A 2026 Farm Bill enters the House…

On February 13, 2026, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, an updated version of the Farm Bill, was introduced in the House of Representatives. Shortly afterwards, on March 4th, the House Agriculture Committee voted 34-17 to advance the bill to the House floor, marking the first major legislative step in process likely to be long and contentious, given the recent extreme polarization on the U.S. Congress.

Supreme Court of the United States in 2023

It's high time for a new farm bill-- the last official version, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, was authorized for 5 years, spanning from 2018 to 2023. Updates to the Farm Bill after 2023 were stalled by political gridlock. Instead of passing a new Farm Bill in 2023, Congress opted for two consecutive one-year extensions of the outdated 2018 framework.

At last, lawmakers are attempting to move forward with a new Farm Bill that will update how the federal government supports or defunds a range of programs affecting agriculture, food systems, conservation, and rural communities across America.

Farm bills have been introduced to Congress starting in 1933. The first one followed the catastrophic impact the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl had on American farmers. In response, the federal government created programs designed to stabilize farm income, conserve land, and ensure a stable food supply. You can read more about the history of the farm bill here or in this prior blog post. Indeed, many posts going back to this blog's inception in 2007 mention the Farm Bill.

Throughout the years, the Farm Bill has grown into one of the federal governments largest and most comprehensive policy packages, typically spanning hundreds or thousands of pages. Programs housed under the Farm Bill include SNAP funding, crop insurance, conservation programs, rural development programs, agricultural research, food distribution programs, and beyond. 

This Farm Bill claims to “expand investments in rural communities, bring science-backed management back to our national forests, and restore regulatory certainty in the interstate marketplace.”

Within the report, two sections specifically caught my eye—the MAHA section and the discussion surrounding California’s Proposition 12. Both sections highlight how the Farm Bill increasingly serves as a platform for broader political debates.

Somerset, El Dorado County, California

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

MAHA Section
The highlighted MAHA section references the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement within the current administration led by Robert F. Kennedy. MAHA aims to address national health issues. As expressed in the one-pager released by the House Agriculture Committee on MAHA in this Farm Bill, the goals of MAHA are to “renew our lands, reforming dietary guidelines to focus on sound nutrition science, ensuring that rural America has access to quality healthcare, and making whole foods such as fruits and vegetables more affordable and accessible for everyday Americans.”

This Farm Bill codifies recent reforms to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) which include prioritizing whole, high-quality protein and full-fat fluid milk and hard cheeses. This Farm Bill also proposes the incorporation of these guidelines into SNAP which may impact which foods are promoted within federal nutrition assistance programs. 

Sign in Sonoma County

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Another initiative highlighted in this one-pager is the establishment of a “local procurement program” that will in theory strengthen partnerships between local producers and the “food distribution community” in effort to ease fresh food distribution.

On paper, the idea sounds promising. Strengthening local food systems could support farmers while improving access to healthier foods. However, the proposal remains vague-- it is not clear (at least to me) who, how, or where these programs will take place.

Another major component of the MAHA section focuses on rural healthcare, an issue that has become increasingly urgent as rural hospitals close and rural healthcare systems become increasingly stressed, as I discussed in this prior blog post.

Clinic in McCloud, California

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2018

This bill proposes expanding programs affecting rural healthcare including the Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program, the Community Facilities Program, and the Rural Hospital Technical Assistance Program (RHTAP). RHTAP is codified within the bill with the goal of “improv[ing] the financial and operational sustainability of rural healthcare facilities, bolstering essential health services for rural residents and preventing hospital closures in their hometowns.” This program originally received funding through the Rural Development Hospital Technical Assistance Program Act of 2025, which appropriated up to $2 million per year from 2025-2029. The proposed Farm Bill extends that funding window, restating the maximum funding for the fiscal years 2027-2031. As I mentioned in this blog post, politicians use policy packages such as this to signal their support of rural farms, families, systems, etc.. Yet the monetary value proposed in each case is insignificant to the cause. Here, $2 million spread among the countless rural healthcare systems that are in serious need is negligible.

Proposition 12 Section
Another section highlighted by the House Committee on Agriculture focuses on California’s Proposition 12 (Prop 12), one of the most controversial livestock welfare laws in the United States. Passed by 63% of California voters in 2018, Prop 12 prohibits the sale of certain pork, veal, and egg products in California unless they are produced according to certain animal welfare standards. These standards focus on enclosure size compliance. 

Chickens in transportation truck in Northwest Arkansas

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017

Corporations like the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) advocate for repealing Prop 12 to allow for the sale of animal products from animals raised in smaller and confined spaces. The American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Pork Producers Council brought suit against the California Department of Food and Agriculture asserting that Prop 12 violated the Dormant Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court upheld Prop 12, yet the current administration and House Republicans have attempted to overturn the decision and influence public opinion or legislatures not to support it anymore—for example, through this one-pager. In this one-pager, the House Committee on Agriculture calls Prop 12 “arbitrary and unscientific.” They state that “retail pork prices in California have increased 18.7% compared to a 6.3% increase nationwide. They then state that “[c]ompliance costs disproportionately affect small and mid-sized producers, who face tighter margins and less access to capital.” While small or mid-sized facilities may be affected more than large ones, Prop 12 has been fully in effect since 2022. I support Prop 12 and find that since the majority of California voters supported it, the NPPC and the MAHA movement should reassess their priorities.

Ultimately, the Farm Bill has increasingly incorporated broader policy debates, but the 2026 rendition highlights how influential national debates and administrations can be on this hallmark legislation. Programs initially intended to support farmers, rural communities, and ecological conservation are now debated at length in an effort to gain an inch of power or influence. However, a new Farm Bill was desperately needed to address the everchanging landscape—especially post-COVID and entering a likely recession.

Rural news, late notice: the mail lag that quietly taxes rural life

American Samoa Post Office (2021) - Pago Pago, AS; Credit: Talanei News 

Without a post office in one’s community, one must resort to traveling farther and farther away in order to have access to this necessary element.

That quote was from a 2011 blog post about post offices as community lifelines. It, along with many other posts on threatened post office closures in 2011 and 2012, highlights a rural baseline: when infrastructure is limited, distance becomes a cost paid in time, fuel, and coordination. In 2026, however, the issue seems less about whether a post office exists and more about the timeliness of mail delivery. The issue of slow mail delivery in rural America is partly caused by public policy.

In 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission (“Commission”) outlined nationwide changes by the United States Postal Service (“U.S.P.S.”) under its “Delivering for America” plan. The plan was introduced shortly after the Trump Administration called for privatizing the U.S.P.S. While it claims the plan is essential for financial stability, critics argue that the Delivering for America plan more resembles a "march to privatize the U.S. mail." Particularly relevant to rural America under this plan is a concept called Regional Transportation Optimization (“RTO”). The Commission explained:

Under RTO, mail dropped off at Post Offices and collection boxes more than 50 miles from a regional hub is collected the next day instead of the same day.

The Commission warned that rural communities would face disproportionate negative impacts. That is, some mail originating in rural areas enters the U.S.P.S. system later than mail from locations closer to processing centers. Hence, rural areas are more likely to experience the additional day and any subsequent delays. Reports from journalists like Sophie Culpepper help illustrate what that extra day looks like in practice for rural communities.

In her 2026 Neiman Lab Report, Culpepper described community newspapers facing mail delays that arrive late, go missing, or show up in batches. She interviewed publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia, all of whom reported a significant increase in complaints about U.S.P.S. delays last summer. 

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager – which serves Knox and Waldo counties – is the primary or only local news source for roughly 80,000 residents. Publishers told Culpepper that they have little visibility into, or control over, U.S.P.S.’s delivery timelines:

When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating…because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber, let alone many.

Rural Post Office (2024) - Salvo, NC
Credit: Wikimedia Commons Contributors

For a weekly newspaper, punctuality is essential. Culpepper directly linked mail delays to rural livelihoods because local advertising relies on timely delivery. From community announcements like auctions and open houses to business inquiries like invitations to local project bids, if the newspaper is late, rural residents not only miss the news; they lose the opportunity to act while it still matters. 

Newspaper delivery is just one issue where mail speed influences rural life. A similar issue arises in the business context. In a 2026 interview with the Federal News Network, Elena Patel described the U.S.P.S. more as a rural economic platform than as a news pipeline. 

Patel, a Brookings senior fellow and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, argued that judging the U.S.P.S. mainly by profitability misses the role the postal service plays in rural economies. Patel pointed out that private carriers can impose geography-based surcharges of up to $20 per package, costs that can wipe out small margins for rural businesses trying to reach distant customers. 

Patel also highlighted the practical functions of post offices in rural areas: shipping goods for e-commerce, maintaining a reliable business address (including P.O. boxes), and accessing counter services such as certified mail. She concluded:

We need to rethink the Postal Service as a public good and fund it appropriately so that it can support rural economies.

Taken together, these stories reveal why the mail delivery system is a rural livelihood issue. Rural areas suffer twice when mail slows down: once in time and once in opportunity. Time is spent on extra trips to town, more phone calls, and contingency plans just to complete basic tasks. Opportunities are missed: auctions and bids close, notices arrive too late, payments are delayed, and small businesses lose customers as shipping slows or becomes more expensive.

This is the quiet tax of a lagging mailbox: not a sudden shutdown, but a consistent decline in timely mail delivery in rural communities. When a national service like the U.S.P.S. is treated as a profit-and-loss problem, delay becomes an acceptable efficiency trade-off.

Burning down the house: California’s fire insurance crisis

California residents have become accustomed to historically large wildfires occurring at an astonishing pace, with eight of the ten largest fires ever recorded in California occurring in the last 10 years. The increasing frequency and destructiveness of wildfires has strained fire insurance systems to a near breaking point, and rural communities are often the most impacted by both wildfires and rising insurance costs.

Fire danger sign on scorched ground outside Klamath. Image source: National Interagency Fire Center

A primer on California’s FAIR Plan

California’s FAIR Plan, commonly referred to as the “insurer of last resort,” was created by the California Legislature in 1968 to act as a temporary safety net for homeowners who were unable to find home insurance from regular providers. Unlike a typical home insurance plan, the FAIR Plan only covers fire damage to structures, not household goods or personal liability. Contrary to public perception, the FAIR Plan is not a state funded insurer. The FAIR Plan is instead a state managed insurance pool comprised of all private insurers licensed to conduct business in California.

When FAIR Plan premiums fail to cover their exposure, the California Insurance Commissioner may levy assessments of up to a total of $1 billion per year (gross, not per insurer) against private insurers based on the market share of these insurers. Ostensibly, private insurers are not permitted to pass the costs of these assessments along to their ratepayers without approval from the Insurance Commissioner.

Trends in FAIR Plan usage

FAIR Plan usage has grown significantly in recent years. In 2009, only 7% of California ZIP codes had FAIR Plan policies that accounted for more than 10% of policies in that ZIP code. By 2022, this was true of 22% of California ZIP codes. FAIR Plan usage tends to be much higher in rural areas, as demonstrated by the below map, published by Avery Bick and Nam Nguyen in this post.



To select a few extreme examples from this map, one ZIP code located in Placer County where the largest community, Foresthill, has a population of 1692, has a FAIR Plan rate of 69.625%. Another ZIP code in Orange county has a FAIR Plan rate of 79.67%, and their largest community, Silverado, has a population of only 932.

While the FAIR Plan was not intended to insure such a large proportion of California’s residents, the reason why that trend is unfolding is quite clear: private insurers are fleeing the state as fast as they can. State Farm (still the largest insurer in California) and Allstate stopped writing new homeowner fire policies in 2022. A series of other large insurers left the state in the following years, with Nationwide, Farmers, Travelers, Tokio, and American National all ceasing to write new policies from 2023-2025.

As FAIR Plan usage has expanded, premiums for FAIR Plan policies have also increased significantly, with some consumers seeing rate increases (rarely) as high as 300% in a single year. While the average FAIR Plan policy costs around $3,200 per year, it is common for policies to cost more than $10,000 per year in high fire risk areas.

Why has rural California been hit so hard by the insurance crisis?

The reason that this crisis has hit rural California particularly hard is relatively intuitive. As phrased by Prof. Minnich of UC Riverside, “People want to live with nature, but they don’t recognize that nature is explosively flammable.”

Housing in wildland urban interface (WUI) areas is much more prone to fire damage. Defined commonly as an area where urban development mingles with undeveloped wildland vegetation, WUI overlaps significantly with areas typically considered rural, but it may also include development on the outskirts of urban centers.

Residential development in WUI is the fastest growing land use type in the United States, with the number of houses in WUI increasing by 46% from 1990 to 2020. California has seen the greatest increase of houses in WUI, with one third of California households in WUI as of 2020. Note the striking resemblance that the below map of change in WUI in California, published by Prof. Miriam Greenberg in this article, bears to the above map of FAIR Plan coverage rates.



The increasing number of houses in high fire risk areas coupled with more frequent and destructive fires have proved a hurdle that insurers are often unable to clear without substantial premium increases.

The future of the FAIR Plan

Increased reliance on the FAIR Plan, along with massive exposure from the Palisades and Eaton fires has led Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to levy the first assessment against FAIR Plan member companies since 1994. The assessment is for the full $1 billion allowed. 

Additionally, Commissioner Lara mandated the use of wildfire catastrophe models in FAIR Plan's most recent rate increase application. The rate increase currently proposed would average a 35.8% increase, with about half of policyholders seeing an increase between 40% and 50%.

In addition to these efforts by the Department of Insurance, a variety of legislative measures have been passed or proposed to address California's insurance crisis. One of the most notable among these is Assemblymember Lisa Calderon's (D, 56th District) AB 1680, which seeks to overhaul the FAIR Plan in a number of ways, perhaps most significantly by extending FAIR Plan coverage to water damage, personal injury liability, and other coverages typical of standard home insurance policies. 

Conclusions

These and other measures taken by California in response to the Palisades and Eaton fire make clear that policymakers know action is needed, but there is little doubt that they are inadequate. While efforts to mitigate the costs to FAIR Plan policyholders are important, California's insurance crisis is inherent in our homebuilding choices and lack of adequate wildfire hardening. As previous blog posts have noted, wildfire prevention efforts in rural areas of California are severely underfunded. Without serious efforts to mitigate wildfire risk, California is unlikely to halt the exodus of private insurers. 

If you build it, they will come: Rural relocation incentive programs prove popular

In an effort to combat rural depopulation, small communities across the United States are thinking of inventive ways to encourage relocation. Programs have popped up across the country offering financial incentives to new residents, ranging from down payment assistance to cash stipends. These packages can include anything from free internet service and recreation passes to lunch with the mayor. 

An earlier post on this blog discussed how rural communities are attracting California’s remote workers to Indiana incentive programs. This post discusses two programs that have emerged through state  initiatives in the last few years since that post that are seeking to draw folks from all backgrounds to find their new rural homes. Both programs offer bigger financial incentives than previous programs, and they specifically reward homeownership. 

An infrastructure project in Hickman, NE, an hour northwest of Pawnee City.

One program in Pawnee City, Nebraska, a town of about 900 residents, 90 minutes southeast of Lincoln, attracted considerable media attention last year. As part of their Vision 2030 plan, the city is offering $50,000 in down payment assistance to new home buyers. One video on the program from business news service Morning Brew garnered over one million views.  The money for this program has come from a grant from the Nebraska Affordable Housing Trust,

Over the next five years, the city plans to build 25 houses, multiple apartment buildings, and new community amenities. These projects are set for infill lots already owned by the city, which has helped to reduce costs.  The first two houses will be sold for $325,000, significantly higher than the average home price of $116,768 in Pawnee City. 

But the buzz has proved to be more than just media hype. The Chamber of Commerce reported receiving 115 applications for the two homes in the first two weeks. To qualify, applicants must make no more than 120% of the Area Median Income (AMI), $108,375 for a family of four.

Aaron Sawyer, Pawnee City's Economic Development Director, explained to Morning Brew what kind of applicants they are looking for:

The ideal people for these homes that we're building here in Pawnee City would be people that work from home. They can get a lot more bang for their buck to come to a small town like this, in a safe environment, and their same job, and just have a much better lifestyle.

Pawnee City isn't the only place trying to attract the growing number of remote workers to rural areas. Ascend WV is one of the largest relocation programs, covering several rural communities across West Virginia. A partnership between Brad D. Smith, former CEO of Intuit, Governor Patrick Morrissey, the West Virginia Department of Tourism, and the University of West Virginia, this program provides incentives for remote workers to move to the Mountain State for at least two years. 

Maverick's Bar, located in Morgantown, WV, an Ascend WV community.

Ascend WV is offering $12,000 cash payments for relocation, paid out in monthly installments over two years. If participants choose to buy a home at any point in their two years, the remaining money can be paid out as a lump sum for a downpayment or other home-buying expenses. The program also offers free outdoor recreation and gear rentals, access to coworking spaces, professional development through West Virginia University, and exclusive social events.

The program seeks to grow West Virginia's economy while helping remote workers find a community to call home and get involved in. West Virginia recorded the ninth-worst job growth of any state coming out of the pandemic, and post-COVID corporate investment has been concentrated in wealthier-than-average counties. This program could drive spending and tax revenue to more remote locations, like New River Gorge. The community there still faces long-standing infrastructure concerns, like sufficient housing for residents, even after the recent designation of New River Gorge as a National Park. 

Ascend WV complements First Ascent, a program to support recent graduates of West Virginia University and avoid brain-drain.WVU Today reported that as of September 5, 2025, 

[B]oth programs have drawn nearly 65,000 applicants, relocated upwards of 950 new residents, and kept 60 graduates in West Virginia, boasting above a 96% retention rate. Notably, 38% of participants also are West Virginia homeowners.

It remains too early to tell if these relocation programs are enough to meaningfully combat rural depopulation over the long term. However, these programs have proven incredibly popular and created significant online chatter. Attracting remote workers could pay off considerably, as they are able to increase the tax base and drive up consumer spending, without taking much-needed jobs away from residents. 

The gain isn't solely with the rural community, however. Young people with remote jobs report feeling less happy and engaged in their communities. These programs, especially those that offer social engagement and recreation opportunities, can help people find their place in the world. As twin crises of affordability and loneliness impact young Americans, programs like these may offer a chance for rural areas to revitalize community, reverse demographic trends, and shore up tax revenue. 

Big tech sets its sights on rural Arizona

The blog’s most recent post discussed the Rural Health Transformation Program. Passed as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” this “rural slush fund” was added as a last-minute sweetener to secure the support of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

One of the $50 billion fund’s stated goals is “tech innovation.” States utilizing the funds must spend them on three or more approved uses, including:

Providing training and technical assistance for the development and adoption of technology-enabled solutions that improve care delivery in rural hospitals, including remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies.

This sounds promising. Rural hospitals face unique challenges, and technology that improves care and increases capacity could be transformative. An earlier post on this blog discussed how RFK Jr. has promoted AI nurses as a potential solution to the rural health care crisis. That optimistic vision contrasts sharply with how artificial intelligence is currently arriving in many rural areas.

In December 2025, Sharon Goldman reported for Fortune on a massive AI data center project planned for rural Arizona. The development would be built on a 2,000-acre property called Hassayampa Ranch, located about 50 miles west of Phoenix near the unincorporated community of Tonopah in western Maricopa County. The area is home to a few hundred residents, drawn there for its tranquility and clear skies for stargazing.

Photo caption: Buckeye Ranch, Tonopah. © Nextdoor

This quiet corner of the desert has become the center of intense activity since developer Anita Verma-Lallian purchased the land for $51 million, backed by billionaire venture capitalist and Trump mega-donor Chamath Palihapitiya. The plan is to spend as much as $25 billion to build a data center that would produce 1.5 gigawatts of compute and consume as much electricity as a million homes.

Photo caption: Visualization of the land parcel. © Jason Ma, 2025

Investment in rural communities sounds exciting, but who benefits? As Andrew Aitken noted in The Builder Bureau, AI is largely being developed for and used by urban populations, while rural people continue to struggle with poor network coverage and slow internet speeds. So while it remains unclear whether Tonopah will reap any benefits from hosting AI infrastructure, residents are already bearing the costs.

This pattern echoes concerns raised in prior entries on this blog. A May 2024 post discussed how rural folks in Montana are resisting efforts to make their land a “carbon sponge” for urban America. As one county commissioner put it:

The question I keep hearing is, ‘Why are they making us the dumping ground for the rest of the country?’

A similar dynamic is at play in Tonopah, with rural Arizona poised to bear the environmental burden of infrastructure that primarily serves urban tech consumers.

In her Fortune article, Goldman explains that Tonopah residents are already worried about incoming noise and light pollution, traffic and infrastructure strain, and negative impacts on property values. Concerned community members have organized and signed petitions against the development. But with such a small population, their political power is limited against billionaire-backed interests. As Kathy Fletcher, a 76-year-old resident who lives on a one-acre plot next to the Hassayampa Ranch site, said:

All we can do is plead with the people here... We’re kind of treated like the redheaded stepchild, and they just think they can throw anything they want out here... We’re having a difficult time fighting the battle to tell people, ‘You can make a difference.’

Another major concern is water. AI data centers generate vast amounts of heat and require millions of gallons of water per day for cooling. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a medium-sized data center can consume up to 110 million gallons of water per year—equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can use up to 5 million gallons per day. For the people of Tonopah, who rely almost exclusively on ground wells for their water needs, the prospect of a massive development tapping into their water supply is daunting.

As Dillon Beckett wrote on this blog, utility-scale projects are “overwhelmingly sited in rural areas” and tend to “benefit a sliver of the community’s social strata (wealthy, often absentee landowners, with extensive real estate holdings) while spreading the cost across the entire community.” The Hassayampa Ranch data center fits this pattern: Silicon Valley investors stand to profit, while local residents face rising utility costs, depleted aquifers, and a transformed landscape.

Tonya Pearsall, a Tonopah resident who has lived in the area since 1999, feels a profound sense of loss as this project rapidly changes the character of her once-calm community:

We used to be able to see the Milky Way—that’s why we moved out here... It’s painful... I could break down and cry.

Photo caption: The night sky over Maricopa County. © David Iversen, 2025.

There is some movement in Congress to address these concerns. Representative Jim Costa (D-CA) has introduced the Unleashing Low-Cost Rural AI Act, which would require the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Energy to study the impact of AI data center expansion on rural areas, including effects on energy supply, consumer costs, and infrastructure needs. Whether such a study will lead to meaningful protections for communities like Tonopah remains to be seen.

The Hassayampa Ranch project is not unique. Similar fights are playing out in Louisiana, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where rural residents are pushing back against data center proposals that promise economic development but threaten local resources and quality of life.

As AI continues its rapid expansion, rural communities across the country will increasingly find themselves on the front lines of a familiar struggle: who decides what happens to rural land, and who bears the cost of progress?

Literary Ruralism (Part LI): Attention to "rural" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, on China's rise

Breakneck:  China's Quest to Engineer the Future by technology analyst Dan Wang was published last month by W.W. Norton.  The promotional blurb touts the book, in part, thusly:  

Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China—one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.

I came to the book after listening to Ross Douthat's interview with Wang on the "Interesting Times" podcast.  While Wang's book primarily contrasts the differing approaches to development and infrastructure of the United States and China, it often raises the matter of rural-urban difference and how those differences play out in the two countries.  I was intrigued, for example, by Douthat's comparison of Guizhou, a backwater Chinese province that Wang uses to illustrate an underdeveloped place, to West Virginia.  The transcript from the podcast features this from Wang: 

Guizhou... is a land where a local said, “Not three feet of land is flat, not three days go by without rain and not a family has three silver coins.”  China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

That's a good introduction to the book excerpts that follow.  I have highlighted the word "rural" in context.  

Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith. 

The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. (pp. 5-6)

* * * 

The Guizhou locals we chatted with were prouder of their bridges than anything else. My friends and I cycled across bridges that were set above plunging ravines. State media boasts that Guizhou has become a “museum of bridges,” a few of which are trying to develop into tourism sites: The tenth-highest bridge in Guizhou (which is twenty-third globally) hosts the world’s highest bungee jump. Each time the engineers build a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere. 

(I am reminded of what a "bridge to nowhere" connotes in the United States; read some of my analysis of the political implications of the phenomenon here). 

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One day, Christian remarked on how few working-age adults we saw in Guizhou: Those who don’t have a job making guitars have mostly migrated to other provinces, leaving small children in the care of grandparents. In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school. 

In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it. 

Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis. (pp. 27-28)

* * * 

The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects. There’s something for the ordinary consumer too, but it’s nowhere near as exciting. To promote consumption, the plan suggests measures like “expanding the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas,” “improving product recalls,” and “improving in-city duty-free shops.” Fine measures, but puny relative to orbiting Mars. The economic planners have obviously poured their hearts into the scientific projects, whereas the consumption measures look like a hasty afterthought. When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income. 

Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the regime into the twenty-first century. Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks. Maybe even Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have been understood as socialism. When the engineering state works, it can produce beautiful cities like Shanghai. But Shanghai is exceptional: It has been China’s richest and most westernized city for the better part of a century. The engineering state also produces a lot of problems. To see them, we should return one more time to Guizhou. 

Under the gleaming new bridges lurk not only poverty but also a massive debt burden. The underlying hope of Guizhou’s construction is that infrastructure will invite lasting economic activity. Part of that has worked out: Guizhou incomes have risen by nearly 10 percent annually from 2011 to 2022, driven partially by urbanization and by the tourism facilitated by new infrastructure.  (pp. 37-38)

* * *  

But most of Guizhou’s infrastructure spending looks dubious. Its super-high bridges aren’t producing the revenue to recoup anywhere near their super-high costs. Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission. 

Guizhou’s debt has kindled Beijing’s wrath. In China, the only people scarier than debt collectors are political inspectors from the central government. The Communist Party has unleashed teams of officers from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition, enforcing doctrine and discipline on its members. (pp. 38-39) 

The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises. Two researchers at the University of Colorado have documented China’s coercive tactics to compel locals to leave their homes. It is a process it calls “thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent. 

Reckless construction has often produced rubbish quality. Builders employed cheap materials to construct even schoolhouses. The 2008 earthquake that tore through Sichuan also shattered thousands of schoolrooms, killing five thousand children (according to official figures).  (pp. 48-49)

* * * 

Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. 

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai. The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.

I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other.  (pp. 49-50) 

* * * 

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments. 

Rather than worry about bond vigilantes, the engineering state has focused on delivering material improvements for the people. Rural folks in Guizhou have seen their material conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past few decades. The mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure is part of the reason that the Communist Party has held on to consent of the governed.  (p. 54) 

I'll write a separate post later about the rural-urban divide in relation to China's one-child policy.  

iPhone factory rises in rural India. Does it provide rural development lessons for the United States?

Alex Travelli and Hari Kumar report from Devanahalli, India in yesterday's New York Times on the pending opening of an iPhone factory.  The story features many descriptors suggesting the remoteness and rurality of the place and concludes with a brief comparison to rural development efforts in the United States.  The plant, which will be fully functioning and employing 40,000 people by the end of this calendar year, responds to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's “Make in India” policy, announced in 2015.  The Modi government has committed $26 billion to subsidizing strategic manufacturing goals since 2020. 

A new iPhone factory in an out-of-the-way corner of India looks like a spaceship from another planet. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world’s iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli. 

* * *

By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 and 30 percent of iPhones in India.

* * *

The effects on the region are transformative. It’s a field day for job-seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple’s factory towns in China is coalescing in India’s heartland. 

* * *

India’s most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the United States, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half its workers are involved in farming.

* * *

India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables.

Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory’s day shift. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck.

It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn’s ambitions for India possible. Mr. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind American factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there.

Thus, while Trump wants this to happen in the United States, it probably won't, "without sustained government financial support to revive U.S. manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers."   

The USDA pulls back from rural communities

The Trump administration's efforts to reduce the size of government now include reducing investment in rural America. The administration recently fired hundreds of staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development program, part of a broader firing of 6,000 staff at USDA. Many staff are now being reinstated following court challenges to the layoffs, but their futures remain uncertain.

Alongside the layoffs and uncertainty, the Trump administration ordered staff not to perform community outreach, which Carrie Decker, a West Virginia employee of USDA Rural Development, said was "90% of what we do." 

All of this looks like it will have a profound effect on rural communities across the U.S. Frank Morris at KCUR reports, 

[t]he U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development is Washington’s chief tool to promote economic growth in rural counties — providing funding for everything from renovating old hospitals to providing faster internet service.

Previous bloggers have highlighted some of the many benefits provided by Rural Development. The agency 

does things that local governments can't afford - building water supply systems for small, shrinking towns, for instance, shoring up hospitals, buying police cars. It's an economic lifeline to places without a lot of options. 

Rural Development has a long history of bringing needed investment to rural areas. 

USDA Rural Development is rooted in the Great Depression, when the Rural Electrification Administration brought power lines to hundreds of remote communities. The agency has sustained thousands of towns over the decades, often by supporting the businesses and farms that bring money into the local economy. 

Now, government upheaval under the new administration is draining the resources that could go to rural people and towns. Former Missouri head of USDA Rural Development Kyle Wilkens noted that the current process of firing and rehiring is highly inefficient:

Think of the time that you're taken away from these folks doing their actual job and that is money. It's all it is. It's money.

Many of the grants already cut are relatively small, but provide important support for small-scale programs in rural communities.

One of the most notable examples is the Mancos Conservation District in Colorado, which had its $630,000 grant for the Equity in Conservation Outreach Program canceled. This grant was intended to support small farmers, tribal communities, and local outreach efforts in the region.

The Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council in Kansas City also faced a setback when its $165,000 Farmers Market Promotion Program grant was canceled. Director Alana Henry explained that, despite the cancellation, the community is working hard to keep their farmers market going and continue supporting local growers.

While much of the Trump administration's efforts at "government efficiency" seem to be aimed at reducing red tape and allowing greater private investment, there does not appear to be private capital ready to fill the void caused by cuts to Rural Development programs. Owen Hart, from the National Association of Counties, pointed out that

[i]n a lot of these communities, USDA Rural Development is the most important partner. You can’t rely on private investment coming in. The market’s just not there for it. You can't rely on philanthropy, like you can in a lot of urban areas to meet some of these needs. It is a really, really crucial partner to a lot of these folks.

Without any clear benefits from slashing this vital economic lifeline besides nominal budgetary relief, the administration appears to be primarily sending a political message. USDA recently announced that it was allowing applicants for Rural Development's energy programs to update their applications by removing DEIA and climate-related content, which it framed as an 

opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals.

Ignoring the inefficiency of resubmitting already-submitted applications, this announcement shows that the political messaging of these changes is the point. USDA's emphasis on "energy independence" also indicates that the administration is ignoring or downplaying the many beneficial programs overseen by Rural Development that do not involve energy, such as grants and business support for small farmers. 

Punching down at rural areas by the Trump administration is not limited to USDA. The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households, many in more rural areas of the country, offset the cost of high energy bills. Much like the Rural Development cuts, the obvious impact of cutting the 25 staff at LIHEAP is that 6.2 million Americans who relied on those funds will struggle to make ends meet.

The frustratingly narrow focus on "energy independence" at USDA under the Trump administration seems particularly backwards when considering the strong support Trump received from many rural parts of this country - and his efforts to cast his campaign as advocating for rural people. One can more easily imagine a Republican administration wanting to promote its investments in rural farms and communities than risking the backlash associated with cutting those programs. 

One reason for these cuts is to reduce citizens' faith in, and reliance on, the federal government to provide benefits to the public. The administration's directive to reduce community outreach at Rural Development, even while outreach staff remain employed, reduces visibility for agency programming without saving any money. Instead, making communities less aware of the possible benefits of working with federal agencies is the point. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis recounts an illustrative scene in which a local official requested that USDA staff not show up to the ribbon-cutting for a new grocery store in his town that was built with Rural Development funds, because he said that people in town did not think highly of the federal government. 

(I highly recommend The Fifth Risk for further reading on USDA Rural Development, as well as other vital and under-appreciated areas of the federal government.)

Even if this administration succeeds in further reducing communities' faith in government, that success will not create more jobs or bring better internet access or hospitals to rural communities. Hopefully, in the same way that farmers are lobbying for relief from Trump's tariffs, there can be some political will to push back against these cuts. But unlike Big Ag, the people served by Rural Development are not already wealthy and politically influential. They need government support just to get by, or in the hopes of improving areas that have historically suffered from under-investment. Are these cuts truly worth the pain?

The rise of the "barndominium" and the "shouse"

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, migration to rural areas has substantially increased. From 2019 to 2023, large urban areas like New Orleans and Cleveland experienced smaller population growth than average as many city dwellers moved to rural and rural adjacent places. The loosening of in-person work requirements likely played a large role in this migration to rural areas.

Theoretically, the pandemic's resolution and subsequent return to in-person work should have ended the rural migration trend, yet many Americans are still trading city life for country living. For instance, as of late 2024, young families with children were increasingly leaving big cities, opting instead for rural counties and small metropolitan areas. 

The benefits of living in the country are somewhat obvious. Cities tend to come with a higher cost of living, overwhelmed public school systems, higher rates of crime, and greater environmental pollution. This reality, combined with a rising cultural appreciation for the countryside aesthetic, has set the stage for homeowners to embrace a lesser-known phenomenon: the "barndominium."

Picture this: 14 acres in the middle of nowhere, abundant open space, and the opportunity to design your own home at a far lower cost than purchasing a traditional house. For people like the Barndominium Lady Stacey Lynn Bell, who built her dream barndominium and now helps others do the same, the appeal is irresistible. In a recent New York Times article reporting on the barndo's surge in popularity, Bell explained that: 

More people want bigger homes, more distant neighbors, land to raise chickens and grow vegetables, and an environment 'not as hustle-bustle.'

In the same piece, Brittany VanHouten shared that she and her husband expect their barndominium in Citrus County, Florida to be 4,500 square feet and include a home theater, library, craft room, and spacious detached garage, once finished. The Florida couple estimated their new home would cost under $300,000, which falls on the lower end of the average price to build a home in their area.

On top of all these advantages, barndominiums are often disaster-resilient, long-lasting, and energy-efficient. This is largely due to their slow-to-rust steel frames and customary metal roofs, which can withstand high winds and hurricanes. Pertinently, climate and disaster-resilient features are "very important" to 86% of homebuyers, according to a recent Zillow survey.

Of course, the barndominium has its disadvantages, too. As with rural living in general, taking up residence on vast open land may mean sacrificing easy access to schools, places of employment, restaurants, and shopping centers. 

A partial remedy to this problem is the shouse, an even more niche category of housing also taking over rural America. The term "shouse" is derived from a combination of "shop" and "house." While the shouse is extremely barndo-esque, it provides the additional option of allowing owners to combine their living space with their workshop. This feature virtually eliminates commute time, unless you count the time it takes to walk from one room to another.

Further, while a greater emphasis on function over form renders shouses somewhat less cosmetically appealing than their barndo counterparts, these structures share many of the same advantages, including lower costs and energy efficiency. 

If migration trends over the last few years are predictive of those to come, rural areas are likely to continue to experience an influx of new residents from bigger cities. Unfortunately, housing prices have already begun to increase in smaller towns and rural areas due to this shift. However, for those with the resources, patience, and vision, a barndominium or a shouse might allow potential homebuyers to make their rural dreams a rural reality.

Death of the American Dream for rural America

Is the American Dream ("the Dream") dead? The Dream posits that success results from work and sacrifice rather than the circumstances in which one is born. However, in recent years, some have argued that the so-called Dream is illusory, used only as a "strategic and intricate device crafted to keep you where you are." Antagonists propose that the Dream only adds wealth to the rich while keeping dream-chasers on the hamster wheel. 

The Dream can be measured by analyzing generational mobility, which refers to whether an individual's social and economic opportunities depend upon their parents' income or social status. Less generational mobility suggests that the Dream is dead or dying, and more mobility indicates the opposite. Upward mobility means that an individual was born to parents in the bottom 25% of income earners and that they later fall within the top 25% of income earners in America. 

According to most data, residents of rural counties are more likely to be persistently poor, with at least a 20 percent poverty rate persisting for at least 30 years. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, "In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst."

According to some researchers, five factors directly correlate with generational mobility: (1) residential segregation, (2) income inequality, (3) school quality, (4) social capital, and (5) family structure. Rural counties have lower incomes, levels of educational attainment, life expectancies, and limited access to health insurance and healthcare providers than their urban counterparts. Why, then, do some rural counties have the highest upward mobility rates in the country but also some of the lowest? 

Perhaps another factor—the ease of migration from rural communities to urban ones—can explain this seeming disparity. Is the solution to "attaining" the Dream to be born into a rural community and leave as soon as possible for an urban one? If leaving is the only answer, should the Dream even be considered a dream?

Supposing that achieving the Dream for rural people is premised on leaving their community, each pursuit diminishes the Dream for those left behind. If the best and brightest pursue education or economic opportunities elsewhere, growth remains stagnant for the home community. Published by The Sun, a U.C. Davis law student references Fresno's inability to attract educated professionals, a phenomenon called "brain drain," the migration of educated and skilled individuals away from their home region. His solution to attract young professionals includes increasing career opportunities, housing, arts, entertainment, and sports.

While stagnant growth may be one side effect of the Dream, one more insidious issue is the Dream's tarnishing effect. If everyone can succeed, why do unsuccessful people exist? Like Vice President J.D. Vance, proponents of the Dream argue that lack of success results from laziness. However, those proponents forget what the evidence proves—a lack of resources impacts the likelihood of success. Often, proponents of the Dream ignore their privilege to bolster their ego and achievements.

Like most things, the Dream may be aspirational in most parts of America. Nevertheless, it seemingly impedes and damages rural America's vitality. It is okay to recognize that dreams vary between people and places. Arguably, for rural America, the question is not whether the Dream is dead but whether it should be.

How marijuana funds schools in rural Colorado

Colorado in 2012, via state-wide referendum, voted to legalize recreational-use marijuana, becoming (alongside Washington) one the first states to do so. One of the campaign promises of legalization in Colorado was the promise that the excess tax revenue generated by legalization would be used to help fund construction projects in public school districts.

Most of these extra funds are distributed through BEST grants (Building Excellent Schools Today) which are used on these construction projects. While the tax breakdown changed in the initial years following legalization, in 2019 the Colorado House passed House Bill 1055, which demanded that 100% of all funds raised by the excise tax on wholesale retail marijuana was dedicated to BEST grants, to be distributed based on an application program available to all public school districts in the state.

As stated on the Colorado Department of Education website (where a school district will start their application for a grant), “BEST grants are competitive, awarded annually and in most cases must be supplemented with local district matching funds.” In order to be awarded a BEST grant then, it is highly likely that a school district, to be competitive, must be able to help supplement a large chunk of the funding.

An overview of BEST grants awarded from the 2019/2020 to 2024/2025 school years bears this out. For the 2019/20 cycle, money supplied by the districts represented 41.18% of the money used for the projects; for 2020/21 it was 47.11%, in 2021/22 it was 45.36%, in 2022/23 it was 43.85%, in 2023/24 it was 41.42% and in 2024/25 it was 34.86% (a compiled list of excel documents from the Colorado Department of Education website detailing BEST Grants from 2019-2024 that has the raw data referred to throughout this blog post can be found here).

It seems it can be hard for rural districts to put up the money to be competitive for these grants. In every year from 2019 to 2024, districts that would have been awarded grants, but were denied due to lack of supplemental funding, were exclusively rural districts (with two exceptions in 2020-21, when a project in Boulder and a project in Pueblo were unable to raise the funds).

It is worth looking at a specific example of how this system of requiring matching funds can directly impact the rural school districts that need the resources. In the 2024/25 grant cycle, school district North Park R-1 in Jackson County, Colorado requested a $52,713,524.19 BEST grant for replacing the Preschool to 12th grade school in the district that serves 150 students, where about 50% of students come from poverty (according to the school district-not the official census data). The grant requested the state of Colorado to help replace the only school that is in North Park R-1. The building is almost sixty years old and is “challenging to work around [] due to the asbestos that is commonly found in buildings of this age.” North Park R-1 was denied, due to being unable to raise the $19,032,673.00 they needed to raise in supplemental funds. The failure to raise the funds can hardly be shocking, as the median household income in Jackson County (according to the 2020 census) is $41,809 and the yearly revenue of the school district is $4,854,820 (with yearly expenditures of $4,765,740). In order to raise the supplemental money for the BEST grant, there was a $20 million bond placed on the November 2024 ballot. The bond, proposed by the school district, would have involved a small raise in property tax on the residents to pay for the roughly $20 million supplement-the increase would max out to $1.8 million in new taxes raised each year.

Jackson County, who voted for Donald Trump by 55 points, failed to pass the bond measure. The small rural community in Jackson County can hardly be blamed on not wanting to raise property taxes in a community that has many families who live on a small/fixed income, and who are facing shrinking enrollment in their school district.

It is not that the BEST grants alone can be blamed, but in the 2024/25 cycle, all of the denied BEST grants (due to lack of supplemental funding) were projects asking for new schools, or drastic renovations to existing schools, in small rural districts. It helps showcase the broader trend, that these small rural districts are working with outdated buildings and worse resources, and state programs that are meant to help are still leaving them in the dust.