Trump cuts hit struggling food banks, risking hunger for poor Americans

Food banks across the US, strained by rising demand, say they will have less food to distribute because of at least $1bn (R18.17bn) in federal funding cuts and pauses by President Donald Trump's administration, according to Reuters interviews with organisations in seven states.

Hunger in the US has ticked up in recent years with rising inflation and the end of pandemic-era programmes that expanded food aid. Trump's administration has vowed to lower inflation by cutting back on government spending, including two department of agriculture programmes that helped schools and food banks buy food from local farms.

Reuters spoke to food banks in seven states that said cancellation and pauses of the programmes meant they expected to offer less produce, meat and other staples in the coming weeks and months, leaving scarcer food for those reliant on free supplies that helped stave off hunger.

One reason is fewer expected shipments from the agriculture department's The Emergency Food Assistance Programme (Tefap), one of the agency's core nutrition programmes that buys food from farmers and sends it to food pantries, some organisations said.

Vince Hall, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, the nation's largest food bank network, said the agriculture department is reviewing the programme and had paused half of Tefap funding — $500m (R9.09bn) — sourced from the Commodity Credit Corporation, which generally gives the department a broad discretionary funding pool for programmes.

An agriculture department spokesperson told Reuters the agency is making purchases to support food banks but did not respond to detailed questions about Tefap spending and why food banks are seeing reduced deliveries.

Feeding America has spoken to the Trump administration about the pause and urged it to make a quick decision on whether to unfreeze the funds, Hall said. The pause compounds losses from the agency's cancellation of the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) programme, which funded about $500m annually for food banks, the organisations told Reuters.

Chad Morrison, head of Mountaineer Food Bank in West Virginia, said he saw on a weekly forecast from the state that about 40% of the organisation's expected April deliveries of products such as cheese, eggs and milk from Tefap would be cancelled. That will reduce the amount of food its network of 450 food pantries and other feeding programmes provide, he said.

Food banks are handling unprecedented demand as US hunger rates climb after years of decline. In 2023, 13.5% of Americans struggled at some point to secure enough food, the highest rate in nearly a decade, according to the most recent agriculture department data. In rural America, the hunger rate is higher, at 15.4%, the data shows.

Anna Pesek, a farmer in Delaware County, Iowa, said about 20% of sales from her Over the Moon farm last year were from the LFPA, which sent her turkeys and pork to food banks across the state. Funding for the programme has also been cut. She expected her pasture-raised products will no longer make their way to pantries without the agency funding.

“It feels devastating,” she said.

Food banks and pantries in West Virginia, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California and Nebraska have together lost millions in federal funding and food deliveries in recent weeks, according to Reuters interviews.

Julie Yurko, president and CEO of Northern Illinois Food Bank, which serves 13 counties in the state, said that over the past 18 months, her organisation received $3m (R54.5m) from the LFPA to buy onions, potatoes, apples and other produce from local farmers.

Without the programme “we are going to have less produce to give to our neighbours”, she said.

Illinois had $14.7m (R267.1m) in funding terminated and another $6.4m (R116.3m) in other agriculture department  funds frozen in recent weeks, halting a food box programme that paired local farmers with food pantries, said Jerry Costello, director of the state's agriculture department.

Savannah Oates, advocacy and public relations manager at Community Action Partnership of Kern in Kern County, California, said about half the food for the organisation's food bank comes from Tefap. With deliveries paused, she said the group has about two to six months of supplies in stock and is hoping to supplement the offerings with leftover food from local restaurants.

In Charleston, West Virginia, Sara Busse, volunteer coordinator for Trinity's Table, a food aid group, stood in a parking lot and surveyed a meagre delivery of agriculture department-supplied food: two boxes each of dried potato flakes and shelf-stable milk and two cases of baked beans.

Before the Trump administration began the cuts, the deliveries filled an 18-wheeler, she said, adding the programme may need to halt its meal service to senior groups altogether. 

“It’s dreary, it’s very frightening. We’re all losing sleep,” she said.

At Charleston's East End Resource Centre, Martha Ross, 78, looked over Trinity's Table's sparse donations during a recent senior meal, noting it was far less than usual.

“I guess we’ll get real skinny,” she said. 

Reuters