaun.”

Shrines, which are often churches, house relics and artifacts of those venerated by the church. They serve as pilgrimage sites — sacred destinations for Catholics seeking to deepen their connection with their faith through a physical journey.

It’s not clear yet whether Kapaun’s would be in Pilsen, about 3 miles northeast of the farm where he grew up, or elsewhere in the diocese, such as Wichita.

Two hours south, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City wrestled with a similar question after the Vatican beatified Oklahoma martyr and priest Stanley Rother in 2017.

The shrine’s executive director, Miguel Mireles, said leaders determined Rother’s small Oklahoma hometown of Okarche wouldn’t have been able to support the number of visitors the shrine would draw.

“Part of the deal with building a shrine is that you have pilgrims coming on pilgrimage from all over, and you have to have amenities for them,” he said. “They need a place to stay, they need a place to eat.”

Rother’s shrine was built in Oklahoma City and opened to the public in 2023. Last year, around a quarter million people visited.

“Now, there’s more folks that are looking at investing in (hospitality) businesses around us because there’s more demand.”

Mireles says the shrine brought a new, large-capacity church to Oklahoma City’s substantially Hispanic south side, which was struggling with overcrowding in its existing churches. And it served as a new anchor to the city’s growing Catholic community.

“It’s an exciting time to see the church alive, here in our home,” he said.

But sainthood — and a busier Pilsen — could be decades away. The Vatican will next investigate potential miracles attributed to Kapaun’s intercession from heaven. Catholics believe saints can bring prayers to God on their behalf. One confirmed miracle is needed for beatification and a second is needed for canonization as a saint.

“Most of the time, these are medical miracles,” said Scott Carter, the coordinator for Kapaun’s cause for sainthood at the Catholic Diocese of Wichita. “Because we’re able to look for evidence of an actual problem, to show that there’s a change that happens and that change can’t be explained through medical intervention.”

Saints and stories of their miracles perform two key functions in the church, according to Carter. They serve as examples for Catholics on how to live the gospel in today’s age. And they offer solace during times of hardship.

“It reminds us,” he said, “that God has not left us alone.”

One potential miracle attributed to Kapaun involves Chase Kear, a former college athlete who nearly died in a pole-vaulting accident in 2008. Sitting in his parent’s living room in Colwich, Kansas, the memory of the fateful track practice still brings him to tears.

He was 14 feet in the air when, he says, he realized he’d lost control. He flew past the landing mat and landed head-first on the hard track, fracturing his skull from ear to ear.

“All I remember was a white flash,” he said.

After being airlifted to the hospital, Chase was put into a medically induced coma. But it didn’t stop his brain from swelling. Doctors told his mom, Paula, that they’d have to remove part of his skull.

“They told us that he has a better chance of dying on the table than living through the surgery,” she said.

Chase did live through the surgery. And, despite doctors removing around 10% of his brain, he started walking, then talking. He graduated college and got a job; got married and had kids. Paula says he’s defied every doctor’s expectations.

“They cannot explain it,” she said. “And they, every one of them, have said that he is a miracle.”

Through it all, his family and church community prayed. One constant they repeated was the Father Kapaun Prayer, asking him to intercede for Chase’s healing.

Stuchlik thinks Kapaun’s work has continued in the years since his death. Many who live in Pilsen and many who visit have stories of their own.

“They know that Father has touched their lives,” she said. “And we know he touches ours.”

Regardless of what happens next with Kapaun’s cause for sainthood, Stuchlik is excited for his story to continue to spread — and for what it could mean for her community. Including, she says, for its potholes.

“Hopefully, as we get more traffic into Pilsen, we’ll be more of a priority,” she said. “It’d be great if we could get the roads a little less bumpy.”

A broadcast version of this story originally aired on NPR and appears here through a partnership between NPR and RNS.