North Carolina sits right in the middle of the pack — 32nd of 50 states on the health, food, jobs, crime, and education measures we track. Not a disaster, but not the thriving state its leaders like to sell either. And the numbers are moving in the wrong direction, because the people North Carolinians sent to Washington keep voting to make life here harder, not easier.
Here's the honest way to read this. The state's ranking measures where we stand today. What follows is what our own members of Congress just voted to pile on top of that — the cuts, the trade war, and the layoffs they signed their names to. When you see who loses, you'll also see who voted for it.
$49.9 billion in Medicaid — gone
North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. That's not an abstract budget line. It means fewer doctors, more strain on rural hospitals that were already hanging on by a thread, and worse care for families who struggle to see a doctor now.
Up to 195,000 North Carolina residents are at risk of losing their health coverage, according to the Modern Medicaid Alliance. This is happening in a state that just expanded Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of people — coverage now on the chopping block. The members below voted for the budget bill that does it.
1 in 5 kids lives in hunger — and they voted to cut food aid
Here in North Carolina, 1 in 5 kids lives in hunger, according to the No Kid Hungry campaign. About 1.44 million North Carolinians receive SNAP benefits every month — nearly 13% of the whole state.
As food banks report rising requests for emergency food aid, the same budget bill that guts Medicaid also cuts SNAP. When you take food off a hungry child's table to help pay for a tax cut, that's a choice. Every member on the roster below made it.
Their trade war is wiping out our farmers
Agriculture is North Carolina's largest industry, and the Trump tariffs are gutting it. A new report for the John Locke Foundation estimates that the retaliatory tariffs other countries imposed in response could cost the state's farmers about $695 million — roughly a third of average net farm income — and about 8,000 jobs, with total economic losses from trade retaliation reaching an estimated $1.9 billion.
North Carolina grows 60% of all U.S. tobacco, but China said it would not buy North Carolina's 2025 flue-cured crop, then left tobacco out of its trade deal — which one grower says knocked prices 20–25% below what he expected. Soybean growers don't know how they'll repay their loans, and experts are predicting a third year of losses. The members below cheered the tariffs on instead of standing up for the farmers in their own districts.
DOGE hit North Carolina harder than almost anywhere
This one is close to home. North Carolina's 4th District, in the Raleigh-Durham area, was the hardest-hit congressional district in the entire country for DOGE grant cuts, losing 186 federal grants by May 2025. All told, DOGE claims it cut more than $1.49 billion from North Carolina.
The damage is real jobs. RTI International, the research institute in Research Triangle Park, lost about $1 billion to DOGE cuts and laid off a third of its workforce, according to one consultancy's report. UNC-Chapel Hill lost $38.4 million in federal grants; at Duke, more than $135 million in grants were terminated or frozen. That's on top of the 606,000 layoffs and discharges across North Carolina in 2025. Our delegation stood by and cheered while the cuts landed on their own constituents.
The members who voted for this
These are North Carolina's ten Republicans in the House — the ones who actually cast the federal votes behind the numbers above. Every one of them voted for the budget bill. (In the Senate, Ted Budd voted yes; Thom Tillis voted no.)
- Addison McDowell
- Brad Knott
- Chuck Edwards
- David Rouzer
- Greg Murphy
- Mark Harris
- Pat Harrigan
- Richard Hudson
- Tim Moore
- Virginia Foxx
When these members duck the town halls where you could ask them about it — as NC Newsline reported North Carolina Republicans doing all year — that's not an accident. It's easier to vote for $49.9 billion in Medicaid cuts when you never have to look the people losing coverage in the eye.
What happens next is up to us
North Carolina doesn't have to slide down the rankings. The Medicaid cuts, the SNAP cuts, the trade war crushing our farmers, the DOGE grants ripped out of the Research Triangle — none of it was inevitable. It was voted for, name by name, by the people above. In 2026, North Carolinians get to decide whether the folks who did this keep their jobs. Look at the record before you fill out the ballot.
