North Dakota can’t afford this boondoggle of a budget bill

Letters to the Editor | June 2nd, 2025

To the editor:

As a North Dakotan who cares about our rural communities, I’m concerned about the House’s recently passed tax and spending bill. Touted as a “big, beautiful” solution, this 1,100-page boondoggle is anything but — it’s a massive giveaway to the wealthy that threatens to rip vital support away from rural communities.

While a few short-term tax breaks like an increased child tax credit or temporary tip tax relief may sound positive, they’re just window dressing on a bill that, in reality, threatens Medicaid, SNAP and clean energy investment, three pillars of support in our rural state.

In many parts of North Dakota, especially tribal and rural areas, Medicaid is a lifeline. In North Dakota, one in five — more than 170,000 people — rely on Medicaid or Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace plans for health coverage according to KFF (2024). Cutting these programs could force thousands of North Dakotans to lose their coverage.

The bill also takes a hammer to SNAP, a program that supports more than 38,000 North Dakota households (USDA, 2023) and pumps dollars into our small-town economies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that every dollar in SNAP benefits generates about $1.50 in economic activity (USDA Economic Research Service, 2019). Eliminating that support doesn’t just hurt families, it pulls cash out of local grocery stores.

At a time when rural North Dakota finally received long-overdue investments in renewable energy, the House voted to pull the rug out from under us. Co-ops like Great River Energy and Basin Electric Cooperative received $1.5 billion in Biden-era funding through USDA Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program to build wind and solar projects that have the potential to lower energy bills, to create local jobs and bolster our rural community economies. But the reconciliation bill would slash this support by gutting the very programs that are helping North Dakota modernize its grid and stay competitive.

Finally, the plan to open more of our public lands to drilling, mining and logging, while cutting royalty payments to mineral owners, local and tribal governments, is an insult. North Dakotans deserve a fair return on the use of our natural resources and we deserve a say in how our lands are managed.

The bill passed the house with the support of Representative Fedorchak and will be moving to the Senate. We ask plainly: Who do you work for, Representative Fedorchak? Because this bill doesn’t speak for rural North Dakota. It speaks for energy lobbyists who have polluted our lands, drained our resources and ignored our voices for generations. North Dakota Native Vote calls on Senators Cramer and Hoeven to vote no on this reconciliation bill. Stop treating North Dakota as open ground for extraction.

North Dakota Native Vote

Bismarck, North Dakota

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