Food banks, kids’ therapy and diapers: What Colorado lawmakers have cut from the state budget so far

This time last year, Colorado food pantries were on the brink — so state lawmakers stepped in to help, passing a bipartisan bill to help nonprofits stock up on local produce.

A year later, that need has only grown. The Trump administration last week announced it was eliminating the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, a $500 million grant for food banks, as part of its wide-ranging assault on federal government spending.

And now, the state of Colorado, facing a $1.2 billion budget shortfall of its own, might reduce its contribution to food pantries — on top of the $5.5 million the state stands to lose from the federal government.

As part of its line-by-line review of state spending, the Joint Budget Committee took a preliminary vote in February to cut $1 million from food assistance grants. That same day, the six-member budget panel also cut $500,000 from a program created in 2021 that helps fund diaper banks across the state.

The two wrenching choices — taking away diapers from babies, and food from families in need — have become a mantra of sorts for lawmakers as they’ve combed through the operations of state agencies in recent weeks, searching for a million dollars here and a hundred thousand dollars there to cut from the state’s budget. More than once, lawmakers have been confronted by choices that seem a little easier when they try to weigh their human toll against the things they’ve already agreed to do.

“I’m OK with eliminating it entirely,” Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat, said of proposed cuts to an apprenticeship program earlier this month. “I voted to take $1 million away from food banks — that seems like a lot more immediate for people in need.”

“We are talking about food banks and diapers and public health dollars and the like,” said Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, during a debate over funding hospitality education programs in high schools. “This to me, feels like a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.” 

This afternoon, lawmakers will learn how much they still need to cut, when state economists present the latest revenue forecasts to the budget writing committee. But as of now, Colorado doesn’t face a revenue problem. The budget crunch is instead driven primarily by health care costs rising faster than the government is allowed to grow under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which limits state tax collections to the combined rate of inflation and population growth.

“I think every day we have had difficult decisions,” Sirota told The Colorado Sun in an interview. “Every day there have been sad decisions that we have made.”

And the most significant ones are still yet to come. For all the cuts lawmakers have approved so far, most of them have barely made a dent in the state’s $1.2 billion budget gap. But every dollar saved on small programs is a dollar they won’t have to cut this week from the big ones — Medicaid providers, education and the state workforce — in the final sprint to introducing a budget bill this month.

Here’s some of what the JBC has done so far:

Targeting inefficiency

In light of the threat to social services, some decisions feel like no-brainers, lawmakers say.

Last week, for instance, the JBC eliminated $400,000 in funding for an office that doesn’t exist — a Judicial Discipline Ombudsman that the legislature created in 2023, but never actually hired.

Budget writers are looking to repeal a financial literacy program that was supposed to help around 100 low-income households a year. In its first year, administrators said they didn’t have enough funding to sign up a single person.

Lawmakers have also looked to wring savings out of programs that aren’t working as intended, nixing $1.8 million in funding for the software that powers the state’s property tax deferral program when they learned that only 1,600 people applied to it last year.

Sen. Jeff Bridges, the JBC’s chair, told The Sun they’ve also eliminated things that don’t seem like necessities, such as grant money to help marijuana growers increase their energy efficiency.

“You know, there aren’t 1,999 more programs like the marijuana efficiency one,” said Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat. “That plus the Ombudsman Office that was never filled is a million dollars. Well, we have $999 million more to go.”

And the JBC could still face pushback from the rest of the legislature in maintaining even the small cuts it has already made.

While the judicial ombudsman and property tax deferral programs aren’t working as lawmakers intended, they were still created with overwhelming bipartisan support in response to real needs. It’s likely that one or both could see a rescue attempt by supporters through budget amendments on the House and Senate floors.

Shifting costs to others

Some of the cuts the JBC has made won’t necessarily eliminate spending — but they will shift them to someone else.

One idea to salvage the property tax deferral program, which allows homeowners to defer chunks of their property tax bill until they die or sell their home, is to outsource the administration of it back to county governments.

The JBC also scaled back a bipartisan effort to have the state share the cost of assistant district attorney salaries with county governments starting July 2026. The JBC’s proposal would delay the provision until July 2027, and have the state cover 25% of their pay. That’s down from the 50/50 split called for by Senate Bill 13, but still more than the state contributes today — nothing. The original proposal was aimed at helping rural counties with staffing shortages.

If the legislature approves the change, that won’t help with next year’s budget crunch. But it would save the state $1.1 million annually starting in the 2026-2027 budget.

Another JBC proposal would eliminate a program that dates back to the Gov. John Hickenlooper administration: a grant that helps local law enforcement target gray and black market marijuana sales. That would save the state about $800,000 next budget year.

“We’re in a situation where we need to stop taking on local government responsibilities, and saying they’re ours somehow,” Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican, said at one hearing.

The biggest cost shifts are yet to come, when lawmakers consider how much to fund higher education and health care providers. Absent state spending, the bulk of those costs are unlikely to go away — they’ll just be pushed onto college students and patients.

Rationing — and eliminating — health services

More than any other agency, the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing is driving the state’s budget crunch.

It already represents a third of the state’s $16 billion general fund. And next year, Medicaid costs are expected to grow by 5.7% — about 2 percentage points faster than the TABOR cap will allow state tax collections to grow in the 2025-26 budget.

But the department’s sheer size hasn’t made it any easier to cut.

“You either cut people off Medicaid, you pay doctors less, or you deny services,” Bridges told The Sun. “Those are the options. That’s how you control the cost of Medicaid.”

At a hearing last week, lawmakers agonized over proposals to:

• cap the dental services Medicaid would cover for adults (a savings of $1.6 million)
• eliminate continuous Medicaid eligibility for children under 3, meaning they’d have to re-enroll annually ($5.6 million)
• reduce the rates Medicaid pays for certain health needs, including maternity care ($6.3 million)

Each of them would have amounted to a decimal point worth of savings against a shortfall of $1.2 billion; none of them passed.

The committee at one point considered eliminating Cover All Coloradans, a program that has enrolled around 10,000 kids without legal immigration status in Medicaid since it launched in January. But the idea, which would have saved $19.2 million next year, fell flat with the JBC’s Democratic majority — even as some suggested they would consider “rationing” health care for the enrolled children if they can’t find a better way to balance the budget.

When lawmakers finally agreed to cut something from the health budget — $200,000 to support therapeutic horse programs that have been shown to help children with developmental disabilities — the gravity of the situation sunk in.

“I hate this,” Bridges complained.

At another hearing last week, which saw the budget panel torn over how much to spend on public defenders, Kirkmeyer reminded them how far they still had to go.

“We haven’t really been cutting that much — at least it doesn’t feel like it to me,” she said. “We can’t keep funding at these high levels. We just can’t.”