U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Aurora) is home in Northwest Aurora this week and he’s spending time visiting organizations facing cuts under the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, a roundtable of health providers met with Crow, sharing stories of what proposed cuts to Medicaid would mean to their programs, from ambulance services and  schools to staffing to support the community.

The meeting was held at Aurora Mental Health & Recovery at 791 Chambers Road, a nonprofit community mental health center, whose leaders said funding cuts would make it even more difficult to pay people to work in their field.

“It’s really difficult work that our folks do. And when we hire staff, it’s because they’re aligned with our mission. These cuts would drastically alter our mission in the way that we’re able to deliver it,” said Dr. Kristen Anderson, chief clinical officer at Aurora Mental Health & Recovery.

Potential staffing and service cuts, and the ability for patients to get the care they need, were the focus of conversation at the meeting. Those cuts could also impact Aurora schools, participants said. There are 75 school-based therapists across the city. Medicaid helps fund those positions because many children being served are eligible for the federal health program.

“I don’t have to tell you all, there’s a lot of suffering. And I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s going to get worse, at least for the near future,” Crow told the group.

“We didn’t wake up and say, ‘I want to be at a moment where our democracy is under assault and we’re retreating from the world and our government’,” the congressman added. He said extremism, violence and polarization are at “lifetime” levels.

Crow urged the health leaders to continue to share stories that he can take to Washington, and invited them to work with his office to seek support.

He spoke of “my conversations with my colleagues, trying to convince those on the other side of the aisle to push back on this and to not cut really important programs” with a human impact.

On Tuesday, the congressman visited the nearby University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where he toured research labs and talked to administrators and faculty about proposed cuts to medical research and federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Crow said those potential cuts are “threatening our ability to find cures for disease like cancer and Alzheimer’s.”

In February, Crow and other Colorado congressional Democrats sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees highlighting how cuts would hurt Colorado’s economy and stall efforts to advance medicine.

At Wednesday’s gathering, Crow said that “the supposed motivation for a lot of these [cuts] is efficiency. I think that’s BS, because if you try to find rationality and logic to any of this, it just doesn’t add up.”