Budget bill protesters at Omaha's Memorial Park seek to keep pressure on Rep. Don Bacon

By Kevin Cole, Omaha World-Herald

(May 25, 2025)

Approximately 250 people gathered Sunday on the Memorial Park bridge over Dodge Street to bring attention to what they said is Rep. Don Bacon’s “heart-breaking” vote in favor of the Republican budget bill.

The bill that passed 215-214 along party lines includes devastating cuts to food assistance and Medicaid, speakers said. Sunday’s gathering, dubbed “Common Ground for Common Cause,” was also an attempt to educate Nebraskans about the expected effects of the bill as passed by the House.

Members of several organizations were in attendance, including 50501 Omaha, Bernie’s Fighting Oligarchy, Indivisible Nebraska, Like-Minded Friends and Omaha Mutual Aid. More protests are planned as the bill now moves to the Senate.

Bill Armbrust, a 68-year-old fifth-generation farmer from Douglas County, estimated the attendance and described it as a “high-energy crowd.” He noted that several organizations had been trying to influence the congressman to vote against the bill by showing up at his offices in Omaha and Saunders County. There have also been gatherings at Memorial Park.

“Congressman Bacon has broken our heart because we felt like he was going to be a warrior for the people and stand strong and what we ended up with was him voting for all of this despite all of the talk that he’s given us, all of the quotes that he’s put out there and so it’s become a character issue for us as well.”

Collin Adler Ruane, the communications director of Nebraska For Us, a nonprofit organization opposed to the budget bill in its current form, said Medicaid cuts would be felt by taxpayers like Vanessa Chavez Jurado.

“In recent years, my sister has relied on Medicaid for her care following an unexpected, life-altering stroke,” Chavez Jurado told Nebraska For Us. “My family is deeply worried about what hundreds of billions in cuts could mean for my sister as she navigates this challenging journey. ... We are not alone in these fears.”

Armbrust said the event Sunday was aimed at informing people of the damage the bill could do. It was also aimed at keeping pressure on the state’s congressional delegation.

“I know that there’s some people that have been to (Bacon’s) office every single day. I know the pressure has been consistent and ... it’s gone on for quite some time now,” Armbrust said. “What we’re doing now is we’re trying to to collaborate more to bring together larger more visual efforts to bring awareness to other people. We’ve brought our issues to Congressman Bacon. Now we need to take it to the people.”

Bacon said Sunday in an email to The World-Herald that he has listened to constituents both for and against the bill.

“I have been consistent in saying that I would not support cuts to SNAP or Medicaid that would harm the vulnerable — those who need it, but that I would support cost-saving reforms that strengthen the program,” he said. “I support completing an audit of the programs, as one has not been done since before the Biden Administration, to remove those who should not be receiving benefits. I also support enforcing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents. Finally, I support a cost share to the states, based on error rates.

“Our team successfully negotiated with committee leadership to lower the burden of the state’s share. Nebraska was looking into shelling out an additional $83 million and we got that lowered to between $30-$50 million. Plus, if Nebraska and other states lower their error rates, the share cost percentage will decrease.”

Bacon also said that the making the Trump Tax cuts permanent, would mean a saving of $1,700 a year for an average family of four in Nebraska, making $80,000 a year.

According to the Associated Press and PBS, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated 8.6 million fewer people would have health insurance with the various changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. About 3 million fewer people each month would have Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

The $300 billion in cuts to food assistance programs like SNAP would affect 155,000 Nebraska recipients, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. More than 68% of Nebraska’s SNAP participants are in families with children.

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation said 57,000 Nebraskans are at risk of losing their health coverage if the bill passes the Senate as is. A state-by-state breakdown by the foundation is available at www.kff.org/medicaid/issue.

Rural Nebraskans are among those who need to be concerned about the outcome of the budget bill, Armbrust said, because, as it stands, it “would remove a tremendous amount of the support that rural Nebraska gets for healthcare, for elderly care for support in infrastructure for disaster relief and a lot of the support personnel that are needed in rural Nebraska for the basic function of agriculture.”

Current budgetary support “may be bare bones and working, but it’s still bare bones and fragile,” he said. The Natural Resources Conservation Service is one of many agencies that will be gutted under terms of the bill.

“These service agencies, like NRCS, so many of them have been gutted of important people with skills, and the issues that they were dealing with are now left out there like orphans. Also, the forestry department that does all of the work that so many state agencies do in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa; those have become very difficult now because of the loss of personnel specialized personnel.

“We are generally concerned in this bill with the fact that it’s pulled away a lot of what we think are important protections and controls for conservation, for protecting the health of people. Bacon’s been there for a long time. He has served on the (House Committee on Agriculture) and yet we don’t see him defending rural Nebraska.”