If state residents want to spend money on health care and food assistance for their low-income neighbors, they should be willing to foot the bill.

Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a “budget nightmare” is on the horizon for state governments, Politico reports. What exactly is going on?

By slashing health care and food assistance for low-income Americans, Republicans in Washington are passing tremendous costs onto the states, leaving local leaders from both parties grasping for ways to make up for billions in lost federal dollars. The cuts are already threatening to endanger governors’ education, public safety and disaster relief funds.

And this is all happening as up to 20 state leaders face reelection in 2026, forcing them to figure out how to message the fallout as their parties battle for control over the House next year.

Oh, no. State governments run enormous Medicaid and food stamp programs for their low-income residents. Now, the federal government will pay for a slightly lower share of those welfare programs. States will have to figure out how to pay for them by actually budgeting and considering trade-offs. What a nightmare, indeed.

New York, in particular, is in big trouble. “In deep blue New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is contending with an $11 billion budget hole as she faces reelection next year, possibly against Trump acolyte Rep. Elise Stefanik.” The state’s budget next year “was already estimated to have a $7.5 billion gap to fill. That hole is expected to grow to $11 billion as a result of the federal cuts.”

Why does New York face such a large budget hole? “New York has one of the costliest Medicaid programs in the country. About 44 percent of the state’s residents are enrolled in Medicaid or have state-sponsored coverage.” Oh, yeah, that would do it!

Alas, profligate states are coming to the realization that spending money — even for very nice causes like health care and food — actually costs something. They were happy to have Uncle Sam pick up nearly the entire tab. Now, though, they’ll need to justify that spending to their own taxpayers. Unlike the federal government, the vast majority of states are required to balance their budgets every year. Therefore, if they want to keep their welfare spending at current levels, they will either need to raise taxes or cut spending in other areas.

Government exists, in part, to fund large, collective purchases that cannot be made individually but are valuable nonetheless. Even free-market evangelists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman agree that a limited welfare state was one such purchase that was appropriate for a government to make on behalf of its citizens. But the people who decide through their representatives to make that purchase should be the ones who are paying for it. They should not be able to just pass off the cost to someone else, as government then becomes merely a mechanism to seize and redistribute resources.

So, yes, state taxpayers will now bear more of the burden of spending that their legislatures approved on their behalf. But those costs were already being incurred. The money didn’t materialize out of thin air. The cost was simply passed on to future taxpayers through federal borrowing.

If states feel that they cannot raise taxes any higher to pay for their welfare programs, it means that the price of those purchases was never justifiable in the first place. Prioritizing finite resources is no fun, but that’s what adults have to do. If only the government of New York had any.