Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP — these are lifelines, not bargaining chips. I am one of the kids the safety net caught: my mother raised me on food stamps while she built her career at NASA. The bridge held. That is the entire purpose of the program. Right now the net is under threat from two directions. The Republican Study Committee — roughly 80 percent of House Republicans, including our own incumbent — has backed a plan to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69, cutting benefits by up to 13 percent for every worker not yet near retirement, while leaving the program’s solvency problem untouched. And in July 2025, Congress passed the largest SNAP cuts in the program’s history — nearly $200 billion over ten years, sweeping in older workers, parents of teenagers, and the active-duty military families already locked out of the program by the way their housing allowance is counted as income.