Maryland Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND 2026 Regular Session

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SENATE BILL ____ (or HOUSE BILL ____)

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE PROGRAMS FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL MARYLAND RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ADDING NEW SUBTITLES TO THE AGRICULTURE ARTICLE AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ARTICLE OF THE ANNOTATED CODE OF MARYLAND, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE MARYLAND FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE MARYLAND FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING A NEW SUBTITLE TO THE AGRICULTURE ARTICLE OF THE ANNOTATED CODE OF MARYLAND; CREATING THE MARYLAND ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING A NEW SUBTITLE TO THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ARTICLE; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Maryland does not have a citizen initiative process for the introduction of new statutes. Maryland's Constitution provides for a petition referendum process under Article XVI, whereby voters may petition to put enacted legislation on the ballot for approval or rejection. However, citizens cannot propose new statutes directly. This bill must therefore be introduced through the General Assembly by a member of the Senate or the House of Delegates.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Education, Energy, and the Environment Committee or the House Environment and Transportation Committee, which hold jurisdiction over agriculture, with referral to the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee or the House Appropriations Committee for the appropriation.

FISCAL NOTE: The Department of Legislative Services prepares fiscal and policy notes for all bills. The fiscal note for this bill would assess the impact on Maryland's budget, approximately $70.8 billion in total operating expenditures for fiscal year 2027 (Office of the Governor, signed April 9, 2026).

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber. Governor's signature or veto override (three-fifths of each chamber).

SESSION: The General Assembly convenes annually on the second Wednesday of January for a ninety-day session.

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.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND, That:

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) Twenty-two federal government shutdowns since 1976, including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025. The House frozen at 435 since 1929; 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 machine is structurally overloaded (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). This state has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a0.1) THE MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT. A single overloaded federal executive is not the only governing design on the record. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member collective executive with a rotating one-year presidency since 1848, one hundred seventy-eight years, and reports citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic ran paired consuls for four hundred eighty-two years. Functional government at scale does not require the single-executive structure the United States froze in place. The structural overload documented above is a design choice, not a constraint of nature;

(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. Fort Meade, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and Joint Base Andrews operate this template on Maryland soil today;

(a1) DENIAL IS NO LONGER NEUTRAL. Inaction by a legislature possessing the authority, capacity, and 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. Applied to Maryland's population of approximately 6.2 million, hundreds of thousands of Marylanders lack consistent access to adequate food. One in four Baltimore residents lives in a food desert (Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future);

(b) Maryland's agricultural sector, anchored by the Eastern Shore's poultry industry (Perdue Farms is headquartered in Salisbury, Maryland) and the Chesapeake Bay's commercial fishing economy, demonstrates that the state's productive capacity exceeds its population's food requirements. Perdue Farms, one of the nation's largest poultry producers, makes corporate decisions about markup, wages, and distribution from Maryland soil while Eastern Shore poultry processing workers handle chicken they cannot afford at retail prices. Food insecurity in Maryland is a distribution problem, not a production problem;

(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," 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-nine (159) years through two hundred thirty-six (236) commissary stores worldwide, delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. Maryland hosts commissaries at Fort George G. Meade, Joint Base Andrews, the United States Naval Academy, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and Naval Support Activity Indian Head. These deliver at-cost food distribution for intelligence community families, military officers, and defense personnel while Baltimore food deserts persist and Eastern Shore poultry workers go hungry. This program is funded by all federal taxpayers but available only to military families and retirees;

(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," 2025);

(h) In 2024 alone, 7,325 retail grocery store locations closed in the United States (Cooper, "Stolen Futures," 2025), while 54 million Americans live in food deserts. The commercial retail grocery model is collapsing as a distribution system. In Baltimore, the neighborhoods with the least grocery access correlate, on the documented record, with the neighborhoods the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation marked hazardous on its residential security maps in the 1930s; the lines drawn ninety years ago still predict where the food is not (National Community Reinvestment Coalition; Johns Hopkins research);

(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 Maryland with unique intensity: the state hosts the world's largest intelligence agency, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, the world's largest defense contractor, and one of the world's finest medical institutions, while maintaining neighborhoods forty miles from these institutions where one in four residents lives in a food desert;

(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 Maryland's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE CONTROL ROOM PARADOX:

(k) Maryland is the control room of the United States, the state from which the nation's intelligence, health research, military medicine, defense contracting, and military leadership development are administered. The National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort George G. Meade employs approximately 40,000 civilian and military personnel and operates the most sophisticated signals intelligence capability in human history. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda operates as the world's largest funder of biomedical research, on a budget of tens of billions of dollars annually. Johns Hopkins University and Hospital in Baltimore was the number-one recipient of NIH funding in the nation in 2024, receiving more than $800 million (Forbes; BRIMR rankings). Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, the world's largest multi-service military medical center, serves nearly one million beneficiaries per year. Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, is headquartered in Bethesda. The United States Naval Academy in Annapolis develops 4,400 midshipmen into naval officers through one of the most intensive developmental pipelines in human history. Aberdeen Proving Ground hosts research, development, testing, and evaluation commands for the Army. Joint Base Andrews in Prince George's County is the home base of Air Force One. This institutional infrastructure is the most sophisticated on earth. It operates from Maryland soil;

(l) Forty miles from NSA headquarters, the life-expectancy gap inside Baltimore runs from Greater Roland Park and Poplar Hill in north Baltimore, where it reaches 83.9 years, to Sandtown-Winchester in west Baltimore, where Freddie Gray lived and where it is approximately 70 years. That is an approximately fourteen-year spread within the same city, under the same mayor, in the same state that hosts NIH, Johns Hopkins, and Walter Reed. The finest medical infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere cannot save the neighborhoods five miles from the hospital. The agency that sees everything cannot see Baltimore. The institution that studies disease mechanisms cannot prevent the social mechanisms that activate them thirty-five miles northeast. The operators do not get the service;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(l1) Feeding citizens is not a modern invention. Augustus ran the annona civica for 200,000 Romans as infrastructure, the same category as aqueducts. Suetonius records Augustus ordering a knight stabbed at a public assembly for taking notes. The man who did that still understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. The annona lasted over 400 years. Nerva added the alimenta, child nutrition funded by government loans to farmers, recorded on a bronze tablet at Veleia (CIL XI 1147) that you can still visit. At Mabu Co in Tibet, people sustained sedentary abundance 4,400 years ago at 14,587 feet with fishing hooks (Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event, 49 million years ago, proved a single fern species could edit a planet's atmosphere by replicating on freshwater for 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). The commissary has operated 159 years. The annona ran 400. Biology works across geologic time. The precedent is not short;

(l2) This Act does not place Maryland agriculture under government ownership. Eastern Shore poultry operations stay private. Chesapeake Bay watermen stay private. Processing plants stay private. The state purchases from them at production cost plus a five percent surcharge, the same relationship the Defense Commissary Agency has maintained with private suppliers since 1867 without acquiring a single farm. This is not the city-owned grocery store proposed in New York under Mayor Mamdani, where the government owns and runs the store. The state here operates only the at-cost retail point, the way the warehouse club Costco prices near cost on volume while the supply chain stays private. Currency survives for everything above the base list. This Act is a floor, not a ceiling;

(l3) The retail jobs are already leaving. Aurora runs driverless freight between Dallas and Houston today. Over 15,000 store closures were projected for 2025. West Baltimore lost grocery access long before this bill was written. This Act does not cause the displacement. This Act is what catches the workers when the stores close. It feeds them at production cost while the retail economy that no longer needs them completes its collapse. The commissary has truckers. At-cost removes the markup, not the labor;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY, THE EVIDENTIARY BASIS FOR FEEDING MARYLANDERS BEYOND BARE SURVIVAL:

(m) 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 hierarchy itself, independent of absolute material deprivation, produces lethal health outcomes. The gap is the gradient, not the deprivation; the rank is the exposure;

(n) 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, hierarchy collapsed, and 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);

(o) 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);

(p) 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 and Epel, "The Telomere Effect," 2017);

(q) Baltimore's life-expectancy gradient, from Greater Roland Park's 83.9 years to Sandtown-Winchester's approximately 70 years, is Marmot's Whitehall study compressed into a single city. The gradient is not measured between countries or between states. It is measured between ZIP codes 21210 and 21217. In the state that hosts NIH, Johns Hopkins, and Walter Reed, the finest medical infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere, poor Black neighborhoods die approximately fourteen years early. Johns Hopkins researchers publish papers on the social determinants of health, cite Marmot, and document how hierarchy kills, then walk to the parking garage past neighborhoods where those determinants are killing people in real time. Hopkins is the institution that knows the hierarchy kills and exists within the killing field. NIH spends tens of billions of dollars annually on biomedical research. The research happens in Bethesda. The application does not reach Baltimore's West Side;

(r) Freddie Gray, age twenty-five (25), died on April 19, 2015, from injuries to his cervical spinal cord sustained while in Baltimore police custody following his arrest on April 12, 2015. Gray lived in Sandtown-Winchester, a neighborhood with extreme poverty, vacancy, and health outcomes among the worst in any American city. Gray's death and the subsequent uprising exposed what Sandtown's residents already knew: the hierarchy does not just neglect; it kills through its enforcement apparatus. Police violence and the chronic stress of aggressive policing are public health crises, producing elevated cortisol, post-traumatic stress, avoidance of healthcare facilities, and disrupted child development from parental incarceration. This is Sapolsky's subordination stress, enforced by badge and gun;

(s) Baltimore's drug crisis is a chronic cortisol-mediated health catastrophe that has spanned generations, not merely decades. The New York Times called Baltimore "the U.S. Overdose Capital" in 2024. Fatal overdoses in Baltimore quadrupled since 2013, with disproportionate impact on Black residents. The drug economy exists because the legitimate economy abandoned these communities. The self-medication pathway, Sapolsky's cortisol cascade, has operated in Baltimore continuously for the duration of the heroin and opioid epidemic;

(t) Baltimore's aging rowhouse stock has been a source of childhood lead poisoning for decades. In 2023, 130,305 blood lead tests were processed by Maryland's Childhood Lead Registry. Children absorb lead into the bloodstream four to five times more quickly than adults. Lead exposure damages developing brains, reducing IQ, producing behavioral problems, and limiting educational capacity. The hierarchy poisons children's brains through housing and then measures the damaged children against unpoisoned children and calls it an achievement gap. It is not an achievement gap. It is a poisoning gap;

(u) Western Maryland, Allegany and Garrett counties, exhibits Appalachian poverty and health outcomes consistent with the Appalachian pattern documented in West Virginia and Kentucky. Maryland's Marmot gradient runs from Bethesda, one of the wealthiest zip codes in America (Montgomery County median household income $128,733, among the highest of any county in the nation), to Cumberland and the Appalachian western panhandle. The state that had the fourth-lowest poverty rate in the nation in 2023 masks some of the most extreme within-state disparities in the country;

(v) 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;

(v1) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in "Schooling in Capitalist America" (1976), named a real stratification but misidentified its site, an error the Historical Apoplexy literature terms the targeting error (Cooper, Paper V, 2025). The stratification documented in findings (m) through (v) is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease, and it runs through every institution a Marylander touches: housing, wages, food access, policing, and the lead a rowhouse holds. No single institution built it, and targeting any single institution misses the mechanism. A food and commodity assurance program does not claim to cure the gradient. It removes one of the gradient's load-bearing stressors, material food insecurity, at the point where the physiological evidence says the damage compounds;

(2) The General Assembly further finds that the food and commodity assurance program established in this Act is, on the evidence assembled in findings (m) through (v1) of this section, a public health intervention. Material insecurity and social hierarchy are not merely economic conditions. They are documented physiological mechanisms, measured across four research programs, six decades, and three species, that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. Feeding Marylanders at production cost is therefore not charity. It is preventive medicine, and the physiological findings of this section establish why a food program reaches a public-health objective the State already pays for, less efficiently, today. Denial is no longer neutral.

MARYLAND FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE

SECTION 2. The Agriculture Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland is amended by adding a new Subtitle to read:

SUBTITLE __ MARYLAND FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-101. Short title.

This subtitle shall be known and may be cited as the "Maryland Food Assurance Act."

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-102. Definitions.

As used in this subtitle, 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 Maryland Department of Agriculture.

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

(4) "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.

(5) "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.

(6) "Secretary" means the Secretary of Agriculture.

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-103. Maryland food assurance program, creation, purpose.

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

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Maryland 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 Maryland;

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

(c) Sell food products to Maryland residents at at-cost pricing as defined in Section __-102 of this subtitle;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Maryland farms, the Chesapeake Bay fishing and aquaculture industry, and Eastern Shore poultry producers 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.

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-104. Pilot food assurance centers, locations, timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of this subtitle, the department shall establish not fewer than six (6) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) Two (2) centers in Baltimore City, prioritizing neighborhoods designated as food deserts by the Baltimore City Health Department, including but not limited to Sandtown-Winchester, Upton, Cherry Hill, and East Baltimore;

(b) One (1) center in the Baltimore metropolitan area outside the city, serving communities in Baltimore County or Anne Arundel County;

(c) One (1) center in the Washington metropolitan suburban corridor, serving communities in Prince George's County or Montgomery County;

(d) One (1) center on the Eastern Shore, prioritizing proximity to poultry processing communities and Chesapeake Bay watermen populations;

(e) One (1) center in Western Maryland, serving Allegany or Garrett County communities.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this subtitle, the department shall expand the program to not fewer than twenty-four (24) food assurance centers statewide, with at least one center in each of Maryland's eight congressional districts and at least four (4) 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.

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-105. Maryland food assurance fund, creation.

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

(2) The fund shall consist of:

(a) Moneys appropriated by the General Assembly;

(b) Revenue from facility surcharges collected by food assurance centers;

(c) Grants, gifts, and donations from any source, public or private;

(d) Any federal funds made available for food distribution programs.

(3) Moneys in the fund are continuously appropriated to the department for the purposes of this subtitle.

(4) The department shall maintain separate accounting for each food assurance center and shall publish annual financial reports demonstrating the production cost, facility surcharge, and total cost to consumers for each product category.

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-106. Maryland producer priority.

(1) The department shall establish procurement protocols that prioritize Maryland-produced food products, including Chesapeake Bay seafood and Eastern Shore poultry. Not less than fifty percent (50%) of the total wholesale acquisition value of food products purchased by food assurance centers shall be from Maryland producers in the first three (3) years, increasing to not less than sixty-five percent (65%) by the fifth year.

(2) The department shall establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Maryland farms, Chesapeake Bay watermen cooperatives, Eastern Shore poultry producers, and agricultural cooperatives to provide stable revenue for Maryland agricultural producers and to reduce producer dependence on commodity market price volatility.

Md. Code Ann., Agriculture Section __-107. Reporting.

(1) The department shall submit an annual report to the General Assembly by January 31 of each year, beginning the second year after the effective date of this subtitle, containing:

(a) The number and locations of food assurance centers in operation;

(b) Total sales volume and number of customers served;

(c) Average savings per customer compared to commercial retail pricing;

(d) Percentage of procurement from Maryland producers;

(e) Operational costs and surcharge revenue;

(f) Progress toward self-sufficiency through surcharge revenue;

(g) Impact on SNAP benefit utilization rates in served areas.

AND BE IT FURTHER ENACTED, That:

SECTION 3. The Economic Development Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland is amended by adding a new Subtitle to read:

SUBTITLE __ MARYLAND ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM

Md. Code Ann., Economic Development Section __-101. Short title.

This subtitle shall be known and may be cited as the "Maryland Essential Goods Act."

Md. Code Ann., Economic Development Section __-102. Definitions.

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

(1) "Below-retail pricing" means a price calculated as the production cost plus a surcharge not to exceed ten percent (10%) of the production cost.

(2) "Essential goods" means basic consumer products necessary for daily life, including but not limited to:

(a) Clothing and footwear;

(b) Household cleaning and maintenance supplies;

(c) Personal hygiene products;

(d) School and educational supplies;

(e) Basic home furnishings;

(f) Basic tools and hardware.

(3) "Department" means the Department of Commerce.

Md. Code Ann., Economic Development Section __-103. Maryland essential goods program, creation, purpose.

(1) There is hereby created in the Department of Commerce the Maryland essential goods program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to create procurement contracts with Maryland manufacturers to produce and distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers established under the Agriculture Article and through dedicated essential goods distribution points established under this subtitle.

(3) The program shall:

(a) Identify essential goods categories suitable for Maryland manufacturing;

(b) Establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Maryland manufacturers to produce essential goods at production cost;

(c) Distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers and through dedicated distribution points;

(d) Stimulate Maryland's manufacturing sector through guaranteed demand contracts.

(4) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities, of which 10,000 to 15,000 would suffice for universal material abundance. Maryland's manufacturing sector has the capacity to meet the state's essential goods requirements through targeted procurement (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025; Federal Reserve capacity utilization data).

Md. Code Ann., Economic Development Section __-104. Distribution model, tiered by permanence.

(1) The distribution of essential goods shall follow the tiered distribution model described by Jacque Fresco (2007), in which goods are distributed according to need and tiered by permanence:

(a) Constant-need goods, including food and consumable supplies, shall be distributed on a recurring basis through food assurance centers;

(b) Semi-permanent goods, including clothing and household supplies, shall be distributed on a need-based schedule with reasonable limits to prevent hoarding;

(c) Permanent goods, including durable home furnishings, tools, and appliances, shall be distributed on a one-per-household basis through dedicated essential goods distribution points;

(d) Currency shall survive for luxury, custom, and specialty goods not covered by the essential goods program.

Md. Code Ann., Economic Development Section __-105. Reporting.

(1) The department shall submit an annual report to the General Assembly by January 31 of each year, beginning the second year after the effective date of this subtitle, containing:

(a) Total procurement volume and value of contracts awarded to Maryland manufacturers;

(b) Number and types of essential goods distributed;

(c) Average savings per consumer compared to commercial retail pricing;

(d) Number of Maryland manufacturing jobs created or sustained through program contracts;

(e) Progress toward statewide distribution coverage.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

AND BE IT FURTHER ENACTED, That:

SECTION 4. Appropriation.

(1) There is hereby appropriated from the General Fund of the State of Maryland to the following departments for the fiscal year beginning July 1 following the effective date of this Act:

(a) DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE: $80,000,000 (EIGHTY MILLION DOLLARS) for the establishment and operation of the Maryland food assurance program;

(b) DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE: $25,000,000 (TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS) for the establishment and operation of the Maryland essential goods program;

(c) DEPARTMENT OF BUDGET AND MANAGEMENT: $10,000,000 (TEN MILLION DOLLARS) for administrative costs, personnel, and program coordination;

(d) TOTAL INITIAL APPROPRIATION: $115,000,000 (ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS).

(2) This appropriation is approximately 0.16 percent of Maryland's total state operating budget of approximately $70.8 billion for fiscal year 2027 [SOURCE: Office of the Governor; Maryland Matters, 2026], and approximately 0.42 percent of the general fund.

(3) FISCAL CONTEXT:

(a) Maryland currently distributes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers, where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food production [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2023]. Redirecting a fraction of SNAP expenditure through food assurance centers at at-cost pricing reduces the per-beneficiary cost of food provision while increasing the quantity of food delivered;

(b) The healthcare-cost reduction from food security and from the reduction of poverty-related chronic stress is projected to offset a substantial portion of the initial appropriation within ten (10) years, on the evidence assembled in findings (m) through (v1) that hierarchy and material insecurity impose measurable, recurring costs on public health systems;

(c) The state that hosts the National Security Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the United States Naval Academy, and the corporate headquarters of the world's largest defense contractor possesses the fiscal capacity and the institutional precedent for public investment at this scale. The question is not whether Maryland can afford a food program. The question is whether Maryland can afford to keep an approximately fourteen-year life-expectancy gap forty miles from the National Institutes of Health.

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. Maryland 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 this Act, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food (production cost plus a five percent surcharge), a 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in this Act, serving Maryland's population of approximately 6.2 million residents [SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 estimate], requires approximately $1.92 billion per year at production cost: $309 per person per year for a base list of twenty-five core staple food items at thirty percent of the cheapest retail price, on the USDA Food Dollar Series farm-share methodology [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, 2023]. Against Maryland's general fund of approximately $27.2 billion [SOURCE: Maryland Board of Revenue Estimates, December 2025], that is approximately 7.0 percent. Maryland's per-capita general fund spend of approximately $4,387 per resident places the program at the base-list tier. The fuller thirty-seven-item baseline at $609 per person, approximately $3.78 billion or 13.9 percent of the general fund, is retained as the program's expansion goal once at-cost operations are demonstrated.

FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says ending the gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state's residents already pay. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine years inside the same federal apparatus the state already funds. Maryland is not asked to attempt something untested. Maryland is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans, intelligence-community families, and midshipmen have received since 1867.

THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Maryland cannot afford this Act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same provision, while it absorbs a federal SNAP cost-shift it did not request. The fiscal question is not whether to spend. It is whether to keep spending several times what the objective requires. Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 5. Severability.

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

SECTION 6. Safety clause.

The General Assembly hereby finds and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.

SECTION 7. Effective dates.

(1) The Maryland Food Assurance Program and the Maryland Essential Goods Program shall take effect July 1, 2028.

(2) The general provisions of this act shall take effect upon passage.

SECTION 8. Repeal of conflicting provisions.

All acts and parts of acts inconsistent with this act are hereby repealed to the extent of such inconsistency.

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this Act are drawn from the following sources:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE:

- Penck, Albrecht. "Die Nahrungsquellen der Menschheit." (1925). First rigorous calculation of global carrying capacity. - United States Military Commissary Act (1867). 10 U.S.C. Section 2484. Codification of at-cost food distribution. - USDA Economic Research Service. Food Dollar Series (annual). Farm share 24.3 cents; marketing share 75.7 cents. - USDA Economic Research Service. Household Food Security in the United States. 47.9 million food-insecure Americans. - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "The Mathematics of Abundance: Two Proofs That Scarcity Is a Policy Choice." Historical Apoplexy Paper III (2025). - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "Stolen Futures: The Intergenerational Theft of Technical Possibility." Historical Apoplexy Paper IV (2025). - Galbraith, John Kenneth. "The Affluent Society." (1958). - Veblen, Thorstein. "The Engineers and the Price System." (1921). - Fresco, Jacque. "Designing the Future." (2007). Tiered distribution model. - Federal Reserve. Industrial capacity utilization data (G.17).

PUBLIC HEALTH:

- Marmot, Sir Michael. "The Health Gap" (2015); Whitehall Studies (1967-present). 10,308 subjects, threefold mortality gradient. - Sapolsky, Robert. "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" (1994); "Behave" (2017). Thirty-year baboon study, cortisol, hierarchy. - Shively, Carol. Wake Forest macaque studies (2009, 2014). Serotonin, coronary disease, subordination. - Blackburn, Elizabeth. Nobel Prize 2009. Telomere research. "The Telomere Effect" (2017). - Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. "Schooling in Capitalist America." (1976). The stratification thesis, corrected by Cooper (Paper V) as the targeting error. - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "The Targeting Error." Historical Apoplexy Paper V (2025). Stratification is society-wide; the gradient is the disease.

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY FRAMEWORK AND PRECEDENT:

- Cooper, Imran Stanton. "Historical Apoplexy: On the Stroke-Like Loss of Civilizational Memory." Paper I (2025). - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "The Historical Arc." Paper II (2026). - Cooper, Imran Stanton. "The Structural Overload." Paper VII (2026). - Brinkhuis, H. et al. Nature 441 (2006). The Azolla Event. - CIL XI 1147. Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia. Nerva alimenta. - Suetonius. "Lives of the Twelve Caesars." Augustus. - Yang, Y. et al. Nature Ecology and Evolution (2024). Mabu Co.

MARYLAND-SPECIFIC DATA:

- Maryland Board of Revenue Estimates (December 2025). FY2027 general fund projection approximately $27.2 billion. - Office of the Governor; Maryland Matters; CNS Maryland. FY2027 total operating budget $70.8 billion, signed April 9, 2026. - U.S. Census Bureau; Maryland Department of Planning. Maryland population approximately 6.2 million (2024 estimate). - NSA, Fort George G. Meade. Employment approximately 40,000. - National Institutes of Health, Bethesda. World's largest funder of biomedical research. - Johns Hopkins University. Number-one recipient of NIH funding nationally, 2024 (Forbes; BRIMR rankings). - Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda. - Maryland DHCD, "Separate and Unequal Neighborhoods" baseline report; KFF Health News; Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance. Greater Roland Park / Poplar Hill life expectancy 83.9 years; Sandtown-Winchester approximately 70 years. - Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. One in four Baltimore residents in a food desert. - Maryland Department of the Environment. 2023 Childhood Lead Registry: 130,305 blood lead tests. - Freddie Gray. Arrested April 12, 2015; died April 19, 2015, at age 25 of a cervical spinal injury in Baltimore Police custody. - Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, March 26, 2024. MV Dali. Six workers killed. NTSB ruled the collapse preventable. - Perdue Farms. Headquartered in Salisbury, Maryland. - Lockheed Martin. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. - Home Owners' Loan Corporation residential security maps (1930s). National Community Reinvestment Coalition; Johns Hopkins research. - Montgomery County median household income $128,733 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023). - Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation (SMRF). First non-partisan political trade school, Colorado DPOS registered. Original 2016 proposal.

END OF BILL

MARYLAND FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT

Prepared for the General Assembly of Maryland, 2026 Regular Session.

Originally drafted: 2015-2016 (Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation, for the State of Colorado) Maryland adaptation: March 5, 2026; revised May 21, 2026 (Historical Apoplexy series, Cooper)

Filed by: _________________ [Sponsor/Proponent] Address: _________________ [Maryland address required] Date: ___________________

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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 Maryland.

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.