Montana Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

SIXTY-NINTH LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MONTANA 2025 Regular Session

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HOUSE/SENATE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE PROGRAMS FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL MONTANA RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, AMENDING TITLE 80, CHAPTER 1, AND TITLE 90, CHAPTER 1, OF THE MONTANA CODE ANNOTATED, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE MONTANA FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE MONTANA FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING A NEW PART TO TITLE 80, CHAPTER 1, OF THE MONTANA CODE ANNOTATED; CREATING THE MONTANA ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING A NEW PART TO TITLE 90, CHAPTER 1, OF THE MONTANA CODE ANNOTATED; REQUIRING PARTNERSHIP WITH MONTANA'S FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED TRIBAL NATIONS IN THE FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE PROGRAMS PURSUANT TO ARTICLE X, SECTION 1(2) OF THE MONTANA CONSTITUTION; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Montana has a citizen ballot initiative process. Under Article III, Section 4 of the Montana Constitution, the people may enact laws by initiative on all matters except appropriations of money and local or special laws. Because this act includes appropriations, it must be introduced through the Legislature. However, the substantive programs established herein may also be proposed as a separate non-appropriation initiative statute.

The signature requirement for a statutory initiative is five percent (5%) of the total votes cast for governor in the most recent gubernatorial election. Based on the 2024 gubernatorial election, the approximate threshold for a statutory initiative is 30,180 valid signatures, collected from at least thirty-four (34) of Montana's one hundred (100) House districts (one-third plus one). For a constitutional initiative, the threshold is ten percent (10%), or approximately 60,359 signatures from at least forty (40) House districts. The exact current-cycle threshold is pending the Montana Secretary of State posted calculation.

FILING: An initiated statute is filed with the Montana Secretary of State pursuant to MCA 13-27-201 through 13-27-312. The Attorney General prepares the ballot statement. The Legislative Services Division conducts a legal sufficiency review.

Alternatively, this bill may be introduced through the Legislature by any member of the Senate or House of Representatives.

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

FISCAL NOTE: The Legislative Fiscal Division prepares fiscal notes for all bills with budgetary impact per Montana Joint Rule 30-60.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (26 of 50 Senators; 51 of 100 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber).

SESSION: The 69th Legislature (2025). Montana legislative sessions convene on the first Monday in January of odd-numbered years and last no more than ninety (90) legislative days unless extended by two-thirds vote.

HISTORY: A version of this proposal was first developed in 2015-2016 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 drafted for Colorado and sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle. The present version has been adapted for the State of Montana, incorporating 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 Legislature of the State of Montana:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

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

FINDINGS RELATING TO MONTANA'S CONSTITUTIONAL MANDATE:

(a) The Montana Constitution of 1972, drafted by one hundred (100) delegates in Helena from January 17 through March 11, 1972, in response to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's decades of political domination of the state, established among the most citizen-protective and individual-rights-protective provisions of any state constitution in the United States;

(b) Article II, Section 3 of the Montana Constitution guarantees the right to a "clean and healthful environment," one of the strongest environmental rights provisions in any state constitution. Article II, Section 10 guarantees the right to privacy. Article X, Section 1(2) commits the state to the preservation of the cultural integrity of Montana's American Indian populations. This act operationalizes these constitutional commitments;

(c) The 1972 Constitutional Convention was driven by broad public and bipartisan opposition to corporate extraction, specifically the Anaconda Company's control of Montana's press, legislature, and judiciary. The delegates wrote a constitution to prevent extraction interests from controlling the state's governance. This act extends that anti-extraction principle from governance to the material economy: the 75.7 percent markup between food production cost and retail price is the same extraction mechanism the 1972 delegates sought to prevent, applied to commerce rather than politics;

(c1) Montana has eight (8) federally recognized tribal nations occupying seven (7) reservations: the Blackfeet Nation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (Flathead Reservation), the Crow Tribe, the Fort Belknap Indian Community of the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes, the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boy's Reservation, and the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians (federally recognized in December 2019). Every program established by this act that operates on or serves a reservation community is developed in genuine government-to-government partnership with the relevant tribal nation, pursuant to Article X, Section 1(2) of the Montana Constitution;

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(a0) Twenty-two federal government shutdowns have occurred since 1976, including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025, the longest in United States history, which furloughed approximately 670,000 federal employees. The House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, producing approximately 762,000 constituents per representative, the worst ratio in the OECD. Senate cloture motions rose from 49 total between 1917 and 1970 to more than 2,000 per decade. 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). Montana has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a0a) THE MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT. The structural overload of a single overburdened federal executive is not a law of nature. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member collegial executive with a rotating one-year presidency since 1848, across 178 years, and reports citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic governed through paired consuls for 482 years. A government too small for the job is a design choice, and design choices can be corrected. Montana, acting within its own constitutional authority, is one of the laboratories in which a correction begins;

(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. Malmstrom Air Force Base operates this template on Montana soil today, supporting Minuteman III missile operations across the central Montana plains, and the Montana Army National Guard adds a statewide presence;

(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:

(d) According to the Food Research and Action Center and the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, approximately eleven percent (11%) of Montana households experience food insecurity. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) serves approximately 80,271 Montanans, bringing $169,446,871 to the state in fiscal year 2024 [SOURCE: FRAC, SNAP State Fact Sheet, Montana, February 2025];

(e) Montana's agricultural sector generates approximately $4.6 billion in annual cash receipts from farm marketings [SOURCE: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service]. The state has approximately 58 million acres of land in farms and ranches, ranking among the largest agricultural land bases in the nation. Montana's top agricultural products include cattle and calves, wheat, hay, barley, and lentils;

(f) Montana has approximately 2.12 million cattle and approximately 1.14 million people, nearly two cattle for every Montanan [SOURCE: USDA, 2024; Montana Free Press, July 2025]. The state produces more food per capita than nearly any other state in the union, yet eleven percent of its households cannot consistently feed themselves. Food insecurity in Montana is a distribution problem, not a production problem;

(g) 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 [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2023];

(h) 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);

(i) 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 the Defense Commissary Agency, operating 236 stores worldwide and delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, operates a commissary serving military families, funded by all federal taxpayers including Montana ranchers and farmers whose products feed the nation but who themselves may lack consistent access to affordable food;

(j) Montana's vast geography (147,040 square miles, the fourth largest state by area) combined with its sparse population of approximately 1.14 million people at a density of approximately 7.8 persons per square mile creates distribution challenges unlike any other state in the nation. Reservation communities may be fifty to one hundred miles from the nearest full-service grocery store. The state that maintains one hundred fifty (150) Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles across 13,800 square miles of its prairies through the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base can deliver a nuclear warhead to any point on earth within thirty minutes, but cannot consistently deliver groceries to the Blackfeet Reservation;

(k) 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, the 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);

(l) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities. Studies indicate that 10,000 to 15,000 facilities would suffice to supply the basic material needs of the entire United States population, representing 19.5 to 29.3 times overcapacity, with United States manufacturing currently operating at approximately 77 percent capacity utilization [SOURCE: Federal Reserve; Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025];

(m) In 2024 alone, 7,325 retail store locations closed in the United States, a figure that closure trackers projected to roughly double in 2025 [SOURCE: Coresight Research], while 54 million Americans live in food deserts. The commercial retail grocery model is collapsing as a distribution system;

(n) 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 is acute in Montana, where the state produces nearly twice as much livestock as it has people yet cannot feed all of its residents;

(o) 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 Montana's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

FINDINGS RELATING TO MONTANA'S EXTRACTION HISTORY:

(p) Butte, Montana, once called "The Richest Hill on Earth," produced the copper that wired America's electrical grid. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company extracted billions of dollars in wealth from Butte and its surrounding communities. What remained is the Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine measuring approximately one mile by one-half mile with a maximum depth of approximately 1,780 feet, now a federal Superfund site and one of the largest toxic waste complexes in the United States. In November 1995, 342 migrating snow geese landed on the pit's toxic water and died (High Country News, December 1995; Audubon, 2016);

(q) Butte's population collapsed from over 100,000 at peak mining to approximately 35,000 today. The town of Anaconda is a Superfund site. The wealth extracted from Montana built corporate empires elsewhere. The poison remained. This is the extraction economy in its most literal form: resource extracted, profit removed, community abandoned with the cost. The 75.7 percent markup between food production cost and retail price is the same mechanism in a different industry, value extracted from production, profit taken elsewhere, communities left bearing the cost. This Act reverses the extraction model by keeping value in the communities where it is produced;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(q1) Anaconda extracted copper from Butte and left a toxic pit. Augustus extracted taxes from Rome and fed 200,000 people with the annona civica, grain distribution as infrastructure, the same category as roads. Suetonius records Augustus ordering a Roman knight named Pinarius stabbed at a public assembly for the offense of taking notes. The man who did that still fed his city. The annona ran over 400 years. Nerva added child nutrition funded by government loans to farmers, recorded on bronze at Veleia (CIL XI 1147) that can still be visited in the Parma Museum. At Mabu Co in Tibet, sedentary abundance was achieved 4,400 years ago at 14,587 feet with fishing hooks (Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event proved one fern species could edit Earth's atmosphere over 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). The military commissary has run 159 years. The annona ran over 400. Biology works across geologic time. Montana's ranches produce more cattle than the state has people. The question is not production. The question is who eats;

(q2) This Act does not place Montana ranching under government ownership. Cattle operations stay private. Wheat farms stay private. Trucking and processing stay private. The state purchases at production cost plus a surcharge not exceeding five percent and operates the retail point of sale, the same model the Defense Commissary Agency at Malmstrom Air Force Base has used since 1867 without acquiring a single ranch. This is not the municipal grocery-ownership model: it does not have the state own and operate the supply chain, as the New York City municipally owned grocery proposal associated with Mayor Mamdani would. It contracts with private producers and removes the markup, the way the member-owned wholesaler Costco delivers groceries at near-cost through volume purchasing. Currency survives for everything above the base list. The Act establishes a floor, not a ceiling;

(q3) The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora operates driverless freight between Dallas and Houston today. More than 15,000 store closures were projected for 2025. Rural Montana grocery access was already fragile. This Act does not cause that displacement; it catches the workers it displaces, because at-cost food does not depend on holding a job. Adam Smith warned in 1776 of exactly the worker the automated economy now produces: the man "whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations." The commissary still employs truckers and stockers; at-cost pricing removes the markup, not the labor;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH: WHY THIS ACT REACHES BEYOND BARE SURVIVAL:

(r) 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;

(s) 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 the surviving 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);

(t) 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);

(u) 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);

(v) These findings collectively establish the load-bearing fact of this section: the gap is the gradient, not the deprivation alone. The rank is the exposure. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three species. Hierarchy itself kills. Poverty and social hierarchy are therefore not merely economic conditions but medical conditions with documented physiological pathways that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. A food and commodity assurance program that lifts the floor and reduces the gradient is, on this evidence, a public health intervention with quantifiable healthcare cost-reduction potential;

(v1) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis named a real disease at the wrong site. In "Schooling in Capitalist America" (1976) they identified socioeconomic stratification but isolated the school as its engine. The targeting was wrong. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease, and it runs through housing, wages, healthcare access, food distribution, and every other institution at once. No single institution built it, and targeting any single institution misses the structural mechanism (Cooper, "The Targeting Error," 2025). The corrected diagnosis is stronger because it requires no villain: the gradient documented in findings (r) through (v) kills at every level of the hierarchy, and the remedy is to raise the floor;

(w) Montana has ranked among the five highest states for suicide rate in the nation for thirty consecutive years. In 2022, Montana had the highest suicide rate in the United States at 28.9 per 100,000 population (326 suicides), according to the National Vital Statistics Report (Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, September 2023). Rural isolation, economic precarity, cultural stigma around mental health, limited access to behavioral health services, and Montana's vast geography, where the nearest mental health provider may be hours away, produce a hierarchy of abandonment. Marmot's gradient does not require a visible oppressor; geographic and economic isolation produce the same cortisol-driven health outcomes;

(x) Montana's tribal reservations experience some of the worst health outcomes in the United States. Poverty rates on Montana's reservations range from twenty percent (20%) on the Flathead Reservation to thirty-eight percent (38%) on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation (Montana Department of Labor and Industry, 2024). Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, substance abuse, and suicide rates on Montana's reservations are severely elevated. This is Marmot's gradient at its steepest: the colonization of indigenous peoples imposed an extreme status hierarchy, and the health consequences are measurable generations later;

(y) Montana's rural geography creates healthcare deserts measured in hundreds of miles. Critical access hospitals serve as lifelines across the state, but the nearest specialist may be in another state entirely. When the nearest emergency room is one hundred miles away, every Marmot-predicted health outcome is amplified by geographic isolation;

(z) Article II, Section 3 of the Montana Constitution guarantees the right to a "clean and healthful environment." This Act operationalizes that guarantee beyond environmental contamination to the health effects of hierarchy itself, because for most Montanans the gradient is the unhealthful environment;

(2) The Legislature further finds, on the evidence of findings (r) through (z), that food and commodity assurance is itself a public health measure. A program that delivers food at production cost raises the material floor, reduces the documented physiological gradient, and is therefore a measure for the immediate preservation of the public health, peace, and safety of the State of Montana. The evidence is assembled, the productive capacity exists, and the operational template has run since 1867. Denial is no longer a neutral position.

MONTANA FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE

SECTION 2. Title 80, chapter 1, Montana Code Annotated, is amended by adding a new part to read:

ARTICLE 1 Montana Food Assurance Program

80-1-201. Short title.

This part shall be known and may be cited as the "Montana Food Assurance Act."

80-1-202. Definitions.

As used in this part, 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 Montana Department of Agriculture.

(3) "Food assurance center" means a state-operated facility established under this part for the purpose of distributing food products to Montana 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) "Tribal food sovereignty program" means a food production, processing, or distribution program operated by or in partnership with one of Montana's federally recognized tribal nations, including but not limited to buffalo restoration programs, traditional food systems, community gardens, and tribally operated food distribution centers.

80-1-203. Montana food assurance program - creation - purpose.

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

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Montana 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 continuously since 1867.

(3) The program shall:

(a) Establish and operate food assurance centers throughout the state of Montana;

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

(c) Sell food products to Montana residents at at-cost pricing as defined in section 80-1-202;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Montana farms, ranches, and tribal food sovereignty programs to the maximum extent practicable, with a target of sixty percent (60%) Montana-sourced products within three years and seventy-five percent (75%) within five years;

(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;

(g) Establish partnerships with Montana's tribal nations for food sovereignty programs, including but not limited to buffalo restoration, traditional food systems, indigenous seed banks, and tribally operated distribution points on or near reservations.

80-1-204. Pilot food assurance centers - locations - timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of this part, the department shall establish not fewer than five (5) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) One (1) center in the Billings metropolitan area;

(b) One (1) center in the Missoula metropolitan area;

(c) One (1) center in the Great Falls metropolitan area, with particular consideration for proximity to the Little Shell Tribe community and Malmstrom Air Force Base;

(d) One (1) center serving the Blackfeet Reservation and surrounding communities, located in consultation with the Blackfeet Nation;

(e) One (1) center serving the Crow or Northern Cheyenne Reservation and surrounding communities, located in consultation with the respective tribal governments.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this part, the department shall expand the program to not fewer than twelve (12) food assurance centers statewide, including:

(a) At least one center per congressional district;

(b) At least one center within or adjacent to each of Montana's seven reservations, developed in partnership with the relevant tribal government;

(c) At least two (2) centers serving rural communities as defined by the department, with priority given to communities more than fifty (50) miles from the nearest full-service grocery store.

(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.

(4) Mobile food assurance units, refrigerated distribution vehicles operating on regular routes, shall supplement fixed centers in areas where population density does not support a permanent facility, with not fewer than three (3) mobile units operational within two years.

80-1-205. Montana food assurance fund - creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the state treasury the Montana food assurance fund.

(2) The fund shall consist of:

(a) Appropriations made by the Legislature;

(b) Revenue generated by the facility surcharge;

(c) Federal grants and matching funds;

(d) Private donations and gifts;

(e) Any other money directed to the fund by law.

(3) Money in the fund is continuously appropriated to the department for the purposes of this part.

80-1-206. Montana-first procurement.

(1) The department shall prioritize procurement from Montana-based producers, ranches, farms, and tribal food sovereignty programs.

(2) Not less than sixty percent (60%) of all food products distributed through food assurance centers shall be sourced from Montana producers within three (3) years of the program's effective date.

(3) Not less than seventy-five percent (75%) of all food products distributed through food assurance centers shall be sourced from Montana producers within five (5) years of the program's effective date.

(4) The department shall establish contracts with Montana's tribal nations for the procurement of buffalo meat, traditional foods, and tribally produced agricultural products, with terms negotiated directly with tribal governments.

80-1-207. Tribal food sovereignty partnership.

(1) The department shall establish a Tribal Food Sovereignty Advisory Council consisting of one (1) representative designated by each of Montana's eight federally recognized tribal nations.

(2) The Advisory Council shall advise the department on:

(a) Location and design of food assurance centers on or adjacent to reservations;

(b) Integration of traditional foods and culturally appropriate products into food assurance center inventories;

(c) Buffalo restoration programs as food sovereignty infrastructure;

(d) Indigenous seed preservation and traditional agricultural practices;

(e) Tribally operated mobile distribution routes.

(3) No food assurance center shall be established on tribal land without the express consent and partnership of the relevant tribal government.

MONTANA ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM

SECTION 3. Title 90, chapter 1, Montana Code Annotated, is amended by adding a new part to read:

ARTICLE 2 Montana Essential Goods Program

90-1-201. Montana essential goods program - creation.

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

(2) The program shall produce and distribute clothing, household supplies, hygiene products, tools, and other essential commodity goods at at-cost or below-retail pricing through manufacturing partnerships and direct procurement, on the same no-profit, cost-plus-surcharge basis as the food assurance program.

(3) The program shall prioritize partnerships with Montana-based manufacturers and artisans, including tribal enterprises.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 4. Appropriation.

The following amounts are appropriated from the general fund for the biennium beginning July 1, 2027:

Department of Agriculture (food assurance): $20,000,000 Department of Commerce (essential goods): $8,000,000 Tribal partnership and food sovereignty grants: $8,000,000 TOTAL: $36,000,000

This total represents approximately one-half of one percent (0.5%) of Montana's approximately $6.96 billion biennial general fund for the 2027 biennium [SOURCE: NBC Montana, "Montana 2027 biennium budget by the numbers," 2026].

THE FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says that ending the food gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state and its residents already pay. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine years inside the same federal apparatus the state already funds. Montana is not asked to attempt something untested. Montana is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans at Malmstrom Air Force Base have received since 1867.

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 [SOURCE: H.R. 1, 119th Congress, 2025]. Montana 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 SECTION 2 of this Act, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food (production cost plus a surcharge not exceeding five percent), an approximately 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

THE FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in SECTION 2 of this Act, serving Montana's population of approximately 1,142,750 residents [SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program, Vintage 2025], requires approximately $353 million 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 lowest retail price, per USDA Food Dollar Series methodology). Montana's per-capita general fund spend is approximately $3,045 per resident (the approximately $3.48 billion annual general fund [SOURCE: NBC Montana, 2026], divided by population), which places Montana on Table 2 of the fiscal-baseline schedule. Against Montana's annual general fund of approximately $3.48 billion, the $353 million target represents approximately ten percent. The full thirty-seven-item Table 1 baseline ($609 per person per year, approximately $696 million per year) is retained as the program's expansion goal once the base program is operating. The $36 million appropriated by this SECTION funds the establishment, pilot, and initial-expansion phases; full statewide operation scales to the target as food assurance centers come online and Montana-first procurement contracts mature.

THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Montana "cannot afford" this Act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same function, routing food assistance through a 75.7 percent retail markup, 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 several times as much as required to accomplish the same objective. Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 5. Effective dates.

(1) The Montana Food Assurance Program established in SECTION 2 of this Act takes effect July 1, 2027, with pilot food assurance centers operational within two (2) years of the effective date and statewide expansion within five (5) years.

(2) The Montana Essential Goods Program established in SECTION 3 of this Act takes effect July 1, 2027.

SECTION 6. Severability.

If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the act and the application of the provision to other persons or circumstances is not affected.

SECTION 7. Tribal sovereignty.

(1) Nothing in this act shall be construed to diminish, modify, or eliminate the sovereign authority of Montana's federally recognized tribal nations.

(2) All programs established in this act that operate on tribal land or serve tribal communities shall be developed and administered in genuine partnership with the relevant tribal government, pursuant to the government-to-government relationship between Montana and its tribal nations.

(3) Tribal nations may elect to participate in, modify, or decline any program established in this act as it applies to their sovereign territory.

SECTION 8. Coordination with Montana Constitution.

(1) This act is enacted pursuant to and consistent with:

(a) Article II, Section 3 (right to a clean and healthful environment);

(b) Article II, Section 10 (right to privacy);

(c) Article X, Section 1(2) (preservation of cultural integrity of American Indian populations);

(d) Article III, Section 4 (initiative and referendum);

(e) Article XII, Section 1 (the Montana Constitution controls when in conflict with statute).

(2) The Legislature declares that this act operationalizes the anti-extraction constitutional framework envisioned by the delegates to the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention.

SECTION 9. Safety clause.

This act is declared necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT:

Senate Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation Committee House Agriculture Committee House Appropriations Committee

FLOOR VOTE:

Senate: Simple majority (26 of 50) House: Simple majority (51 of 100) Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds)

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this act are drawn from:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE: - USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series (2023) - Military Commissary Act of 1867, 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 - Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance" (2025), Paper III - Cooper, "Stolen Futures" (2025), Paper IV - FRAC, SNAP State Fact Sheet, Montana (February 2025) - USDA NASS, Montana Agricultural Statistics (2024) - Montana Free Press, "Montana still has more cows than people" (July 2025) - Coresight Research, United States retail store closures (2024) - Galbraith, "The Affluent Society" (1958) - Veblen, "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921) - Penck, Earth carrying capacity calculations (1925) - Cohen, "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" (1995) - Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), Book V

EXTRACTION HISTORY: - High Country News, Berkeley Pit snow geese (December 1995) - Audubon Society, Snow Geese Die in Poisonous Mine Waters (2016) - EPA, Butte Mine Flooding Operable Unit Fact Sheet (2019) - Malmstrom Air Force Base, 341st Missile Wing Fact Sheet

HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT: - Suetonius, "Life of Augustus"; Appian, "Civil Wars"; Cassius Dio, "Roman History" (annona civica; the Pinarius record; Nerva alimenta) - CIL XI 1147, Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (Parma Museum) - Yang et al., Mabu Co sedentary settlement, Nature Ecology and Evolution (September 2024) - Brinkhuis et al., "Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean," Nature 441 (2006) (the Azolla Event)

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY: - Marmot, The Whitehall Studies (1967-present) - Marmot, "The Status Syndrome" (2004) - Sapolsky, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" (1994); "Behave" (2017) - Shively, Social Stress and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis (2009) - Blackburn and Epel, "The Telomere Effect" (2017) - Bowles and Gintis, "Schooling in Capitalist America" (1976) - Cooper, "The Targeting Error" (2025), Paper V - Montana DPHHS, Suicide in Montana Report (September 2023) - Montana Department of Labor and Industry, Reservation Economies (2024)

FEDERAL STRUCTURAL OVERLOAD AND MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT: - Cooper, "The Structural Overload" (2026), Paper VII - Swiss Federal Council, collegial executive since 1848

MONTANA-SPECIFIC: - Montana Constitution (1972) - Montana tribalnations.mt.gov, Directory of Tribal Nations - NASBO, Montana state budget profile (2025) - NBC Montana, "Montana 2027 biennium budget by the numbers" (2026) - Census Bureau, Montana QuickFacts and Population Estimates, Vintage 2025 - Montana Free Press, Montana population growth (January 2026) - 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention (University of Montana archives) - Ballotpedia, Signature requirements for ballot measures in Montana

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY FRAMEWORK: - Cooper, "Historical Apoplexy" (2025-2026), Papers I through X

END OF BILL

MONTANA FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT Sixty-Ninth Legislature of the State of Montana 2025 Regular Session

Prepared by: The Amanuensis, theamanuensis.com Version 2 (Montana adaptation). Original Colorado proposal 2015-2016 (Cooper, through SMRF). Montana adaptation March 2026. Cromwell-Mode 26-item reweave and Option B restructure May 22, 2026.

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Verification notes & full source chain

Constitutional path: Citizen-initiative-capable.

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 Montana.

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.