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For those who help the poor, 2025 goes down as a year of chaos
Paul B. Miller shops at The Market food pantry in Logan, Ohio on Dec. 9. Food aid was just one of many services offered here that faced disruption in 2025.
Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
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LOGAN, Ohio – Before dawn, in a cold, blustery drizzle, a line forms outside a small, squat building on an open stretch of road on the outskirts of town.
“My heater quit working in my car,” Scott Skinner says good-naturedly to the next man in line. “Man, what kinda luck am I having.”
The building is called “The Market” because it has a food pantry, but Skinner and the others are here to sign up for heating assistance. He’s been calling for a month to get an appointment with no luck, so he showed up an hour ago to snag a walk-in slot.
The demand for help is more acute than usual because heating aid was suspended during the recent government shutdown. At the same time, SNAP food benefits were suspended for weeks, and some food pantry shoppers are still playing catch up.
One of those people is Lisa Murphy. She’s 61, disabled and relies on Social Security, and says it’s important to have “places like this that really help us.”
“I still owe my gas bill. I owe $298,” Murphy says. “It’s hard to buy food and pay my bills, too.”
Lisa Murphy grocery shops at The Market food pantry in Logan, Ohio. She’s still behind on bills after SNAP food benefits were paused for two weeks during the recent federal shutdown.
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A detail from Miller’s grocery cart; signs tell clients the number of items that can be taken.
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
But even as need grows with rising costs and unemployment, local anti-poverty groups like the one that runs The Market say their work has been threatened as never before amid the Trump administration’s funding cuts, pauses and reversals targeting a long list of safety-net programs. The shutdown was only the latest disruption that forced them to scramble to keep operating.
And, they say, the year of chaos has left deep uncertainty over which programs may be hit next.
‘Emergency response mode’
The Market in Logan, Ohio, is part of Hocking Athens Perry Community Action – HAPCAP for short – one of a thousand such agencies across the country that have been around since the 1960s. They connect some 15 million people with housing, health care, food aid and much more.
At HAPCAP, services include Meals on Wheels, Head Start, a public bus system, employment help, and a food bank that serves 10 counties across southeast Appalachian Ohio.
It’s an impressive range, but this year that’s also made it a big target for federal funding cuts.
“Eighty percent of our funding comes from federal grants,” says executive director Kelly Hatas. The “worst day” of her career was back in January, when the Trump administration ordered a federal funding freeze, saying it wanted to shift priorities and promote efficiency.
“When we got that news we were in immediate emergency response mode, like, what are we going to do?” she says.
Kelly Hatas, executive director of Hocking Athens Perry Community Action (HAPCAP), talks with the child of a couple who are shopping at the food pantry. Hatas says the nonprofit has had to scramble all year as various safety-net programs were hit with federal funding cuts or pauses.
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The most urgent threat was to six Head Start centers.
“Our Head Start director was on a call with all of her center coordinators telling them we’re laying everyone off tomorrow,” Hatas recalls. “And then there was some secondary information that was like, ‘Just kidding … Head Start is excluded.’”
That whiplash shook people’s trust. And the hits kept coming.
In March, the administration canceled or paused a billion dollars that helped food banks. In May, President Trump’s budget called for zeroing out Head Start and heating assistance, along with major cuts to other safety-net programs like rental aid. He also proposed eliminating the $770 million dollar Community Services Block Grant that directly supports these anti-poverty groups, including it in a list of “woke programs.”
Congress eventually funded many of those programs, but the Office of Management and Budget took months to get out the block grant money.
“OMB just decided not to spend it, totally usurping congressional authority,” says David Bradley, who advocates for these local groups with the National Community Action Foundation.
He says they’ve long had strong bipartisan support.
“So we’ve had two major fights with the administration,” he says. “We won them because Republicans helped.”
East Main Street in Logan, a small town in southeast Appalachian Ohio.
Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
In a statement, an OMB spokesperson said these anti-poverty programs fund “radically partisan activities, like teaching toddlers to be antiracist and ‘LGBTQIA+ welcoming.’” It also criticized a program that combined affordable housing with clean energy “in the pursuit of both economic and environmental justice.”
“President Trump ran on fiscal responsibility and ending wasteful DEI spending in government,” the statement says.“The American taxpayer should not be made to fund critical race theory.”
Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency “administers CSBG consistent with the funding levels Congress provides to support services for low-income families.”
Funding chaos and uncertainty
In Ohio, Hatas says the state has shifted money to help address federal funding crises as they’ve popped up to keep programs going. But the biggest challenge remains uncertainty.
“The panic and the just day-to-day not knowing what’s going to happen, is just really difficult,” she says.
Because of that, HAPCAP has scaled back some plans, including for a new Head Start facility and a much-needed homeless shelter. It’s also had to pull out of food distribution at schools because of a lack of staff. Some employees are leaving, worried about losing their jobs. Others have been laid off or had their hours trimmed.
“It cut my paychecks completely in half,” says Kelsey Sexton, who manages the front desk but was shifted to part-time in the fall. “We have a mortgage, a car payment. With Christmas coming, my husband was like, what are we going to do?”
She was bumped back up to full-time – but so far only temporarily – after the shutdown pause in SNAP payments brought a surge of people to the food pantry.
Losing a job can be extra tough in rural communities.
“We don’t really have jobs growing on trees … and so there’s nowhere for these folks to go,” says Megan Riddlebarger, who heads the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development (COAD) half an hour away in Athens.
Kelsey Sexton (left) had her hours as a desk clerk at HAPCAP cut in half. Megan Riddlebarger (right) heads the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development and says anti-poverty agencies are important for local economies in this rural region.
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She oversees federal funding for 17 antipoverty groups across the eastern part of the state, and says they’re important for rural economies.
“These aren’t just, like, people volunteering for fun,” she says. “These are some of the biggest businesses in town, buying most of the products that are bought and sold in the town.”
Helping people stay warm and at home
Down a flight of stairs from Riddlebarger’s office, five burly men at long desks take notes as Dave Freeman goes over how to properly install a water heater vent. It’s a refresher training class for inspectors, part of a weatherization assistance program the White House also wanted to end.
Freeman says many older homes in the area are full of cracks and crevices with almost no insulation.
“That house that you walk in (that) has the blanket at the stairway, so ‘Oh, honey, I haven’t been upstairs, it’s so cold up there,’” he says.
Weatherizing homes not only lets people live comfortably, it also saves them money.
“Say their electric bill goes down or gas bill goes down, they might be able to buy a pizza on a Saturday night,” Freeman says. “And that’s a big thing.”
Adam Murdock (left) attends attends a training class for weatherization inspectors at the Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development.
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But COAD’s funding for weatherization was delayed months, which jeopardized staffing. “You can get paid to do similar work in the private sector, and so retaining that staff is already a challenge,” says Riddlebarger.
Most of the agencies she oversees were able to cover the gap until money finally came through in November. But she says it means squeezing what’s supposed to be a year-long program into about half that time “with the same expectations for performance reporting.”
Diana Eads’ volunteer job with COAD – which includes a small stipend – was also at risk earlier this year, when the Trump administration gutted AmeriCorps grants with little explanation. As part of the AmeriCorps Seniors companion program Eads visits and helps out low-income people.
“My companions have been elderly, they’re not able to get out,” she says. “They’re just one-step away from nursing home care.”
Diana Eads, 74, visits with elderly people as part of the AmeriCorps seniors program. When a funding cut threatened her small stipend for gas money, she told an 88-year-old woman who lives far away that she would keep visiting no matter what.
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If they were to land in a nursing home or assisted living, that could cost thousands of dollars a month in Medicaid spending. But Eads helps keep them at home for just $4 dollars an hour, to help cover gas or other small bills.
“Being rural, my one companion, it’s 56 miles roundtrip,” she says.
Riddlebarger managed to secure local philanthropic funding to keep operating, and after a legal challenge AmeriCorps federal funding was restored.
Through it all Eads reassured her companion, an 88-year old woman she’d been visiting for five years.
“I told her no matter what happened, I would not stop visiting,” Eads says. “That was important.”
A grim 2026 outlook
After a year struggling to keep serving those most in need, advocates say they don’t see much relief in site. Republicans in Congress passed major cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food aid and those will start to take hold.
The Trump administration also is considering dramatic limits to rental assistance and has laid out major cuts to long-term housing for people leaving homelessness, a move that faces a legal challenge.
On top of that, the administration’s mass firings and buyouts hit hard in offices that administer various safety-net programs.
The Market runs a food pantry and helps connect people with other services. In December, people seeking an appointment for heating assistance often line up outside before dawn.
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Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
Riddlebarger says most anti-poverty funding already falls far short of the need, and making it even harder to help people is exhausting.
“Not knowing which of our many services we are going to be able to keep operating makes us waste valuable capacity trying to plug holes that shouldn’t be holes,” she says. “We’re just breaking the wheel and reinventing it at a great cost to all parties.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
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Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
April 20, 2026
In this photo illustration, The Onion website is displayed on a computer screen, showing a satirical story titled Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’, on November 14, 2024 in Pasadena, California.
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Mario Tama/Getty Images North America
The satirical website, The Onion, has a new deal to take over Infowars, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s far-right media company. If approved by a Texas judge, the deal would take away his Infowars microphone, and allow The Onion to resume its plans to turn the website into a parody of itself.
Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They’re still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgement they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children in order to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones’s followers to harass and threaten the families for years.
The families are also eager to take away Jones’s platform for spewing such conspiracy theories. The deal not only would divorce Jones from his Infowars brand, but it would turn the platform against him by allowing The Onion to mock his kind of conspiracy mongering and advocate for gun control.
The families “took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others” by using “his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattei, one of the attorneys for the families. “When Infowars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
A mourner visits the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial on the 10th anniversary of the school shooting on Dec.14, 2022 in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people were shot and killed, including 20 first graders and 6 educators, in one of the deadliest elementary school shootings in U.S. history.
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For its part The Onion called it a “significant step in an effort to transform one of the internet’s more notorious misinformation platforms into a new comedy network for satire.” The company says it could announce its new rollout of Infowars in a matter of weeks if the judge approves the deal.
“Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money,” said Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion. “This is a chance to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”
On its website Monday, The Onion posted a satirical message from the fictional CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder,” stating a “dream is finally coming true.”
Jones’s posted on X Monday that “The Onion Has Fraudulently Claimed AGAIN That It Owns Infowars!!!” adding that “The Democrat Party Disinformation Publication Is Publicly Bragging About Its Plan To Silence Alex Jones’ Infowars And Then Steal & Misrepresent His Identity!”
On a podcast in March, Jones alluded to the impending demise of Infowars, saying, “We’re getting shut down. We beat so many attacks. But finally, we’re shutting down like the middle of next month,” before insisting, “We’re going to be fine.”
Jones suggested Monday he would appeal any court decision to approve the leasing deal. And even if he loses control of Infowars, Jones could continue to broadcast from another studio, under another name.
Jones’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
More than a year ago, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected The Onion’s first attempt to buy Infowars through a bankruptcy auction, saying the process was flawed. Since then, the bankruptcy court clarified that because Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, is not itself in bankruptcy, its property should be handled instead by a Texas state receiver. That cleared the way for the new pending deal to lease Infowars to The Onion, with the hope that a future sale could be approved.
In papers filed in state court, the Texas receiver said he “determined that licensing the Intellectual Property is in the best interest of the receivership estate.”
The deal calls for The Onion to pay $81,000 a month to license the Infowars.com domain and brand name, which the receiver says will “cover carrying costs to preserve and protect the assets of the receivership estate” until an appeal filed by Jones is decided and the path is cleared for a sale.
Jones’s personal bankruptcy case is proceeding in federal bankruptcy court, where a trustee continues to sell off Jones’s personal property, including cars, homes, watches and guns, with proceeds intended for the families.
A memorial to massacre victims stands near the former site of Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2013 in Newtown, Connecticut, one year after Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school.
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