For 35 years, the University of Minnesota Extension Service has funded nutrition education in low-income areas statewide, including innovative projects like the medicine garden at the Ramsey County Fairgrounds, which connects the county’s military veterans to a Native American grower and healer.

On Monday, all 59 of Extension’s full-time nutrition educators received termination letters, permanently ending the $7.2 million education and outreach program.

Extension issued letters to 700 partners Tuesday — from clinics and daycares to parks and food banks — explaining that heavy cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, had forced the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families to slash grant funding for the dozens of health and wellness coordinators who run special projects or teach healthy eating to SNAP-eligible families across the state.

The cuts are a direct result of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” approved last week by the Republican-led Congress. The eight tribal nations in Minnesota, alongside SNAP education programs nationwide, face the same straits as a result of the wide-ranging, 800-page budget document.

“Minnesota was a pilot program when it started 35 years ago. This is not temporary. It is a permanent cut,” said Patricia Olson, director of Extension’s Department of Family, Health and Wellbeing, which is based in St. Paul. “It is a national program. How do you wind down a program that is 35 years old?”

“We’re sad about losing staff, but also about the kind of work we were doing in the community,” she added.

The sweeping budget bill, which includes both spending cuts and tax cuts expected to add $3 trillion to $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, has already had repercussions for Minnesota and the East Metro, with deeper impacts likely as the legislation’s many varied provisions take effect over the coming months and years.

Implications for Medicaid

Nearly $1 trillion in cuts to state Medicaid allotments nationwide may not be fully implemented until 2027 or 2028, leaving big choices ahead for the state of Minnesota, which determines how federal Medicaid dollars are distributed, said Karen Kleinhans, chief executive of the Community Dental Care. The nonprofit, which maintains offices in Maplewood and four other locations across the state, charges low-income patients on a sliding scale; 88% of its clients are on Medicaid, while others are uninsured.

Kleinhans fears the state may roll back the increased Medicaid reimbursements that she and other safety-net dental care providers lobbied hard for in 2022, or make even deeper cuts. “We can’t predict what the state will do with the very limited dollars that will be coming to them,” she said. “If you are on Medicaid, you should just make sure you get some dental care before the end of this year, because you might lose those benefits.”

Minnesota is one of a handful of states where the counties conduct Medicaid screenings and connect seniors and the disabled to services. Facing screening backlogs as long as eight months or more, Ramsey County recently committed to hiring 80 new financial assistance workers, including 60 screeners. As a result of Trump’s budget, yearly screening requirements are doubling to twice-annually, moving a goal post that already was exceedingly difficult for some counties to reach.

“We’ve got to certify people twice a year. That’s a huge administrative burden,” said Rafael Ortega, who chairs the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners. “More people fall through the cracks, and that extra work requirement falls on counties in Minnesota.”

“We have no immediate plans, for the people we just hired to expedite financial assistance, to let those people go,” he added. “We budgeted for that, so we’re good for a while. The biggest impact is the people who are going to be cut off from Medicaid and are going to go through the emergency room.”

Ortega predicted a trickle-down effect for hospitals, nursing homes and other Medicaid-backed housing and care providers, who likely will see more patients lacking in medical coverage. Up to $500 million in annual reimbursements for hospitals and nursing homes could be eliminated, according to the League of Minnesota Cities.

“If we don’t verify people for Medicaid, and then they go to the hospital or nursing homes, that impacts reimbursements,” he said.

County officials still are reading through the legislation to get a grasp of it and bracing for changes that, in some cases, are well over a year into the future. “This bill pushes impacts out past the mid-term elections (in November 2026), so we have to figure out what happens when,” Ortega said.

Downtown real estate development

Real estate redevelopment also stands to be impacted, for both better and for worse, according to housing advocates.

Affordable housing developments often depend on federal low-income housing tax credits, which will be altered in “two meaningful ways,” Daniel Lightfoot, a spokesman for the League of Minnesota Cities, said by email Wednesday. The legislation creates a permanent 12% increase in certain housing tax credit allocations beginning in 2026, and it also alters the threshold for bond financing for the developments.

“It’s estimated that these changes will finance over 1 million additional affordable housing units nationwide over the next 10 years,” Lightfoot wrote.

At the same time, Minnesota cities — and St. Paul, in particular — are poised to lose redevelopment incentives aimed at renovating vacant buildings and boosting downtowns. The new legislation kills subsidies that helped developers more than meet city and state energy efficiency standards, undermining a carrot that groups like the St. Paul Port Authority have used to entice development downtown.

Ortega predicted those changes would come down disproportionately hard on affordable housing, but some developers foresee even tougher times ahead for all types of development in distressed areas like downtown St. Paul in particular, in an era where the road already was murky.

“In St. Paul and Minnesota, we have a range of energy efficiency standards and aspirations that cost more than a regular building renovation,” said St. Paul developer Jamie Stolpestad, who hopes to acquire some downtown properties through his family’s firm, Hedmark Holdings. “Based on the (Biden-era) Inflation Reduction Act, there were federal tax incentives and other subsidies that usually more than offset these costs. But with those largely stripped away under the BBB Act, property owners are left to face those costs without federal level subsidies.”

As a result of legislation Trump signed into law in 2017, profits from the sale of stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets can be invested, at significant tax savings, in real estate development projects located within distressed areas, or “Opportunity Zones,” of which St. Paul is home to 18 of the 19 zones located in Ramsey County. The new legislation makes that program permanent and expands it to rural areas, which could spell good news for some areas, Lightfoot said.

Still, of concern to some developers, Trump’s budget tightens eligibility requirements for the “O-Zones” by changing the definition of what constitutes a distressed area. Some fear downtown St. Paul may no longer qualify.

That’s because household incomes within the surrounding census tract previously were limited to 80% of “area median income,” with the statistical area spanning multiple counties, which inflates the average far beyond that of average incomes in St. Paul. Under the new legislation, that threshold drops to 70% of area median income.

“The old rules resulted in most of downtown sitting within qualified Opportunity Zones,” Stolpestad said. “Those incentives drove investors to projects like the Arlow Apartments, Marriott Courtyard Hotel and Ecolab University/Stella Apartments. But with the income standards shifting from 80% of AMI to 70% of AMI, I think all the existing downtown census tracts will lose eligibility.”

Electricity rates to rise?

Logan O’Grady, executive director of the Minnesota Solar Energy Industries Association, said the state’s solar industry began letting workers go even before Trump’s bill passed, in anticipation of a rocky road ahead. The legislation cuts major federal subsidies for solar power in Minnesota, from residential rooftop panels to mid-scale community projects, but the impacts will be felt far beyond industry workers and individual residential buyers.

That’s because Minnesota utilities are under state mandate to convert more of their energy supply to renewables, like wind and solar. Without federal subsidies to do that, they’ll likely pass on the cost of those projects to everyday ratepayers, or import more oil and natural gas from other states. In other words, electricity and home-heating costs are likely to go up for everyone.

“The reality is, all of us are going to see rates go up,” O’Grady said. “It’s really the worst time for us. If you look at all our of load growth projections over the next decade, they’re set to jump by a lot because of things like data centers and EV chargers.”

“I live in a community where a data center is being built in Rosemount,” he added. “When you have this massive load growth coming, and you have tools available to deploy rooftop solar and community solar and other mid-scale projects, and then you strip those away, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

Other impacts foreseen

Officials with the League of Minnesota Cities said Wednesday they’re still sifting through the details of the 800-page legislation, but it eliminates or reduces many of the programs authorized by the Biden administration through the federal Inflation Reduction Act, either by cutting them entirely or rolling back implementation dates. Environmental programs are a big target.

“The bill rescinds unobligated funding for a huge portion of IRA grant programs,” Lightfoot said by email, “including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Environmental Justice Block Grants, Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, State-Based Home Energy Efficiency Contractor Training Grants, and the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program.”

Trump’s bill also reduces the federal income tax that a variety of employees pay on tips and overtime wages. “Overtime is very common for many city departments and some cities have operations where employees earn tips for their work in service roles,” Lightfoot wrote. “Cities may have to think about adjusting payroll systems, which may cost cities money.”

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The political realignment has come for economics. At least since the days of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the last century, the divide in economic thinking roughly corresponded to the political split. In the mainstream, everyone was a capitalist and saw some role for government. The right/left divide was mostly over exactly how big that role should be.

Now, in economics as in politics, it is no longer left versus right; it is moderates versus populists. The question isn’t so much the optimal size of government in a global market-based economy, it is whether the economy is positive or zero-sum and how it entrenches power.

The result is unlikely allies and enemies. The horseshoe theory of politics holds that extreme left and right partisans agree more with each other than they do with the centrists in their party. That theory now also applies to economics.

A decade and a half ago, economists and policy wonks were divided on things that in retrospect seem quite small — the structure of the Affordable Care Act, for example. More and more lately, I struggle to find disagreement with center-left economics pundits who used to make me shake my head.

It could be that we are all moderating with age. But I don’t think so. It’s that the conversation has changed. The debate is increasingly about questions we moderates have long seen as resolved, such as whether price controls work (no), globalization is a good thing (yes), or growth should be the primary objective (of course).

These questions are being revisited because populists have become a much bigger and more influential force in U.S. politics and policy — and as they do, centrists find that we have more in common with each other than the more extreme wings of our respective camps.

It’s not just me. Ezra Klein recently described a divide in the Democratic Party over the so-called “abundance” agenda, which argues that getting many regulations and special-interest groups out of the way can unlock more growth. So-called “abundance liberals” argue that, with the right policies, the government can increase economic growth and make everyone better off.

The more populist wing of the Democratic Party rejects this approach, because it sees the real problem as power. It has a more zero-sum view of the economy, in which the powerful (usually corporations and the rich) take most of the limited resources everyone should be entitled to.

I am closer to abundance liberals (let’s make a bigger economic pie) than I am to populist liberals (let’s make sure the pie slices are exactly even). I also support getting rid of wasteful regulations and favors to special-interest groups. The difference is that I think these barriers need to be removed to empower the private sector, not the government, to drive growth. This is not a trivial difference, and someday it will probably tear our fragile alliance apart. But for now, compared to the alternative, it feels semantic.

Conservatives are facing a divide similar to the one Klein describes among liberals. The populist strain of the right also sees the world as zero-sum and condemns the concentration of power — not of the rich, but among foreigners and institutions: universities, technology firms, government bureaucracies, international agencies, and so on.

President Donald Trump’s administration reflects this division. Its economic team includes representatives from the more traditional pro-growth wing of the Republican Party, with trained economists and people who worked in finance, as well as people from the more populist zero-sum wing, dominated by Yale Law graduates and their fellow travelers.

This realignment will shape America’s economic discourse and policies for the foreseeable future. Rather than a right/left divide on the role of government, the main debate going forward will be between centrists and populists.

One side is united by our love for a more efficient tax code and our desire to reduce regulations that favor special-interest groups, as well as our enthusiasm for growth. The other is obsessed with fighting powerful forces they say are preventing people from thriving in a world of increasingly scarce resources.

It is not clear to me how all this ends. If the post-Trump Republican Party reverts to economic centrism, then it may win over some old center-lefties, especially if the Democrats choose to pursue a more populist agenda. Or the reverse could happen: Democrats could run a centrist in 2028 and win over many disaffected center-right free-market types.

Another possibility is that both parties go populist, leaving us disaffected centrists to huddle together in the political and policy wilderness. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last month’s New York mayoral primary suggests that left-wing economic populism still has room to grow.

What is clear is that populists are gaining more influence for a reason, and it is important to engage them and their ideas. We centrists had a good run. Now we need to work harder to understand why fewer people find our arguments persuasive.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

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The pledge by NATO members to spend 3.5% of gross domestic product on military capabilities and 1.5% on defense infrastructure is the alliance’s boldest commitment in decades. It concedes a basic truth: Russia’s war in Ukraine has exposed critical shortfalls in Europe’s defenses at a time when U.S. support has become less certain. The challenge now is to translate that ambitious target into deployable firepower fast enough to meet the threat.

The starting point is finding the money to meet the new commitments. France, Italy and the UK already run heavy budget deficits. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is claiming his country has eked out a concession to spend just 2.1% of GDP. Over time, Germany’s weak growth and fractious politics could undermine its resolve, despite the loosening of its debt brake. Discipline, and likely continued pressure from the U.S., will be required to ensure members don’t renege on their spending promises.

Even more important will be spending the money wisely. The first task must be to address Europe’s fragmented defense industrial base and the duplication of weapons systems. The region produces more than a dozen main battle tank variants and is pursuing two rival sixth-generation fighter programs — the Future Combat Air System (France, Germany, Spain) and the Global Combat Air Program (Britain, Italy, Japan).

Some progress is being made, such as the pooling of ammunition orders by Nordic states through Norway’s Nammo AS. And 19 EU countries are funding joint drone and electronic warfare projects through the European Defense Agency, an EU body. Yet these efforts are small-scale; fewer than 1 in 5 equipment purchases by European Union members (23 of 27 EU members are in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) are made jointly. NATO members will need to launch more joint tenders, cap the number of platforms per class and insist that new gear be interoperable.

European members should also acknowledge where domestic production makes sense and where it doesn’t, rather than insisting on broad “buy European” provisions. Europe still relies on the U.S. for a range of critical needs from air and missile defenses to cyber and electronic warfare, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Countries should continue buying critical capabilities from the U.S. and license production locally where possible. A new venture between Rheinmetall AG and Anduril Industries Inc., for European production of U.S. drone designs, shows how pragmatic technology sharing can bridge gaps while local industry scales.

Progress will need to be carefully monitored, not just in spending levels but also in weapons delivered. NATO’s classified capability reviews should be distilled into an annual public scorecard for taxpayers to review. Governments should also be forced to show that the funds designated for infrastructure are actually going to reinforce rail beds, widen tunnels and build logistics hubs — all essential to address shortcomings in military mobility ­— rather than politically driven projects rebadged as defense.

Finally, European leaders must be honest with themselves and, most important, with voters. While defense R&D can spin off useful breakthroughs that benefit the broader economy, military outlays rarely deliver the jobs boost that investments in health care or green energy can. Massive defense spending is and should be defended as insurance against Russian aggression, not as a quick fix for stagnant growth.

NATO leaders deserve credit for overcoming parochial concerns and political resistance to agree on the new spending targets. They should recognize, however, that their fight has only just started.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

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By LEAH ASKARINAM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Senate on Wednesday confirmed Bryan Bedford to lead the Federal Aviation Administration, putting him in charge of the federal agency at a precarious time for the airline industry after recent accidents, including the January collision near Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people.

Bedford was confirmed on a near party-line vote, 53-43.

Republicans and industry leaders lauded President Donald Trump’s choice of Bedford, citing his experience as CEO of regional airline Republic Airways since 1999. Sen. Ted Cruz, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, called Bedford a “steady leader with executive experience.”

But Democrats and flight safety advocates opposed his nomination, citing Bedford’s lack of commitment to the 1,500-hour training requirement for pilots that was put in place by Congress after a 2009 plane crash near Buffalo.

Bedford declined during his confirmation hearing to commit to upholding a rule requiring 1,500 hours of training for pilots, saying only that he would not “have anything that will reduce safety.”

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Sen. Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Commerce panel, accused Bedford of wanting “to roll back safety reforms and unravel the regulatory framework that made the United States the gold standard” in aviation safety.

Congress implemented the 1,500-hour rule for pilot training and other safety precautions after the 2009 Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, New York. In that flight, the pilot had not been trained on how to recover from a stall in the aircraft. His actions caused the plane carrying 49 people to fall from the sky and crash into a house, where another man was killed.

Families of the victims of the Colgan crash pushed for the the stricter training requirements and remain vocal advocates for airline safety. They joined Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to express concern about Bedford’s nomination.

Marilyn Kausner, the mother of a passenger on the 3407 flight, said she and other families requested a meeting with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy after Bedford’s confirmation hearing. Her husband, she said, was “discouraged” after hearing what Bedford had to say at his hearing

Pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, made famous for safely landing a plane in the Hudson River, also opposed Trump’s pick, posting on social media that “with the nomination of Bryan Bedford to be FAA Administration, my life’s work could be undone.”

Republican Sen. Todd Young, who is also on the committee, called the 1,500-hour rule an “emotional topic” but maintained that Bedford’s approach to safety is clearly “analytical,” prioritizing what “we ascertain leads to the best safety for passengers.”

“All you have to do is look at his credentials and his testimony to be persuaded that he’s the right person for the job,” Young said.

Bedford has support from much of the industry. The air traffic controllers union noted his commitment to modernize the outdated system.

Airlines for America, a trade association for major airlines, called Bedford a “superb choice.” And United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said, having worked with Bedford, he had “total confidence in his ability to lead the FAA.”