At Alexander Jewish Family Service in Houston, CEO Carl Josehart and his team have spent recent months engaging in contingency planning and back-of-envelope math about what they’d do if the Trump administration were to make massive cuts to social spending and entitlement programs, in line with a budget bill that passed the House in February. 

In short: They’d be in trouble. Deep, in-the-red trouble. The House budget blueprint calls for $230 billion in spending cuts from the House committee that manages the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal program known to most people as food stamps. If the federal government significantly pulls back on SNAP, Josehart said his agency’s clients will be left to fend for themselves when they can least afford it.

“If we were to try to replace those funds for our current clients, it would probably require an additional $500,000 a year. It’s just not sustainable and not possible,” he told Jewish Insider this month. “Philanthropy can’t fill the gap.”

More than 100 American Jewish organizations provide social services to community members in need across the country, and most of them rely on federal funds to pay for at least part of their work, along with Jewish communal philanthropy and support from local governments. 

Now, these agencies are bracing for impact if the Trump administration significantly shrinks its spending footprint, as President Donald Trump has pledged to do. While the specifics of what will be cut, or how much, remain unclear, organizations are already undertaking fundraising drives to replace what may be lost and rearranging budgets to plug gaps wherever possible. 

“The world of nonprofit works like this: You have to have diversified funding. You have to have a little bit from donors, a little bit from the feds, the state, the city and foundations, in order to be sustainable as a nonprofit. You can’t be reliant on any one particular type of funding in order to survive,” said Paula Goldstein, president and CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Philadelphia. 

Her organization applied in January for a federal grant to provide legal services for Jewish women who are victims of intimate partner violence. Since then, the posting for the grant has been taken offline, leading JFCS to wonder whether the program still exists. “We’re kind of viewing it like it’s not going to happen,” said Goldstein. 

These are just some of the concerns facing Jewish social service agencies as Republican leaders from the House and Senate meet this week to flesh out a budget bill that is likely to have a major impact on government assistance programs, particularly SNAP and Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor adults and children. 

The budget blueprint passed by the House in February with Trump’s support calls for at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. While Trump has said that Medicaid will not face cuts, congressional Republicans have stated otherwise. In the meantime, the organizations that provide services to recipients of Medicaid, SNAP and other entitlement programs are left scrambling. 

“Cuts to those programs would affect the vast majority of the individuals and families we serve, increasing community needs significantly and straining our capacity to assist them with issues like food and housing security and access to health care and other basic needs,” said Karen Mozenter, CEO of Jewish Family Services in Columbus, Ohio. 

Susan Frazer, a social worker who leads Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley, said many older adults, including Holocaust survivors, rely on Medicaid. “If you reduce their benefits, if you reduce their access to care, they’re more likely to be in an institution, they’re more likely to be hospitalized,” Frazer said.

Frazer participated in a recent lobbying trip to Washington with several dozen other executives from the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies (NJHSA), a membership organization comprising more than 170 Jewish nonprofits in the U.S., Canada and Israel. The activists met with over 100 lawmakers to urge them to work to prevent major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. But the budget reconciliation process requires only a simple majority in the Senate, rather than the usual 60 votes, so Republicans will likely be able to pass a bill without Democratic support.  

“Medicare and Medicaid were established in this country with an underlying philosophy that government supports the most vulnerable in partnership with nonprofits,” said Reuben Rotman, CEO of NJHSA. “What has happened is a shift in that philosophy. The view right now is that the federal government is really wanting to reduce its contribution to that support safety net for the most vulnerable. They want to shift that burden to the states.” 

Jewish social service agencies already work with state governments, and they worry that state budgets will not be able to pick up the slack on major federal programs. 

“In reality, the states cannot pay. That is a huge nightmare for governors and statehouses of all parties across the political spectrum, whose state budgets are already stretched and who cannot make up that difference,” said Liza Lieberman, vice president of public affairs at Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger. 

Many of the Jewish agencies bracing for federal cuts to their health-care and hunger programs have already had to deal with the loss of another major federal funding stream for their work resettling refugees. Upon taking office, Trump paused all refugee admissions to the country. That part was not a surprise, but what caught Jewish agencies off guard is that promised federal dollars for refugees who had already arrived prior to Trump’s inauguration were also immediately paused, which did not happen in the first Trump administration.

“That was just a straight stop that has not been reinstated at this point in time and has affected our organization quite immensely,” said Melissa Goodson, chief development officer at Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County, which is one of six resettlement agencies in Michigan. In the three months before Trump took office, the organization helped resettle 226 refugees in the county, which includes Ann Arbor.

“There were federal funds promised to these folks to help them pay for rent and food and transportation and clothing and all of the things that you need to get established in a new community,” Goodson said. “Those funds that were promised were no longer available.” HIAS, the national Jewish refugee resettlement agency that has for decades worked closely with the State Department, has had to fire or furlough hundreds of employees. 

Jewish agencies have stepped up private fundraising to try to meet the needs of the communities they serve. But none of them expect to be able to fully cover the cost of programs that have been funded by the government if there’s a massive shift in government spending.

“Agencies will be depending on more volunteer donations and more philanthropy,” said Rotman. “They won’t be able to make up the difference, and it’s just going to make everything much harder at the same time that the price of food is going up.”