At a press conference held today, Gov. Ned Lamont shared tentative support for the idea of calling a special session and tapping into the state’s Rainy Day Fund to cover federal funding shortfalls expected from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA), and temporary service cuts resulting from today’s government shutdown.

“To help people get through this shutdown, the answer is yes [to the idea of a special session],” replied Lamont to an inquiring reporter. “We’re going to know so much more in the next couple of weeks, but – Probably these guys can’t get their act together, we’re probably going to have a [lasting] shutdown, there’s probably going to be some holes in the budget… We’re probably going to have to have a special session between now and November 1, and probably the later in the month, the more we will know.”

Lamont assured state residents that the state has the funds to cover the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC), a federal program which provides food stipends to 52,319 women and children in the state of Connecticut “through the month of October,” but noted the state’s “reserves are limited,” and that the state may have to provide further allocations. Ultimately, Lamont shared his hope that “saner heads are going to prevail down in Washington.”

On the topic of SNAP benefits, more commonly known as food stamps, Lamont was unable to assure the state’s ability to fund it long-term.

“That’s pretty costly, I think it’s about $72 million a month,” said Lamont. “The good news there is we’ve got enough in reserve to keep the SNAP benefits going, so nothing changes at least until the end of the month, the month of October.”

Lamont noted that cuts to SNAP and Medicare are far too big for the state to take on alone, and that state residents should expect to receive notices telling them their insurance premiums, “could go up quite a bit.” Lamont said that James Michele, CEO of Access Health CT, the state’s public insurance marketplace, has, “come up with at least several alternatives on the Silver Plan and Gold Plan that maybe we can help people out if we don’t get this resolved over the next couple of weeks.”

Lamont also assured the state’s 1,300 employees who are paid through the federal government, that they would have their salaries covered by the state throughout the duration of the shutdown. He said the state would look into the possibility of having banks lend money to other in-state federal employees facing furloughs, to cover them for the duration of the shutdown, but that recent comments by the Trump administration may complicate such a deal.

“Last time around, we worked out a deal with the banks where we could make sure they received an interest free loan to help them cover during this very complicated time,” said Lamont, referring to the government shutdown in 2019. “There’s a guy named Russ Vought down there at the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] that’s saying that, ‘We may fire these people,’ or, ‘I can’t guarantee you, they’re going to get hired back,’ so there’s a lot more risk to us to guarantee that.”

While Lamont shared confidence in the state’s position to absorb some of the impacts of the shutdown, he ultimately urged the U.S. Congress to reach a deal to prevent the impacts of a potential long-term shutdown and to fund big-ticket items, like SNAP and Medicaid.

“I really urge the players to get to the table and get this done,” said Lamont. “You guys have got to figure out how to do a budget. We do it here in Connecticut, why can’t you?”

Just thirty minutes prior to Lamont’s conference, several state lawmakers and policy stakeholders held a conference of their own, in which they urged for a special session to be called, and for the $2.1 billion accumulated this year in the State’s Rainy Day Fund to be tapped for the benefit of the state’s most vulnerable residents. 

“We have the ability to do something, but we must act swiftly,” said Rep. Kate Ferrar (D-West Hartford). “By November 1, we need to take action as a legislature and with the governor to make sure that we can utilize the nearly $2 billion in additional revenue that our state has set aside, to address these federal cuts.”

Senate Majority Leader Matt Lesser (D-Cromwell) highlighted the impact of OBBBA’s changes to the SNAP program, and said that several stipulations regarding how SNAP should be administered go into effect today and require immediate attention. The first change Lesser spoke about was the stipulation that states now have to pay to administer their own SNAP programs, a change which he said amounts to “a huge unfunded mandate,” that will cost $40 million annually. The second change is a stipulation in the bill which calls for a reduction in the state’s SNAP error rate from 10% to 6%, at the risk of the state incurring a $150 million fine if it fails to do so. 

“We have to start making investments into DSS [Department of Social Services], because as of today, we have to have a strategy in place to get our error rate down, or we could be fined $150 million,” said Lesser. “I don’t know what that would take to get us down there, but it’s going to take more than zero dollars and we’ve got to do that right away.”

Lastly, changes to SNAP eligibility mean that 42,000 state residents will be immediately cut off from benefits. Lesser said that 39,000 of these beneficiaries are American citizens, and another 3,000 are “lawfully present individuals,” mostly immigrants who are recognized as refugees, survivors of human trafficking or asylum-seekers. Lesser said these losses in eligibility stand to “devastate the whole state.”

“So the question to Governor Lamont and to policymakers in Connecticut is, how are we going to move forward protecting the residents of the state of Connecticut?,” said Lesser.

Other stakeholders at the conference called for other policies to be addressed by a special session, such as a further strengthening of the state’s TRUST Act or housing affordability. Sen. Jorge Cabrera (D-Ansonia) said that the decisions state lawmakers make in the near future will reflect its values.

“The bottom line is this, we have to decide in Connecticut who we are,” said Cabrera. “It’s that simple.”

The urgency shared by Lamont and Democrat lawmakers, was not shared by House Republican leader Vincent Candelora, who shared his belief that the special session would be used to “redirect hundreds of millions of dollars—money that should go to pay down pension debt—toward expanding state government and programs whose costs are already spiraling out of control.”

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