As with many eight-year-olds, there are few things that excite Jayden Browning more than the idea of going to Disney World. But when he goes, there’s only one character he’s really hoping to meet.

“He’s sure that Pinocchio has the answer on how to be a real boy,” said his grandmother, Sherri Hodgeman. “But then he goes: ‘But Nana, I don’t lie! Why can’t I be a real boy now?’ It breaks your heart.”

Jayden was born with a heart so badly underdeveloped that he’s at perpetual risk of heart attack or stroke. As a baby, Jayden technically died on an airlift to the hospital after his body started to turn blue. He was revived, but not before suffering permanent damage to his frontal lobe from a lack of oxygen.

He and his two sisters live with their grandparents in Beekman, New York, a town that sits on the southern edge of Dutchess County, about two hours north of New York City. When a March storm blew through and toppled a tree on their property, severing the power and communication lines, it also severed Jayden’s lifeline. Hodgeman relied on that power to monitor Jayden’s heart, make sure it was beating correctly, and send cardiographic data to Jayden’s doctors.

“I was mortified. I was crying because I didn’t know what we were going to do,” Hodgeman said.

The situation only grew more dire when Hodgeman learned that the utility pole that the storm destroyed was not the electric company’s property. It was hers. The $4,500 it would cost to restore electric service was completely out of reach for the grandparents, who had mostly stopped working to take care of the kids and scraped by on disability payments.

In 2015, Jayden spent more than a quarter of the year in the hospital with an infection. “That wiped out our savings completely,” Hodgeman said. “We were maxing out charge cards.”

Social services wasn’t any help. Hodgeman’s paltry income, even with three dependents, didn’t qualify for financial assistance, and there are no government-funded programs designed to deal with something like a downed utility pole. Hodgeman felt alone.

But while social services and her county executive’s office couldn’t help her directly, both did have one suggestion: try DCCAP.

Dutchess County Community Action Partnership is one of over 1,000 “Cap” agencies nationwide. Ninety-five percent of the nation’s counties have one, and nearly 15 million people are served by one every year. Ostensibly, their mission is simple: address poverty on a community level by offering “wrap-around” services to low-income people. The agencies leverage federal money into state and private grants and generally have more flexibility than government agencies in how they help people – like Jayden and Hodgman – whose electric restoration they were able to cover.

But had Donald Trump gotten his way in budget negotiations, nearly every Cap in the country would be in the process of closing its doors. The community service block grant (CSBG) that funds the program is one of dozens of community service and poverty-fighting programs the president zeroed in his administration’s March “skinny budget” proposal. And even though Congress ignored Trump and fully funded the agencies in a bipartisan budget deal reached Monday, people like Jayden and Hodgeman who rely on them still have reason to fear. With the president advocating a government shutdown to force his way the next time budget negotiations come around, it’s clear that no federal funding aimed at fighting poverty is safe in Trump’s America.

I have personal familiarity with the way these agencies operate, and the complex matrix of support – both financial and ideological – that keeps them afloat. Before my career as a Guardian journalist, I worked at DCCAP in a variety of roles from 2010 to 2013.

I came in on the wave of the $700bn Obama stimulus package in 2009, which saw many US not-for-profit groups swell to their largest-ever size. DCCAP’s youth program had received grant money to mentor children with incarcerated parents and I was hired in a part-time, temporary role fresh out of university to help recruit volunteers.

But the stimulus, and Obama’s 2009 Democratic supermajority legislature, were short-lived. In 2011, the nascent Tea-Party movement ushered in a new era of austerity and lit any hope for continued expansion ablaze. Indeed, the agency does not even house a youth program any longer. But what it still does is offer case management, job training, food pantries, home weatherization and a senior citizen’s program in a county dotted by pockets of extreme urban and rural blight.

“We make other non-profits better and we make city hall and local government more efficient by filling in the gaps in communities,” said David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation. The Head Start pre-K program, Meals on Wheels and Dress for Success are just a few of the nationally popular programs that often operate out of Cap agencies.

Jayden Browning with his sisters. Photograph: Richard Beaven/The Guardian

The agencies were not in uncharted water being slated for defunding under Trump’s “skinny budget”. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush all submitted proposals that would have zeroed the program. Even Barack Obama, who worked directly with the agencies as a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, proposed slicing the outlay for CSBG in half during his 2011 State of the Union.

But Congress has reliably been the Caps’ savior, and that support comes from both sides of the aisle. “Republicans will not go for those cuts that harm their communities so deeply,” Bradley said, noting that even many conservative legislators see the programs as indispensable to their constituents.

Mike Kelly, a congressman elected in the Tea Party wave that brought a number of conservative legislators to office, is one of them. “There’s not enough money for some of the things that I think are important,” Kelly said of Trump’s budget.

The Pennsylvania Republican added that he had been pleased with the management of the Caps in his district, calling them “good stewards” of the funds, and has paid several visits to agencies since being elected.

“I look at it based on the people I represent, and what’s going to help them, not on any ideology,” Kelly said.

And the reality is that while Cap agencies evolved out of Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious 1960s “war on poverty”, the agencies are today a far cry from the kind of “big government” largesse that they were once associated with, at least by their biggest detractors. Instead, much of how they operate has been built in the image of US conservatives.

The current model comes courtesy of Ronald Reagan’s administration after he asked Congress, in 1981, to consolidate dozens of anti-poverty federal grants into block grants, which have less federal oversight and fewer restrictions than other types of grants.

“When we appropriate money … I love to see those people who actually live there and understand that place to be the ones in charge of how that money is used,” Kelly said.

This non-prescriptive approach means that agencies can provide services that make sense for their specific communities, and can adjust to what funders are willing to pay for. When I worked at Cap, for example, the agency hosted a fairly tiny chapter of Dress for Success, a program that helps prepare women to enter or re-enter the workforce with attire for interviews and résumé assistance. In the intervening years, grants from Walmart funded the expansion into a full-fledged career center with one-on-one job-search mentoring.

“For every $1 of [federal funding the agencies] receive, non-governmental dollars are close to $3,” Bradley said. In Dutchess County, the Cap uses these private funds for “unmet needs”, in situations like Hodgeman’s, where no program is necessarily right to pay for something, but a client needs it all the same.

But in many ways the agencies are more than the sum of their parts, and CSBG funding is the glue that sticks all the pieces together and allows them to function as a single unit. “It lays the foundation for all the other things we’re doing. It’s the rock that holds all the other things up,” said Elizabeth Spira, the director of the Dutchess County agency and – full disclosure – my former boss.

The stability of those grants is essentially what allows the agency to exist – to have a building, vehicles or a financial department. CSBG is the infrastructure that other initiatives and programs can rest on when funding shows up, and it serves as a backstop when funding does not.

In Dutchess County that money does things like keep the agency’s weatherization program going, especially when its grant payments lag behind the work being done. The federal program, also zeroed by Trump’s budget, helps low-income people make their homes more energy efficient, saving clients money on their heating and cooling bills while simultaneously helping the environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Many clients see their bills cut by 50% or more, leaving them more money for other necessities and, hopefully, driving them towards self-sufficiency.

On my brief trek back to my old stomping grounds, I stop by and say hello to the director, Patty Lamoree. She is as I remember her: loud, cantankerous and always offering food. “You want a piece of cake?” she says as I walk into her office for the first time in over three years. My attempt to decline is futile. “C’mon, have a piece of cake. Everybody likes cake.”

Lamoree’s role treads the line between a social service provider and a general contractor. As we delve into the nitty-gritty of what her side of the agency does, details I never actually learned in all my time working down the hall, talk of vendors, bids and “as per specs” rolls off her tongue as easily as that of income guidelines and self-sufficiency. Her crew, decimated by cuts since 2010, rolls back in soon after with plaster-caked tees, worn jeans and workboots. They have just finished a nearby job blowing insulation into the attic of a low-income homeowner.

“I think they are cutting funding in the wrong spot. It can’t always be the underdog that gets cut, and yet it always is,” Lamoree said.