Impoverished Texans, the vast majority of them children, could go hungry this Christmas because of dysfunction at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, whistleblowers at the state agency warned in an anonymous letter released Nov. 21.
“Thousands of Texans are still waiting to receive the much-needed food assistance they applied for over six months ago,” the whistleblowers wrote, referring to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP. “Governor [Greg] Abbott and Commissioner [Cecile Erwin] Young, how can you reasonably expect anyone in the situation we have placed our citizens in to have a happy Thanksgiving or a merry Christmas while they are contemplating how they will feed their families?”
This is the fourth letter in a series from the whistleblowers detailing a catastrophic failure of safety net services in Texas. While the latest focuses on food assistance, others have documented widespread and erroneous denials of Medicaid coverage for the state’s poorest citizens. The November letter asks Abbott to step in and fix a backlog that’s causing people who need SNAP to wait 180 days to begin receiving food.
Source: Hundreds of Thousands Denied Medicaid and Food Assistance in Texas / The Austin Chronicle