‘Our People Are Hungry’: What Federal Food Aid Cuts Mean in a Warming World

The USDA’s decision to cut $1 billion worth of food aid is causing layoffs, supply shortfalls, and the end of donations at charitable groups across the country — all as hunger continues to climb

Ayurella Horn-Muller is a staff writer at Grist. Naveena Sadasivam is a senior staff writer at Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist.

Every Friday, as he’s done for the last year and a half, Mark Broyles hops in his truck and drives 20 minutes from his home in Big Stone Gap to Duffield, Virginia, to pick up two boxes of free food. Though their contents are always a surprise, as the retired mechanic describes it, he’s able to get “fresh produce and stuff that a lot of us can’t afford because of the price of groceries.”

On any given week, the boxes, which are provided by Appalachian Sustainable Development, a local nonprofit food hub that also helps small farmers sell fresh goods to public schools and grocery stores, are filled with lean meat, half a gallon of milk, and an assortment of seasonal produce.

It’s been a lifeline for Broyles, who injured his shoulder in 2022 and has been unable to work since. His mother, who broke an arm and is unable to cook, relies on him for meals. Given the variety of ingredients available to him through the food boxes, the 57-year-old has been expanding his cooking repertoire, whipping up chicken, broccoli, and rice casseroles, apple dump cobbler, and roasted butternut squash. The food ends up feeding Broyles’ family of four, his mother, and her husband. Sometimes, if there were unclaimed boxes at the end of the distribution period, Broyles would pick them up and share them with his neighbors.

“Not only is it food that you can put on the table, but it’s good food that you can put in your body,” said Broyles. “And it’s good food that can build bonds in the community.”

Big Stone Gap is in the mountainous southwest corner of the state, wedged between Kentucky and Tennessee. At the 2020 census, the town recorded a population of 5,254. Nestled in the heart of coal country, more than 80 percent of the residents in the area voted for President Donald Trump in November.

Just last month, the region was hit hard by torrential rain and flash floods. While Broyles escaped the brunt of it, his home is in a floodway, and surging water from the river nearby flooded parts of his yard. “I’m dreading that it’s going to flood again,” said Broyles.

A couple of weeks later, the team at Appalachian Sustainable Development learned that the USDA funding they relied on to be able to afford this farm-to-donation work was going to be delayed and they may only end up being reimbursed a portion of a $1.5 million grant that was supposed to last them through July. Then, one of those programs they were counting on for future funding was suddenly terminated by the USDA. So, about a week ago, Appalachian Sustainable Development shuttered the food box program.

Director of development Sylvia Crum described the situation as “heartbreaking” for the thousands of people throughout Central Appalachia they feed and the 40 farmers they work with that will now lose income. “We don’t have the money,” said Crum. It costs them roughly $30,000 to fill the 2,000 or so boxes that, up until March 7, they distributed every week.

Food insecurity has long been a widespread problem across the region, where residents in parts of Kentucky, for one, grapple with rates of food insecurity that more than double the national average. In the last year alone, a barrage of devastating disasters has magnified the issue, said Crum, causing local demand for the nonprofit’s donation program to reach new highs.

“[This region] has really dealt with so much, with the recent hurricanes and mudslides and tornadoes. And our farmers are hurting, and our people are hurting, and our people are hungry,” she said. “It’s an emotional rollercoaster for everybody.”

Appalachian Sustainable Development via Grist

For decades, the USDA has funded several programs that are meant to address the country’s rising food-insecurity crisis — a problem that has only worsened as climate change has advanced, the COVID-19 pandemic led to layoffs, and grocery prices have skyrocketed. A network of nonprofit food banks, pantries, and hubs around the country rely extensively on government funding, particularly through the USDA. The Appalachian Sustainable Development is but one of them. The first few months of the Trump administration have plunged the USDA and its network of funding recipients into chaos.

The agency has abruptly canceled contracts with farmers and nonprofits, froze funding for other long-running programs even as the courts have mandated that the Trump administration release funding, and fired thousands of employees, who were then temporarily reinstated as a result of a court order. Trump’s funding freeze and the USDA’s subsequent gutting of local food system programs has left them without a significant portion of their budgets, money they need to feed their communities. Experts say the administration’s move to axe these resources leaves the country’s first line of defense against the surging demand for hunger relief without enough supply.

The USDA disperses funding for food aid groups through multiple programs. Some of them were established decades ago, while others are recent additions to the maze of hunger prevention programs shepherded by the agency. Among the more prominent programs are the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program, Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, and The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Although each program has a separate mandate, combined, they help nonprofits and community groups purchase food goods from small and mid-sized farms, distribute them to those in need, and bolster local and regional food supply chains.

Over the last few weeks, the USDA has upended that order, cutting billions of dollars for food assistance programs. To get a more comprehensive understanding of the fallout from the chaos, Grist reached out to the state agriculture departments for nine states. Here’s what we learned.

The USDA has ended future rounds of funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The two programs were slated to dole out $1.13 billion throughout the ongoing fiscal year to states, tribes, and territories, which would then distribute funding to emergency food providers, childcare centers, and schools. Additionally, farm and food programs like the Working Lands Conservation Corps as well as seven other programs have had funding frozen while another three have had individual contracts canceled, according to Civil Eats.

At least two major food banks based in the Midwest and Northeast — the Northern Illinois Food Bank and the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, both of which are part of the Feeding America network — have lost critical funds through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, which was established in 1981 to provide direct food assistance to low-income families. It is a primary way that states and the federal government have distributed food to local communities in the aftermath of a climate-fueled disaster like a hurricane or heatwave.

The USDA stopped the flow of some of the money that pays for products like meats, eggs, and vegetables that are termed “bonus commodities” through TEFAP. Normally, those bonus commodities are distributed to charitable food organizations where they show up as monthly shipments. (The first Trump administration initiated this additional funding in 2018 as part of an effort to bailout farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs in the U.S.-China trade war.)

Robert Desio, a senior manager of public policy and benefits at the Northern Illinois Food Bank, said that without those shipments the quantity and quality of food they will be able to serve will be greatly reduced. About 570,000 residents depend on Northern Illinois; since October, the food bank has distributed roughly 3.1 million meals made up of bonus commodities.

The loss of that program is now compounding with the loss of future Local Food Purchase Assistance funding, a “significant chunk of money” that, for Northern Illinois, Desio said would have amounted to an estimated $1.5 million. They’re also waiting on $165,000 in reimbursements they already spent against the grant this year — before the USDA began freezing and rescinding funds — that they aren’t sure they’ll get back.

“We are already serving more neighbors than ever,” said Desio. An even bigger issue, he said, is that nobody — from the state to the USDA — seems to know exactly what’s going on.

Policy analyst Teon Hayes of the Center for Law and Social Policy said the funding freeze and corresponding food and farm program terminations are going to “send a shockwave” throughout the nation, given the growing demand for charitable food donations. “A federal funding freeze of this magnitude definitely amplifies this strain, and the reduction in funding of these programs … is definitely going to weaken local food systems,” said Hayes. All of this is compounding with an ongoing push by Congressional Republicans to drastically reduce nutrition program funding in the farm bill and the budget reconciliation bill, she said.

The team at the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank is also scrambling amid all the uncertainty, said CEO Joe Arthur. Earlier this month, their bonus commodities-funded shipments and Local Food Purchase Assistance funding, which amounts to about 12 percent of their food budget every month, were canceled, too.

The sudden dearth of federal funding has forced them to pull the plug on a farm-to-donation acquisition program. That money allowed them to source fresh goods like milk, eggs, and meat directly from local farmers, which was then donated to hungry families across 27 counties statewide.

“We’re hustling like crazy to raise food from our food donors and money from our financial donors. But these two sources are substantial, and you just really can’t make them up privately,” said Arthur.

The state agricultural departments that Grist reached out to said they receive tens of millions in funding for food aid from the USDA. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said the agency has been awarded more than $55 million through five USDA programs to fight hunger and promote resilient food systems in the state.

“Federal funding from the USDA is critical to our ability to serve Pennsylvanians who struggle with food insecurity, including vulnerable seniors and families with children,” the spokesperson said. “Frozen or reduced funding will hurt these families.”

Neither Feeding America nor the USDA responded to Grist’s requests for comment.

In an interview last week with Fox News, USDA secretary Brooke Rollins said, “We will use every tool that we have as we move into the next few months, the next year, and beyond to ensure that our farmers are protected.” Much of her pitch for helping “family farmers” had to do with incentivizing international trade for their products. So far, though, the Trump administration has imposed harsh tariffs on the U.S.’s biggest trade partners, which has only resulted in counter tariffs that overwhelmingly target American farmers.

When asked to justify the funding cuts, Rollins responded, “We spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on nutrition programs for lower income and socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, but the Biden administration used that to often push money out, taxpayer dollars out, that is not reaching its intended target. … We’re pulling that back.” Rollins continued, “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure.” Without specifying which discontinued food programs she was referring to, Rollins reiterated that the cuts were limited to “nonessential” programs, or what she termed, “an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”

Justin Sullivan/Getty images via Grist

The termination of some USDA programs and the funding standstill of others isn’t merely preventing food banks and pantries from getting the supplies they need to feed the hungry. It has also forced some businesses to cut internal operations. Because of the USDA’s abrupt decisions, 4P Foods, a food hub in Warrenton, Virginia, is out of roughly $4 million, or some 25 percent of the work they had planned for the year. As a result, founder Tom McDougall has had to tell five members of his team he can no longer afford to keep them on payroll.

“We work with Virginians, with families with children who’ve been with us for years, who don’t deserve to be laid off, but they are going to be because we will not have food to put into places and deliver it the way that we had planned,” said McDougall.

Still, he’s “cautiously optimistic” that the administration and USDA will reverse course on the decision to pull the plug on these programs that McDougall says are necessary lifelines for communities like his after a disaster strikes — a reality increasingly likely for more people as warming makes many types of extreme weather events more frequent and severe.

“When, not if, when the next disaster hits, we’re going to need to turn back to what we did during COVID, which was local and regional supplied [food] webs,” he said. “The next hurricane, who’s going to have food available? We’re going to have food available. We’re going to be able to get into these communities again and again and again. This is a conversation not just about the economy, but about resiliency.”

For aid recipients like Broyles, the end of Appalachian Sustainable Development’s food box program means rethinking how to feed his family. For now, he has frozen produce that he can rely on, but in the long term, Broyles said he will either turn to other food programs in the region, even though none of them provide fresh produce, or scour grocery aisles for deals.

“Mountain folk are very proud people,” Broyles said. “Mountain folk don’t usually ask for help, but sometimes when help is offered, we reluctantly go to get it. … I hope our president and our representatives can see how crucial this program is. Instead of using a broad axe approach to cut some of these programs, that they would go more with the scalpel and trim off the fat.”