We’re on day seven of a government shutdown, and there’s no end in sight. In the US, we’ve endured 11 shutdowns (including this one) since 1980, when we began requiring all nonessential government activities to cease when legislation to finance government operations hasn’t been passed before the start of the fiscal year. (The federal fiscal...Read More

On July 31, 2025, more than 30 cross-sector partners gathered in Columbia, Missouri, meeting inside the incredible new Food Bank Market at The Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri. Convened as the Missouri Rural Food Access Partnership, our charge was clear: to understand how the newly-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is reshaping...Read More

If you’ve felt like rent keeps rising faster than paychecks, you’re not imagining it. Federal rental assistance—Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs), public housing funding, homelessness programs, and key state and local tools like HOME and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG)—are the bedrock that help low-income Missourians stay housed, even as rent goes up.   Right now, Washington...Read More

Tonight, I’m catching a flight to Washington, D.C. to meet with staffers of Missouri’s congressional delegation and express Missourians’ opposition to the $300 billion in proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Congress’s “one big, beautiful bill.” Empower Missouri’s focus has traditionally been on state-level policy, but the proposed cuts to Medicaid...Read More

This week, committees in the U.S. House of Representatives released major reconciliation proposals with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs. As the title suggests, these proposals will have big impacts for Missouri families, our healthcare, our nutrition, and our state budget. The federal government controls the budgets for most major anti-poverty programs. Unfortunately, many...Read More

Governor Parson’s decision to end the $300 federal unemployment assistance on June 12th, 2021 is an affront to Missouri workers and could prove harmful to the state’s economy. Ending the assistance, which has kept thousands of Missouri families afloat, would punish Missouri families who are already suffering through an economic downturn.  In Missouri, an estimated...Read More

On Nov. 27th, 2019, Empower Missouri submitted a comment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding their proposed change to how SNAP benefit allocations are calculated. Please use the link below to download or view our comment. Empower Missouri USDA Comment – State Heating and Cooling Standard Utility AllowancesDownloadRead More

The process of making comments on proposed federal rule or regulation changes has been an important but underutilized tool for a long time. In recent months, however, organizations like Empower Missouri have started to urge the advocates we work with to submit these comments on various proposed changes that impact the safety net. Empower Missouri...Read More

In August 2019, Empower Missouri’s Executive Director, Jeanette Mott Oxford, offered testimony in a special hearing on Criminal Justice. “I think sometimes we wish we had a magic mirror, and we could hold it up to people and it would say, ‘I see racism in you. I see racism in you. No racism in you.’...Read More

To my ear, “sequester” is a lovely word. Despite what the dictionary says about its synonyms like segregate, seclude and withdraw or its chemical meaning related to binding and absorbing carbon dioxide, it has a certain lyrical quality. I almost expect it to be a dessert wine (“I’ll take a glass of the Sequester, please”)...Read More