Hancock County, Tennessee, lies on the Virginia border, not far from where Daniel Boone crossed into the American West. For decades it was home to small farmers who carved out a living growing burley tobacco. Greg Marion, the former county mayor, remembers locals buying cars from his father’s dealership on credit. They’d pay in full when their tobacco check came in each season. Those farms started disappearing after the surgeon general released his warning against tobacco products in 1964.



Ten years ago, Hancock County still had 500 manufacturing jobs, according to Marion. Now there are fewer than 50. Most of the factories have decamped—the local electric motor plant departed for China. Almost all the coal jobs just across the border in southern Virginia are gone too. “We lost tobacco, we lost manufacturing, we lost coal,” Marion says. “Strike one, strike two, and strike three.” On Election Day, almost 83 percent of Hancock voted for Donald Trump, the highest proportion of any county in Tennessee.

Like much of rural Appalachia, Hancock—one of the poorest counties in the nation, and the second-poorest in Tennessee—relies on federal funding for even the most basic services. Almost a third of the population lives in poverty, and Marion estimates that up to 90 percent receive some form of government assistance, from school lunches to health care. Hancock, he says, owes its sewage system, hospital, even its sidewalk maintenance to a little-known federal agency called the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC.

ARC is an example of big government at its best.

ARC is on the chopping block in the skinny budget President Trump released on March 16. In the coming months, Congress will haggle over the $120 million ARC has requested from the federal government this fiscal year, money that funds development projects scattered across 420 counties, from Missouri to New York. Trump had campaigned on an upstart populism, promising a government that can “take care of everybody,” but has since embraced a more traditional austerity conservatism. Mick Mulvaney, his budget director, recently bragged, “He probably didn’t know what the Appalachian Regional Commission did. I was able to convince him, ‘Mr. President, this is not an efficient use of the taxpayer dollars.’”

ARC is an example of big government at its best. It is responsive to local needs, and it achieves demonstrable results with a miniscule portion of the federal budget. Its success—and uncertain future—provides an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads in a region that has taken a hard turn toward the Republican Party in the past few decades.