At 11:30 a.m. on the first Monday of the new year, the parking lot of Aging Best in Jefferson City is full, a temporary red canvas sign flapping in the breeze to identify the senior center’s new location since February.
People are trickling in for lunch, served every weekday to Missourians 60 and older for an optional donation. One person asks about the soup of the day, while another donates a stack of Sunday papers. There are coupons for baby formula inside, she explains, in case anyone has family who could use them.
“Seniors need socialization,” said Diana Asher of Holts Summit, who has been attending the lunches a few times a week since moving from California in June. “Most people are busy. Seniors tend to end up alone at home one way or another, even if they have a spouse.”
Rebecca Nowlin, CEO of Aging Best, said the nonprofit, which is central Missouri’s area agency on aging, was able to keep offering all of its services throughout the 2025 federal government shutdown. But to cope with delayed reimbursements, it instituted a hiring freeze and expanded the waitlist for home chore services.
Funding delays during the shutdown forced other area agencies on aging to also cut back services or furlough staff, causing lasting harm to the agencies and the older Missourians who rely on them, agency leaders said.
Now Missouri’s 10 area agencies on aging are facing more uncertainty. Federal funding for the Older Americans Act, currently sustained by the same legislation that ended the shutdown in November, is set to expire on Jan. 30.
“These are dollars and funds which for more than 50 years have been stable funding in the community to help seniors with day to day needs, so that they don’t have to go into a nursing home,” said Anneliese Stoever, director of the St. Louis Area Agency on Aging.
The federal law, enacted in 1965, established a national network of area agencies on aging to connect older Americans with services to help them stay safe and healthy in their homes.
In Missouri, those services include free or subsidized home-delivered and community meals, transportation to medical appointments, to buy groceries or visit family, home modifications like grab bars and relief for family caregivers.
All agencies have now been reimbursed for services they offered while Congress was deadlocked, said Lisa Cox, a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, which administers state and federal funds for the agencies.
Cox said in an email to The Independent that the federal government has always come through with funding for the agencies.
“This has happened in the past, and funding has always continued,” Cox said. “There has been no cut to the funding to date.”
But since it takes four to eight weeks for funding to be processed at the federal and state levels after a shutdown, some agencies have only recently been reimbursed for services they provided while Congress was deadlocked.
Stoever said at the end of December that the agency was “just now receiving the dollars that are flowing as a result of the last government shutdown.”
And as agencies fight to build up their cash reserves to protect against future funding delays, some services haven’t resumed.
Most Thursdays since the end of October, there have been no weekly hot meals at the Cameron Lunch Club Senior Center.
Penny Crawford, CEO of Young at Heart Resources, the area agency on aging for northwest Missouri, said the group meals it hosted in Cameron attracted 60 to 70 people before the shutdown.
Now the Cameron senior center only serves lunches when there’s a private donation — like when a client donated $1,000 to fund a Thanksgiving lunch, complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie.
“She said, ‘I have to have my Thanksgiving meal here. It’s the only way I get Thanksgiving,” Crawford said. “So she [got] everyone a Thanksgiving meal, and she got to be with people.”
Home and community-based services
Stacy Morse, executive director of the Missouri Council on Aging, said that by improving health outcomes among older Missourians, services provided by the agencies save the state money and reduce stress on rural hospitals.
Morse added that stable Older Americans Act funding is crucial in addition to short-term sources of federal investment, like the Rural Health Transformation Program passed by Congress this summer as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Missouri has been awarded more than $216 million for fiscal year 2026 through the program, one of five potential years of funding. With the money, Missouri proposed expanding a pilot project called ToRCH, or Transformation of Rural Community Health, that put six rural hospitals in charge of local health initiatives and enabled medical and community providers to get Medicaid compensation for a broader range of preventative services.
Morse said that in order to take advantage of a future outcome-based Medicaid payment system, Missouri needs reliable support for services that keep people healthy.
“We need the Older Americans Act money to support home and community-based services in order to make the ToRCH program successful,” Morse said.
Nowlin said staff of area agencies on aging, including Aging Best, are experts in connecting clients with services in their communities.
“I don’t think anybody else out there probably has the expertise of some of our people,” Nowlin said. “If you call us, they know who to talk to.”
Jennifer Shotwell, CEO of Region X Area Agency on Aging in Joplin, said meal and grocery deliveries are the only way some older Missourians can access nutritious food, especially in rural areas.
Shotwell said Cheryl Lee, a client from Barton County, for years depended on meals and groceries from the agency. The agency even delivered food for her cats.
Where she lived, outside of Lamar, Shotwell said, “they don’t have delivery. They don’t have DoorDash, no Uber.”
“We did our job,” Shotwell said, “because she passed away at home where she wanted to be and not in a nursing home.”
Morse said these services provide a lifeline to older Missourians who use them.
“Just think, for one day, what that would be like to not have access to food,” Morse said, “to not have access to transportation, to not have anybody to help you, whether it’s to open your medicine bottles or take you to the bathroom to get cleaned up.”
Funding stress
Even without federal disruptions funding has not kept pace with increased costs and demand as Missourians age, said Julie Peetz, executive director of the Missouri Association of Area Agencies on Aging.
“I had one [agency leader] tell me recently, ‘I don’t have any more rabbits to pull out of my hat,” Peetz said. “I just can’t do more. There’s no fallback anymore.”
The total state and federal funding Missouri’s agencies received increased by only 15% from fiscal years 2019-2024, from $40.8 million to $47.1 million, according to data provided to The Independent by the association, though there were spikes due to supplementary funding during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cox, the spokesperson for the state’s health and senior services department, said about 71% of Missouri’s funding for the agencies for fiscal year 2026, or $30.1 million, comes from the federal government.
The agencies have begun to benefit from a state tax on insurance premiums passed by Missouri lawmakers in 2019 to help fund home and community-based services. But that new funding stream was intended to supplement existing funding sources, not replace federal contributions.
Shotwell said that during the shutdown, her agency could only keep offering lunches at its six senior centers thanks to private donations and loans from several city governments.
“I couldn’t keep assuming expenses if I had no idea when we were going to be reimbursed,” Shotwell said.
Shotwell said the agency, which serves Barton, Jasper, Newton and McDonald counties, has had to place about 40 people on a wait list for home-delivered meals.
Crawford’s agency, which serves 18 northwestern counties, furloughed half of its staff and halved its in-home services. The agency cut its program to help clients navigate Medicaid eligibility recertifications and paused transportation services.
Peetz said some furloughed staff quit.
“They’re not going to wait around a month or two months to see if they’ll have a job,” Peetz said.
Between staff losses and services that were cut, Peetz said the shutdown did “permanent damage” to agencies “and most of all to the clients.”
Stoever said her agency, one of two in Missouri that are part of a local government, was able to sustain its services throughout the shutdown partly through support from the city of St. Louis. Most agencies in the state are nonprofits.
The agency collaborated with the antipoverty and disaster relief organization Convoy of Hope to distribute 965 cases of food across 10 senior center food pantries to meet heightened demand due to the pause of monthly food benefits through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, Stoever said.
About 22% of Missouri’s 1.1 million residents 65 or older receive SNAP benefits, according to the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services.
As a result of the delays in federal benefits, Stoever said, the agency delivered 3,325 emergency meal boxes in November.
Lasting effects
Agency leaders said they are adjusting their financial planning in anticipation of more frequent funding delays.
Stoever said that due to funding uncertainty, she’s had to tell contractors and community partners that while she doesn’t anticipate cutting their funding in the coming fiscal year, she can’t increase it either.
Shotwell said her agency is trying to increase its cash reserves, aiming to have six months in the bank rather than three.
“Previous to this shutdown,” she said, “if I had more than three months’ worth of my expenses in the bank, I’m doing a horrible job as a nonprofit. My job is to turn dollars into services to help older adults live independently and with dignity.”
But Shotwell said the shutdown — along with inflation and increasing labor costs as Missouri has increased the minimum wage — have demanded a “paradigm shift.”
Shotwell said she is “constantly chasing grant money and fundraising” to accumulate carryover funds.
But that won’t ultimately be enough, she said.
“We can’t keep up the pace we’re at without an investment in the [Older Americans] Act,” Shotwell said.
Morse said it isn’t sustainable for Congress to keep funding area agencies on aging through temporary spending measures, called continuing resolutions.
“We need to stop this continuing resolution business and get a budget so that [the agencies] have some defined numbers and stability,” she said.
Nowlin said that even though reimbursements from the shutdown have come through, Aging Best is still being careful with funds.
They haven’t lifted the hiring freeze yet. And the agency has plans to install a permanent LED sign in front of the new senior center, but it’s had to wait.
“We’re all trying to help out wherever we can, because we’ve got to make sure that we have the funds to take care of the people,” Nowlin. “There’s just been a lot of unknowns.”
