The Dismantling of Rural Legal Aid

Christopher Chavis wrote on this topic for the Daily Yonder last week.  Here's an excerpt:  

When Reagan became President in 1981, he set out to abolish the LSC and end federal funding for lawyers for the rural poor. He initially proposed abolishing the agency altogether but was rebuked. He did succeed in reducing its budget, which was a consistent theme throughout his term. He also tried to appoint a hostile board, but the Senate also rebuked that. However, this resulted in a series of recess appointments governing the agency. While Reagan did not kill the LSC, he did succeed in weakening it and introducing opposition to its very existence into Republican orthodoxy.

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in decades, House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought to do what Ronald Reagan could not do – finally kill the LSC.

The House Republicans sought to decrease the LSC’s funding incrementally until its ultimate elimination in 1998. However, this also failed. As with Reagan’s failures, the 90s House Republicans succeeded in weakening the LSC. The Republicans passed restrictions on the types of cases the LSC-funded entities could take and effectively banned them from lobbying for and against pending legislation. These restrictions effectively banned LSC-funded entities from advocating for systemic change and limited them to only focusing on the individual issues of their clients.

Why is this especially important to the rural poor? In 2017, when Donald Trump’s Administration proposed eliminating the LSC, then-LSC President Jim Sandman noted to CNN that the LSC provides the majority of legal aid funding for 12 states: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah. Many of these states have large rural populations and high rates of rural poverty.

What is more, when Legal Aid entities lack funds, they close rural offices. For example, when Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) lost state funding in 2011, they closed three rural offices. LANC had lost funding after Republicans successfully took control of both chambers of the North Carolina legislature for the first time in a century.

Over the last 50 years, we have seen the weakening of civil legal aid in the United States. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, the LSC was appropriated $300 Million in 1980. If its appropriation had kept up with inflation, it should have received $936,391,172 in 2017. Instead, they received $385 Million. In 2022, the LSC received $489 Million through the appropriations process. They had requested $1.01 Billion.

The federal government funds the LSC at less than half its estimated need. This lack of funding represents a considerable barrier to expanding rural legal services in this country. The Republican Party’s grudge against civil legal aid started with Ronald Reagan’s fights with rural legal aid lawyers and their decisions continue to influence lives of people in rural spaces.