Illinois Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

104TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS 2025-2026 Regular Session

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HOUSE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE PROGRAMS FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL ILLINOIS RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ADDING ARTICLE 47 TO CHAPTER 505 AND ARTICLE 3.5 TO CHAPTER 20 OF THE ILLINOIS COMPILED STATUTES, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE ILLINOIS FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE ILLINOIS FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING ARTICLE 47 TO CHAPTER 505 OF THE ILLINOIS COMPILED STATUTES; CREATING THE ILLINOIS ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING ARTICLE 3.5 TO CHAPTER 20 OF THE ILLINOIS COMPILED STATUTES; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Illinois does not have a citizen ballot initiative process for statutes. The Illinois Constitution, Article XIV, Section 3, provides an extremely limited constitutional amendment initiative restricted to "structural and procedural subjects" of the Legislative Article, one of the most restrictive initiative provisions in the country. Legislative proposals must therefore proceed through the General Assembly.

ENACTING CLAUSE: The Illinois Constitution, Article IV, Section 8, prescribes the enacting clause: "Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly."

INTRODUCTION: This bill may be introduced as a House Bill (HB) by any member of the House of Representatives or as a Senate Bill (SB) by any member of the Senate. Bills may originate in either house and may be amended or rejected by the other.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the House Agriculture and Conservation Committee or the Senate Agriculture Committee. Because the bill makes appropriations, it may also be referred to an Appropriations Committee under House or Senate Rules.

FISCAL NOTE: The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (CGFA) and the Governor's Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) prepare fiscal impact analyses for all bills with budgetary implications.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (60 of 118 Representatives; 30 of 59 Senators). Governor's signature or veto override (three-fifths of each chamber, per Article IV, Section 9).

SESSION: The 104th General Assembly (2025-2026). The Illinois General Assembly convenes on the second Wednesday of January. Regular sessions have no constitutional time limit but traditionally adjourn by May 31.

FISCAL YEAR: Illinois operates on a July 1 through June 30 fiscal year.

HISTORY: A version of this proposal was first developed in 2016 through the Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation (SMRF), the first non-partisan political trade school in the United States, registered with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS). The original proposal was sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle. The present version incorporates updated research from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026), a ten-paper academic work providing the evidentiary foundation for this legislation.

THE FISCAL CONTEXT: ILLINOIS'S DEFINING POLITICAL WOUND.

Illinois carries approximately $143.5 billion in unfunded pension liabilities across five state retirement systems (CGFA, May 2025): the Teachers' Retirement System (TRS), the State Employees' Retirement System (SERS, $31.0 billion), the State Universities Retirement System (SURS, $28.5 billion), the General Assembly Retirement System (GARS), and the Judges' Retirement System (JRS).

From July 1, 2015, through July 6, 2017, a span of 736 days, Illinois operated without a fully appropriated budget, the longest budget impasse in United States history (Illinois Comptroller; Harvard Program on Negotiation). During the impasse, Moody's and Standard & Poor's lowered the state's credit rating to one level above junk-bond status, the lowest credit rating on record for any United States state (Illinois Comptroller; Illinois Policy Institute, June 2017).

Every proposal in Illinois faces "how do you pay for it" as the first and often terminal question. This bill answers it directly: the commissary model costs less than the current system. The state currently pays the 75.7 percent markup on food through SNAP benefits distributed via commercial retailers ($4.47 billion in federal SNAP funds flowed through Illinois in fiscal year 2024, per FRAC), Medicaid expenditures for diet-related illness, emergency department visits for conditions caused by food insecurity, and lost economic productivity from a food-insecure workforce. The commissary model eliminates the markup. The state does not add a new line item. It replaces an expensive system with a cheaper one. The state carrying the lowest credit rating on record for any United States state cannot afford to keep paying the 75.7 percent markup on survival.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

(1) The General Assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that:

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(a0) There have been twenty-two federal government shutdowns since 1976, including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025. The House has been frozen at 435 members since 1929, producing 762,000 constituents per representative, the worst ratio in the OECD. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) shifted SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent state share. The federal apparatus is structurally overloaded (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). Functioning multi-executive governments exist and are stable: the Swiss Federal Council has operated a seven-member collegial executive with a rotating presidency since 1848, one hundred seventy-eight years, with citizen trust above eighty percent, and the Roman Republic ran paired consuls for four hundred eighty-two years. The single-point overload of the federal executive is a design condition, not a partisan one. This state has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a2) UNIVERSE 25 REBUTTAL. The Calhoun mouse experiment ("Universe 25") is frequently invoked against any abundance-distribution proposal. The argument is a misread. Calhoun's mice collapsed not because they had abundance, but because abundance arrived without institutional infrastructure: food, water, nesting material, and space, with no education, no governance, no intergenerational transmission, no civic role. Abundance of resources plus abundance of ease produces Universe 25. Abundance of resources plus structured civic obligation produces the Augustus annona (400 years), the Defense Commissary (159 years), and the Mabu Co settlement (800 years). The Roman grain dole was distributed to citizens who had civic obligations: military service, public works, jury duty, voting. The commissary is distributed to military families inside an institution that defines daily structure. The institutional scaffolding is what distinguishes sustainable abundance from collapse. Naval Station Great Lakes (the United States Navy's only basic training facility, serving over forty thousand recruits annually), Scott Air Force Base, and Rock Island Arsenal operate this template on Illinois soil today;

(a1) DENIAL IS NO LONGER NEUTRAL. Inaction by a legislature possessing the authority, the capacity, and the documented need to act constitutes active harm. The burden rests on denial;

FINDINGS RELATING TO FOOD AND COMMODITY INSECURITY:

(a) According to the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, 13.5 percent of United States households experienced food insecurity in 2023, and 5.1 percent experienced very low food security. According to the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), twelve (12) percent of Illinois households experience food insecurity. Nearly two (2) million Illinoisans, more than one in seven residents, received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in July 2024 (Illinois Policy Institute, November 2024). In fiscal year 2024, SNAP brought $4,469,341,818 in federal funds to the state (FRAC, February 2025);

(b) Illinois is the number one (1) soybean producing state in the United States, producing fifteen (15) percent of the national soybean supply, and the number two (2) corn producing state, producing thirteen (13) percent of the national corn supply. Cropland comprises seventy-six (76) percent of Illinois land area (Illinois Farm Bureau). Central and southern Illinois contain some of the most productive agricultural land on Earth. Food insecurity in Illinois is a distribution failure, not a production failure;

(c) The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Food Dollar Series establishes that the farm share of the United States food dollar is 24.3 cents, with the remaining 75.7 cents allocated to processing, transportation, wholesale, retail, and food service markup. Total United States food-at-home spending is approximately $1.09 trillion; production cost is approximately $213 to $327 billion. The difference of approximately $496 billion represents markup above production cost;

(d) The cost to close the food insecurity gap for all 47.9 million food-insecure Americans is approximately $32 billion, which represents 6.5 percent of the $496 billion markup between production cost and retail price (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," Paper III, 2025);

(e) The United States military commissary system, established by the Military Commissary Act of 1867 and now codified at 10 U.S.C. Section 2484, has operated at-cost food distribution continuously for one hundred fifty-seven (157) years through 236 commissary stores worldwide (U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-22-104728), delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices in the continental United States, an average discount of 23.7 percent (GAO, 2022), to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. This program is funded by all federal taxpayers but available only to military families and retirees, establishing a proven precedent for government-operated at-cost food distribution;

(f) The geographer Albrecht Penck calculated in 1925 that Earth's carrying capacity was eight billion people using 1920s agricultural technology. The current world population is approximately eight billion. Since agricultural technology has advanced substantially beyond 1920s capacity, scarcity of food is not a physical constraint but a distribution and policy constraint (Penck, 1925; Cohen, "How Many People Can the Earth Support?," 1995);

(g) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities. Studies indicate that 10,000 to 15,000 facilities would suffice for universal material abundance, representing 19.5 to 29.3 times overcapacity, with United States manufacturing currently operating at approximately 77 percent capacity utilization (Federal Reserve; Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," Paper III, 2025);

(h) In 2024 alone, 7,325 retail grocery store locations closed in the United States (Cooper, "Stolen Futures," Paper IV, 2025), while 54 million Americans live in food deserts. The commercial retail grocery model is contracting as a distribution system;

(i) The economist John Kenneth Galbraith described in "The Affluent Society" (1958) the condition of "private opulence and public squalor," the coexistence of enormous private productive capacity with inadequate public provision of basic needs. This condition persists in Illinois, where the state's agricultural and manufacturing output vastly exceeds its population's material requirements;

(j) The economist Thorstein Veblen documented in "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921) the deliberate restriction of production capacity by business interests to maintain prices above production cost, a practice he termed the "conscious withdrawal of efficiency." The gap between Illinois's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

FINDINGS SPECIFIC TO THE STATE OF ILLINOIS:

(k) THE COMMODITY EXCHANGE: The CME Group, located at 20 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago, is the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace (CME Group). Founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, it sets the global price of corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, and hogs. The financial instruments that determine what food costs worldwide are calculated in a building in downtown Chicago. Nine (9) miles south, in the Englewood community, residents cannot afford to eat. Illinois does not merely carry the 75.7 percent markup. It hosts the machinery that calculates it. The state where commodity futures were invented should be the state that decouples food access from commodity speculation;

(l) Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), headquartered in Chicago with its North American headquarters and largest employee base of more than 4,000 workers in Decatur, Illinois, has processed Illinois soybeans and corn since 1939 (ADM). A corporation that once branded itself "Supermarket to the World" applies the markup to Illinois-grown commodities and sells them globally, while Decatur itself contends with poverty and food insecurity. The production- to-consumption gap is measured within the state, not across borders;

(m) The General Assembly observes that thirty-two (32) Fortune 500 companies maintain headquarters in Illinois as of 2024 (Axios Chicago, June 2025), including the global institutions that price, process, and distribute commodities. The wealth generated by Illinois's agricultural and financial sectors does not return to the communities that produce the raw inputs. Downstate Illinois grows the food. Chicago prices it. Downstate does not see the benefit;

(n) The Whole Foods Market location in Chicago's Englewood community, opened in 2016 to national attention, closed on November 13, 2022, after six (6) years of operation (NBC Chicago; CBS Chicago). The closure confirmed what Englewood residents already knew: the commercial retail model will not serve neighborhoods the market deems unprofitable. Grocery store departure from Black Chicago is documented and measurable;

(o) Three (3) military commissaries operate in Illinois, at Naval Station Great Lakes (North Chicago), Scott Air Force Base (near Belleville), and Rock Island Arsenal, providing at-cost food to military families while East St. Louis (poverty rate 32.8 percent, DataUSA), Cairo (population 1,426, declining 3.26 percent annually, World Population Review, 2026), and Chicago's South and West Sides go without. The commissary model operates successfully within Illinois while the civilian population is denied its benefits;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(o1) Augustus Caesar formalized the annona civica, the monthly grain distribution to approximately 200,000 Roman citizens, as civic infrastructure. Augustus was a documented tyrant: Suetonius records him ordering a Roman knight named Pinarius stabbed on the spot for the offense of taking notes at a public assembly. Even a man who would have a citizen killed for taking notes in the wrong room understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. The annona operated for more than 400 years. Emperor Nerva expanded it with the alimenta, child nutrition funded by government loans to farmers, recorded on the Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (CIL XI 1147), a bronze inscription that still exists and can be visited. At Mabu Co, Tibet, sedentary abundance was sustained 4,400 years ago at 4,446 metres elevation with fishing hooks (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event, 49 million years ago, demonstrated that a single fern species replicating on freshwater sequestered enough atmospheric CO2 to shift Earth's climate from hothouse to icehouse over 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). Three independent records establish that feeding a population is infrastructure, not charity: the commissary at 157 years, the annona at more than 400 years, and biology across geologic time;

(o2) This act is not government ownership of the means of production. The food assurance program contracts with private producers at production cost plus a five percent surcharge. Farms stay private. Trucks stay private. Processing stays private. Currency survives for luxury, custom, and specialty goods. This is not the municipal-ownership model proposed by New York's Zohran Mamdani, under which a city would own and operate the grocery stores themselves; the program established here owns no farm, no truck, and no processing plant, and operates only a distribution point at cost. Costco, a private membership retailer, already runs a near-cost, volume-purchase model at national scale; the distinction here is that 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 removes the profit margin by statute, exactly as the Defense Commissary Agency has operated since 1867 without acquiring a single farm. The bill provides a floor. It does not replace the market;

(o3) The retail contraction and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora Innovation operates driverless freight on the Dallas-Houston corridor today. More than 15,000 retail store closures were projected for 2025. The bill does not cause this displacement. Adam Smith warned in 1776 of exactly this worker: the one whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations. The displacement belongs to the market, not to the bill. The bill is what catches the worker when the operation ends: at-cost food does not depend on holding a job. At- cost distribution eliminates the markup, not the labor. The commissary has truckers.

(2) The General Assembly further finds that the food assurance program and the essential goods program established in this act are a single material-security framework. Food insecurity and the inability to afford basic non-food necessities are the same distribution failure measured in two aisles of the same store.

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SECTION 2. Chapter 505 of the Illinois Compiled Statutes is amended by adding Article 47 to read as follows:

ARTICLE 47 Illinois Food Assurance Program

505 ILCS 47/1. Short title.

This Article shall be known and may be cited as the "Illinois Food Assurance Act."

505 ILCS 47/5. Definitions.

As used in this Article, unless the context otherwise requires:

(1) "At-cost pricing" means the price of a food product calculated as the sum of the direct production cost paid to the producer or supplier plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost, with no additional profit margin, markup, or marketing cost applied.

(2) "Department" means the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

(3) "Director" means the Director of Agriculture.

(4) "Food assurance center" means a state-operated facility established under this Article for the purpose of distributing food products to Illinois residents at at-cost pricing.

(5) "Facility surcharge" means a charge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost of a food product, applied to cover the operational costs of a food assurance center, including but not limited to facility maintenance, labor, utilities, and transportation.

(6) "Production cost" means the cost of producing a food product as determined by the Department based on wholesale acquisition price from producers, cooperatives, or the most proximate point in the supply chain to the point of original production.

505 ILCS 47/10. Illinois food assurance program: creation and purpose.

(1) There is hereby created in the Department of Agriculture the Illinois food assurance program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Illinois residents may purchase the full range of grocery products at at-cost pricing, modeled on the United States military commissary system as authorized by 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 and as operated by the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) continuously since 1867.

(3) The program shall:

(a) Establish and operate food assurance centers throughout the State of Illinois;

(b) Purchase food products directly from Illinois producers, cooperatives, and wholesale suppliers at or near production cost;

(c) Sell food products to Illinois residents at at-cost pricing as defined in Section 505 ILCS 47/5;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Illinois farms and ranches to the maximum extent practicable;

(e) Accept all forms of payment including but not limited to cash, electronic benefit transfer (EBT), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) vouchers;

(f) Operate without profit motive, with all revenue above operational costs reinvested in program expansion.

505 ILCS 47/15. Pilot food assurance centers: locations and timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of this Article, the Department shall establish not fewer than eight (8) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) Three (3) centers in the Chicago metropolitan area, including at least one (1) center in a community designated as a food desert on Chicago's South Side and at least one (1) center on Chicago's West Side;

(b) One (1) center in the East St. Louis metropolitan area;

(c) One (1) center in the Peoria metropolitan area;

(d) One (1) center in the Rockford metropolitan area;

(e) One (1) center in the Springfield metropolitan area;

(f) One (1) center in the Southern Illinois region, including but not limited to the Carbondale-Marion corridor.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this Article, the Department shall expand the program to not fewer than thirty-five (35) food assurance centers statewide, with at least one center in each congressional district and at least five (5) centers serving rural communities as defined by the Department.

(3) The Department shall prioritize locations with the highest rates of food insecurity, the greatest distances to existing grocery retail, and the largest populations residing in food deserts. The Department shall specifically consider the grocery access needs of communities that have experienced recent grocery store closures, including but not limited to neighborhoods affected by the closure of Whole Foods in Englewood (November 2022) and similar commercial withdrawals.

505 ILCS 47/20. Illinois food assurance fund: creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the State Treasury the Illinois food assurance fund.

(2) The fund shall consist of:

(a) Appropriations made by the General Assembly;

(b) Revenue generated by the facility surcharge;

(c) Federal grants and matching funds;

(d) Gifts, donations, and bequests received by the Department for purposes of this Article;

(e) Any other moneys as may be provided by law.

(3) All moneys in the fund shall be used exclusively for the purposes of this Article.

505 ILCS 47/25. Pricing transparency: annual audit.

(1) The Department shall publish on its official website on a quarterly basis a report listing:

(a) The production cost of each product category offered at food assurance centers;

(b) The corresponding retail price of equivalent products at commercial grocery retailers, based on USDA price surveys;

(c) The savings realized by consumers at food assurance centers expressed as a percentage below retail;

(d) The total volume of food distributed and the number of Illinois residents served.

(2) The Auditor General shall conduct an annual performance audit of the food assurance program to verify that pricing complies with the at-cost requirement of this Article.

505 ILCS 47/30. Existing food assistance programs: coordination.

(1) Nothing in this Article shall be construed to reduce, replace, or diminish any existing food assistance program, including but not limited to SNAP, WIC, the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), the National School Lunch Program, or the School Breakfast Program.

(2) The Department shall coordinate with the Illinois Department of Human Services to ensure that food assurance centers accept all forms of public food assistance benefits and that participation in the food assurance program does not affect eligibility for any other state or federal benefit program.

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SECTION 3. Chapter 20 of the Illinois Compiled Statutes is amended by adding Article 3.5 to read as follows:

ARTICLE 3.5 Illinois Essential Goods Program

20 ILCS 3.5/1. Short title.

This Article shall be known and may be cited as the "Illinois Essential Goods Act."

20 ILCS 3.5/5. Essential goods program: creation.

(1) There is hereby created the Illinois Essential Goods Program, administered by the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish a state-operated distribution system for essential non-food commodities, including but not limited to personal hygiene products, household cleaning supplies, over-the-counter medications, infant care supplies, and basic clothing, at at-cost pricing, modeled on the military exchange system (Army and Air Force Exchange Service, Navy Exchange Service Command).

(3) Essential goods distribution points shall be co-located with food assurance centers established under Section 2 of this act wherever practicable.

(4) At-cost pricing under this Article carries the same definition as in Section 505 ILCS 47/5: direct production cost plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent (5%), with no profit margin, markup, or marketing cost applied.

20 ILCS 3.5/10. Essential goods fund: creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the State Treasury the Illinois essential goods fund, which shall consist of appropriations made by the General Assembly, revenue generated by the facility surcharge, federal grants and matching funds, gifts, donations, and bequests, and any other moneys as may be provided by law.

(2) All moneys in the fund shall be used exclusively for the purposes of this Article.

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SECTION 4. Fiscal framework and cost analysis.

(1) The General Assembly finds that this act does not represent net new spending but rather the replacement of an expensive scarcity-management system with a less expensive provision system. Specifically:

(a) The 75.7 percent markup on food currently borne by Illinois consumers, including the State of Illinois through SNAP benefits distributed via commercial retailers, is eliminated under the commissary model. At-cost pricing reduces the State's food distribution cost to approximately 24.3 percent of current retail expenditure plus the five percent facility surcharge [SOURCE: USDA Food Dollar Series, 2023];

(b) Diet-related chronic disease, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and hypertension, generates billions of dollars in annual Medicaid expenditure. The reduction of food insecurity through at-cost distribution is projected to reduce these healthcare costs;

(c) THE PENSION CONTEXT: This act does not solve the $143.5 billion unfunded pension liability [SOURCE: CGFA, May 2025]. It stops adding to the cost of poverty. The State cannot address its fiscal obligations while simultaneously paying the hidden costs of manufactured scarcity: healthcare for diet-related illness, emergency services, criminal justice, and lost economic productivity. Every dollar spent maintaining scarcity is a dollar unavailable for pension obligations.

(2) THE FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in Section 2, serving Illinois's population of approximately 12.7 million residents [SOURCE: USAFacts, 2025 Census estimate; U.S. Census Bureau 2024 ACS], requires approximately $7.73 billion per year at production cost ($609 per person per year for a full baseline of 37 staple food items at 30 percent of cheapest retail price, per USDA Food Dollar Series methodology). Against Illinois's enacted FY2026 general funds budget of approximately $55.1 billion [SOURCE: budget.illinois.gov FY2026 Budget Highlights; Capitol News Illinois, 2025], this represents approximately 14 percent. Illinois's per-capita general fund spend of approximately $4,339 per resident places the State in the higher fiscal tier. The FY2027 proposed general funds budget is approximately $56.03 billion [SOURCE: budget.illinois.gov; Civic Federation, 2026]. Fiscal figures re-verified May 21, 2026.

(3) THE FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says ending the gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the State already pays: the $32 billion national food gap is 6.5 percent of the $496 billion annual markup above production cost [SOURCE: Cooper, Paper III, 2025; USDA ERS]. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-seven years inside the same federal apparatus the State already funds. Illinois is not asked to attempt something untested. Illinois is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans have received since 1867.

(4) THE FEDERAL SNAP COST-SHIFT. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) increased the state share of SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent, effective October 1, 2026. Illinois currently routes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food. At at-cost routing through the food assurance program, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food (production cost plus the five percent surcharge), a 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

(5) THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Illinois "cannot afford" this act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same program while absorbing a federal SNAP cost-shift the state did not request. The fiscal question is not whether to spend, but whether to continue spending four times as much as required to accomplish the same objective. Denial is no longer neutral.

(6) The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability shall, within one (1) year of the effective date of this act, produce a comprehensive fiscal impact analysis comparing the total cost of the programs established in this act against the total cost currently borne by the State of Illinois through SNAP administration, Medicaid for diet-related illness, emergency department utilization, and lost economic productivity attributable to food insecurity. This act projects the net fiscal impact to be positive: the programs established herein cost less than the scarcity they replace.

SECTION 5. Severability.

If any provision of this act, or its application to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the invalidity does not affect other provisions or applications of this act which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this act are severable.

SECTION 6. Effective date.

This act takes effect upon becoming law. Implementation schedules for individual programs are specified in Section 7.

SECTION 7. Implementation schedule.

(1) Food Assurance Program (Section 2): Pilot centers operational within two (2) years. Statewide expansion to not fewer than thirty-five centers within five (5) years.

(2) Essential Goods Program (Section 3): Distribution points co-located with food assurance centers from inception, phased alongside the food assurance center rollout.

SECTION 8. CLOSING FINDINGS: THE PUBLIC HEALTH CASE

The General Assembly states, as the closing argument of this act, why a food and commodity assurance program reaches beyond bare survival. The findings below are evidentiary. They establish that hunger and the economic gradient are measured medical conditions with documented physiological pathways, and that feeding a population at cost is therefore a public health intervention with a quantifiable return.

(a) THE GRADIENT IS THE DISEASE. Sir Michael Marmot's Whitehall Studies, commencing in 1967 and continuing to the present with 10,308 subjects, established that among British civil servants with universal healthcare, full employment, and no absolute poverty, the lowest employment grade experienced three times the mortality rate of the highest grade. Standard risk factors, smoking, cholesterol, and blood pressure, explained less than forty percent of the mortality gradient. The gap is the gradient, not the deprivation alone. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three species. Hierarchy itself kills;

(b) Dr. Robert Sapolsky's thirty-year study of wild baboon populations in the Serengeti demonstrated that subordinate social position produces chronically elevated cortisol, atherosclerosis, immune suppression, and cognitive impairment. When a tuberculosis outbreak eliminated the most aggressive males from a troop, the hierarchy collapsed, and the subordinates' cortisol levels normalized, demonstrating that the health damage was caused by the hierarchy, not by inherent individual biology (Sapolsky, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," 1994; "Behave," 2017);

(c) Dr. Carol Shively's thirty-year study of female macaques at Wake Forest University demonstrated that subordinate social status directly causes visceral fat accumulation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease, with cingulate cortex serotonin identified as the neurological nexus linking depression to cardiovascular disease (Shively, 2009; 2014);

(d) Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, demonstrated that chronic psychological stress shortens telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomal DNA, accelerating cellular aging. Caregivers of chronically ill children had measurably shorter telomeres proportional to years of stress. Poverty and subordination age human beings at the molecular level (Blackburn & Epel, "The Telomere Effect," 2017);

(e) THE CORNER NO READER CAN WALK THROUGH. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis named a real disease at the wrong site when they located socioeconomic reproduction inside schools. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease, and it runs through every institution: housing, wages, healthcare, food access, and the criminal justice system alike. Targeting any single institution misses the structural mechanism. This is the "targeting error" identified in the Historical Apoplexy literature (Cooper, Paper V, 2025). The corrected finding is the stronger one: hierarchy kills at the physiological level, and no individual institution built it;

(f) These findings collectively establish that poverty and social hierarchy are not merely economic conditions but medical conditions with documented physiological pathways that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. Food and commodity assurance programs therefore constitute public health interventions with quantifiable healthcare cost reduction potential;

(g) THE NINE-MILE GRADIENT. Chicago has the largest life expectancy gap of any major city in the United States. Residents of the Streeterville neighborhood live to an average age of ninety (90) years. Nine (9) miles south, residents of the Englewood neighborhood live to an average age of sixty (60) years, a thirty-year gap within the same city (NYU School of Medicine, 2019; Chicago Tribune, June 6, 2019; WTTW, June 6, 2019). This is the most concentrated Marmot gradient in America. The hierarchy kills in city blocks, not counties. The gradient is walkable;

(h) East St. Louis, Illinois, directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, once a major railroad hub and industrial center, has a poverty rate of 32.8 percent, nearly three (3) times the national average of 12.4 percent (DataUSA; World Population Review, 2026). East St. Louis is what happens when the economic hierarchy completely withdraws from a community: total withdrawal of investment, services, and opportunity. It is the terminal endpoint of the Marmot gradient. The market serves one bank of the river and abandons the other;

(i) Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, once a thriving river city of more than 15,000 people, has collapsed to a population of 1,426, declining at 3.26 percent annually (World Population Review, 2026). Cairo is the physical manifestation of complete economic abandonment within the borders of a state that hosts thirty-two Fortune 500 headquarters;

(j) DEINDUSTRIALIZATION AND HEALTH. The closure of US Steel South Works (1992), the Union Stock Yards (1971), and the relocation of Caterpillar's headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield (2017) and then out of Illinois entirely to Irving, Texas (2022) produced community-wide cortisol cascades: job loss to status loss to chronic stress to substance abuse, cardiovascular disease, depression, and suicide. Cook County confirmed 1,026 opioid overdose deaths in 2024, with 87 percent involving fentanyl (Cook County Medical Examiner, January 2025). The opioid crisis in downstate Illinois is Sapolsky's cortisol cascade manifested as self-medication;

(k) THE PANDEMIC AS NATURAL EXPERIMENT. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Chicagoans, twenty-nine (29) percent of the city's population, accounted for more than seventy (70) percent of early COVID-19 deaths as of April 2020 (CBS Chicago, April 6, 2020) and forty-two (42) percent of cumulative deaths over the full pandemic (Chicago Crusader, March 2025). The pandemic did not create the health gradient. It exposed a gradient that had been operating for decades. Hierarchy determined exposure, healthcare access, and survival;

(l) WATER INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE. University Park, Illinois, has been under a "Do Not Consume" advisory for lead contamination in drinking water since Aqua Illinois switched its water source in 2017. As of 2025, residents continue to rely on bottled water and certified lead-removal filters (U.S. EPA; Illinois EPA; ABC7 Chicago, June 2023). The same infrastructure failure documented in Flint, Michigan, operates within Illinois. Position in the economic hierarchy determines who drinks clean water;

(m) SEGREGATION CONCENTRATES THE GRADIENT. Illinois is among the most residentially segregated states in the nation, and Chicago is frequently cited as the most segregated major city. Residential segregation is not merely a housing pattern but a health determinant: it concentrates the Marmot gradient geographically, producing food deserts, healthcare deserts, and environmental exposure zones in the same communities;

(n) The General Assembly declares that the food and commodity assurance programs established in this act are public health interventions designed to flatten the Marmot gradient within Illinois by providing material security regardless of zip code or socioeconomic position. This is the closing argument of the act: the State feeds its residents because hunger is broken infrastructure, and a state repairs its infrastructure.

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this legislation are drawn from the following sources, among others:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ECONOMICS: - USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series (2023) - Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), Annual Report - 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 (Military Commissary Act) - U.S. GAO (2022), GAO-22-104728, Defense Commissaries - Penck, A. (1925), Earth carrying capacity calculations - Cohen, J. (1995), "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" - Galbraith, J.K. (1958), "The Affluent Society" - Veblen, T. (1921), "The Engineers and the Price System" - Federal Reserve, Industrial Capacity Utilization (G.17) - Bureau of Labor Statistics, Manufacturing Establishments (Q4 2024)

HIERARCHY AND HEALTH: - Marmot, M. (2004), "The Status Syndrome" - Marmot, M. (2015), "The Health Gap" - Marmot, M.G. et al. (1991), Whitehall II, The Lancet - Sapolsky, R.M. (1994/2004), "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" - Sapolsky, R.M. (2017), "Behave" - Shively, C.A. et al. (2009), Social Stress and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis, Obesity - Blackburn, E. & Epel, E. (2017), "The Telomere Effect" - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976), "Schooling in Capitalist America" (cited for the targeting-error correction, Cooper Paper V)

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY FRAMEWORK: - Cooper, I. (2025), "Historical Apoplexy (Cooper): Paper I" - Cooper, I. (2025), "The Mathematics of Abundance: Paper III" - Cooper, I. (2025), "Stolen Futures: Paper IV" - Cooper, I. (2026), "The Targeting Error: Paper V" - Cooper, I. (2026), "The Structural Overload: Paper VII" - Cooper, I. (2026), "Venus Prime: Paper VIII"

ILLINOIS-SPECIFIC SOURCES: - Illinois Farm Bureau, "The Crops We Grow" - FRAC (2025), SNAP Fact Sheet, Illinois - Illinois Policy Institute (2024), SNAP Participation Data - CGFA (2025), Special Pension Briefing, $143.5B unfunded liability - budget.illinois.gov, FY2026 Budget Highlights; FY2027 Proposal - Capitol News Illinois (2025), FY2026 Budget Signed - Civic Federation (2026), Analysis of the FY2027 Proposed Budget - Illinois Comptroller, Budget Impasse Consequences (736 days) - Illinois Policy Institute (2017), Lowest Credit Rating for US State - CME Group, corporate website and history - ADM, Decatur operations profile - NYU School of Medicine (2019), Urban Life Expectancy Study - Chicago Tribune (2019), Streeterville-Englewood Life Expectancy - NBC Chicago (2022), Whole Foods Englewood Closure - Cook County Medical Examiner (2025), Opioid Overdose Deaths 2024 - U.S. EPA, University Park Drinking Water Advisory - World Population Review (2026), Cairo, Illinois - DataUSA, East St. Louis Community Profile - Naval Station Great Lakes, Commissary Operations - Axios Chicago (2025), Illinois Fortune 500 Companies - CBS Chicago (2020), COVID-19 Mortality Data, Chicago - Chicago Crusader (2025), Five Years Later: COVID-19 in Black Chicago

END OF BILL

Illinois Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

104th General Assembly of the State of Illinois 2025-2026 Regular Session

Prepared pursuant to the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026)

"The state where commodity futures were invented should be the state that decouples food access from commodity speculation."

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Verification notes & full source chain

Constitutional path: Legislative path only.

Distribution-model precedent: The U.S. Defense Commissary Agency (10 U.S.C. § 2484), operational since 1867, sells groceries at cost plus a five-percent maintenance surcharge with no profit allowed by law. 2.8 million authorized users, 236 stores worldwide, $4 billion annual sales, $1.3 billion federal appropriation paid by all taxpayers including the 330+ million civilians denied access. This bill extends the same at-cost distribution model to all residents of Illinois.

Public-health-equity evidence: The Marmot Whitehall Studies (1967-present), Sapolsky's Serengeti baboons, Shively's cynomolgus macaques, and Blackburn's Nobel-winning telomere research establish that hierarchy itself kills across four research programmes, six decades, and three species. The gap is the gradient. Food assurance reaches beyond bare survival because the gradient damages population health even where calorie minimums are met.

Abundance arithmetic: 293,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities at 77 percent utilization; 19.5-29.3× the productive overcapacity required to provide universal abundance in consumer goods. 47.9 million Americans food-insecure; $32 billion ends domestic hunger; $496 billion is the annual U.S. food-industry markup over production cost; the gap is operational evidence of manufactured scarcity, not evidence of resource constraint. See Paper III, The Mathematics of Abundance.