Yves here. With all of the DOGE destruction, tariff freakouts, and continuing assaults on civil liberties and due process, many other damaging Trump actions have gone under the radar. One is an assault on the poors by stopping deliveries to food banks in six states. Oddly, I could not find a list, but the harm is not just to blue states like California and New York. Diehard deep red West Virginia and Ohio are among the victims. This change was presented as a pause, but given that any Federal workers involved in managing the logistics have probably been fired, I would place the odds of a resumption as low.
And the amount at issue is couch lint by Federal standards, $500 million. This is half the budget for The Emergency Food Assistance Program, the one at issue here. The benefits, in terms of reducing suffering, malnutrition and resulting cognitive impairment of the young, and disease, is vastly greater than the cost in real economy terms.
And this is not the only food program being whacked. As described in Reuters, the Trump Administration cancelled the Local Food Assistance Program, which provided an additional $500 million of support, to communities in many more states.
These cutbackare cruel as well as short-sighted.
The article below is about a New York City food bank, but expect effects like this elsewhere.
By Haidee Chu. Originally published at THE CITY on April 9, 2025
On a recent Wednesday, the line began to form around the corner of 116th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard by 3 p.m., an hour before the Food Bank for New York City Pantry and Community Kitchen opened for a free dinner.
“What time is it?” chef Sheri Jefferson, 60, asked just after 4. Calmly but swiftly, she began assembling hundreds of plates of curried potatoes, corned beef, salad and cornbread she had spent the afternoon preparing, placing each plate on a black serving tray.
Colorful plates met eager eyes as volunteers set down meal trays on the dining tables for hungry people to dig into. Few of them knew the journey the food had taken to arrive in this corner of Harlem.
Every weekday, the Food Bank for New York City receives about 50 to 75 truckloads of fresh produce, meats, seafood, dairy products and canned goods from around the country at their 90,000 square feet warehouse in Hunts Point in The Bronx, said associate director of operations Ron Olaizola.
It then sorts, repacks and redistributes that food to more than 1,000 pantries, schools, churches and community centers, including the kitchen in Harlem — cycling through roughly 3 million pounds of goods a month.
“Believe it or not, managing a food bank is much harder than managing a deployment,” said Olaizola, a reservist for the Air Force who had just returned from a six-month mission providing humanitarian aid for Syrian and Gazan refugees in Jordan last year.
But feeding the hungry is about to get much harder. The U.S. Department of Agriculture halted deliveries to food banks in six states without explanation, Politico reported in March. While the department told Reuters later that month it is still making purchases to support food banks, it did not answer questions about the missing deliveries.
Now, those interruptions are also impacting New York.
Executives for the Food Bank for New York City said 2.5 million pounds of food that was supposed to arrive at their warehouse from USDA in May and June has been put on an indefinite pause.
That stop comes as the Trump Administration is reviewing $500 million in Congress-approved funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program — about $30 million of which U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said flows to New York State. Food Bank warehouse operators say that program currently accounts for roughly 65% of its inventory.
Recent cuts to funding and programs across multiple federal agencies, coupled with those proposed at the city level, has left food banks scrambling for ways to fill the holes in their patchwork sources of funding — especially as they say demand at pantries has exceeded even the extraordinarily high levels seen during the pandemic.
“I’d love to sit and talk with you today and say that post-COVID we’ve seen a receding of the demand. I’ve been doing this work for almost 20 years now, and I never thought I would see the need as high as it is now,” Leslie Gordon, Food Bank president and CEO, told THE CITY. “The amount of support that comes through USDA across the country, not just in New York City — if it were to go away, we couldn’t fill the hole by ourselves. It’s just too big.”
The USDA last month also notified state officials across the country that it’s canceling the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program after this fiscal year, which ends in September. The program, known in New York State as New York Food for New York Families (NYFNYF), connects food distributors with “traditionally disadvantaged” local farmers and bakers.
NYFNYF has been providing more than $19 million over the last two years to at least 15 organizations to purchase and redistribute food in New York City, including $2 million for the Food Bank and $1.9 million for the New York Common Pantry, which partners with nearly 150 local pantries, schools, community centers and churches to give out free food.
While USDA described the cut as a “return to long-term, fiscally responsible initiatives,” it’s a program Common Pantry executive director Stephen Grimaldi calls a “win-win-win” because it boosts local producers, supports hungry New Yorkers and reduces environmental pollution by eliminating long-haul deliveries.
“This grant was totally transformational for us because this is what we want to do more of. It’s an example of how the government can do good,” said Grimaldi, who now has to find a way to replace funding from NYFNYF, which makes up 13% of his organization’s operating budget.
”We’re spending so much time with DOGE and everything else talking about all the waste and fraud, and the reality is that…we provide such an efficient service and we help humanity. It’s such a shame.”
Cutting funding for NYFNYF affects local growers, too, Grimaldi said. Megan Murphy, the Common Pantry’s food sourcing manager, said the organization is currently the largest purchaser for three of the farmers it buys from.
“Two of them at the end of the last growing season said that without our orders, they wouldn’t have been able to survive another,” Murphy told THE CITY.
Other cuts are already taking a toll — including the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which the Trump administration suspended in February. FEMA currently owes a total of $1.25 million to nearly 100 organizations in already approved funding, according to Grace Bonilla, president and CEO of United Way of New York City, which distributes funding to 400 food pantries in New York City.
“Many of them were approved to get reimbursed, but with this pause they’re not gonna see this money,” Bonilla told THE CITY. “It’s getting to a tipping point where some of them are honestly talking about whether they keep their doors open. And for neighborhoods that are desperately needing those pantries to be there, that’s a really scary thought.”
A FEMA spokesperson told THE CITY that the agency is “instituting additional reviews on all grants to non-governmental organizations” to “ensure the alignment of its grant programs with President Trump and [Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s direction that U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used wisely and for mission critical efforts.”
According to the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, nearly 15% of New Yorkers experienced food insecurity in 2022, while more than 40% of adults lived in a household that’s at risk of being food insecure. Those conditions were more dire in Brooklyn, Queens and especially The Bronx, where one in three children are food insecure.
With the federal cutoffs, many food banks and pantries are now looking to the state and the city to help fill their plates.
Some are calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul to allocate $75 million for statewide hunger relief programs in the now-overdue state budget. In the meantime, Mayor Eric Adams’ preliminary city budget for the upcoming fiscal year is proposing a $39 million cut, from $60 million in fiscal year 2025 to $21 million in fiscal year 2026, for the Community Food Connection program — the city’s primary source of emergency food funding which disburses money to 700 community kitchens and food pantries across the five boroughs
Last week, food bank and pantry leaders gathered outside City Hall to call on Mayor Eric Adams to allocate $100 million to the program.
“What this does is hopefully help us weather the storm that we know is coming,” said Carlos Rodriguez, chief policy and operations officers for City Harvest. “It is cloudy.”
‘Sometimes They Just Cut You Off’
At the Common Pantry’s distribution site in East Harlem on a recent Wednesday afternoon, volunteers were busy unloading a truck filled with 5,000 pounds of NYFNYF produce freshly delivered from its warehouse in Hunts Point — where staff had spent the morning pre-packing bags full of fresh kale, potatoes, carrots, onions and green peppers to deliver to its local pantry partners over the next two days.
Inside in the kitchen, where pop music played overhead, volunteers formed a production line around tables full of cabbages, plantains, corn, carrots and other vegetables and fruits, ready to put together pantry bags for visitors who had been trickling in since 10 a.m.
Among the visitors were sisters Sandra and Korona Salter, who emerged from inside the pantry building with bags full of fresh produce for their family, including their four other siblings.
“We’d be sad — extremely sad if we didn’t have this,” said Sandra, 20, who comes to the pantry on behalf of her mother nearly every week. “We need protein. It’s important for us, for our bodies. We need nutrition and all that.”
Demand has consistently increased across the Common Pantry’s locations and partner sites, Grimaldi said. The group served 17% more meals last year than the year before, he added, and 13% more meals this March compared to the same time last year.
Many pantry visitors told THE CITY that the rising cost of groceries has made their trips to the pantry an increasingly essential routine.
Maria Leon, 42, left the pantry with a cart full of fruits, lettuce, rice and beans from her family of four. She’s been visiting the pantry about twice a month since the pandemic to help put food on the table, she said.
The pantry bags have helped her save “mucho dinero,” she said, especially since her husband, a construction worker, has been having a hard time finding work lately.
“I sometimes no have the money, and the supermarket is pricey,” said Leon, who emigrated to New York City from Mexico 26 years ago. “It changed my life.”
Gladis Pauta, who was visiting the pantry Wednesday to pick up food for her family of seven, echoed that sentiment.
“It’s lot of help because food right now is expensive — very expensive,” Pauta said in Spanish, “This for us is a blessing from God, it’s is a big help. The small check we get might not always be sufficient.”
Down the block, Shavonda Dew and Jay Branch sat on a stoop to exchange items they had received from the Common Pantry. An older man who had just left the pantry stopped by with his cart, too, offering bags of beans and grains to the two mothers.
Dew, a mother of three, said she’d started visiting the pantry about two weeks ago, when her food benefit was suddenly cut by $600 a month and a teacher at her son’s school handed her a booklet with a list of food pantries in the area.
“Everything we get from welfare these days, they don’t last,” Dew said. Branch, a mother of one, chimed in: “Sometimes they just cut you off — no explanation.”
Sorting through the pantry items, the two mothers began planning meals for their kids for the week: Tuna salad for lunch, fruits for snacks, and oat milk for smoothies.
“A lot of people think when you get food stamps, you spend it on lobsters and seafood or something, or you spend it on yourself or you cash it in,” Branch said. “But with real people and real parents, we care more about the onions and potatoes — stuff that last, stuff that you can throw in the freezer and it will be okay. With produce you can always chop them up and throw them in the freezer.”
Several food bank executives told THE CITY that they expect to see more people like Dew at the pantries if the Republican majority in Congress follows through with the sweeping cut they’ve proposed to federal food stamps, otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
‘It’s Really Gonna Hurt’
At the 4 p.m. dinner at the pantry and kitchen in central Harlem, migrants who had arrived in the city from Colombia and Venezuela about six months ago started mixing with seniors who have been in the center since the afternoon for lunch, which is provided for free to those who are 60 years old and up.
“I just like to cook what people enjoy,” said Jefferson, a single mother who prepares enough food at the kitchen each day to serve about 500 people. “I’ve never been in a line or anything like that but I know struggle. I understand what it’s like.”
Mark Grant, 60, said he started coming to the Kitchen at least three or four times a week about six months ago, when he lost his job selling cars. Here, he said, he can get not only lunch and dinner, but pantry bags too.
“For me right now, there’s no income coming in, so this is where I come. So if it’s cut it’s really gonna hurt,” said Grant, who showcased the fresh fruits and canned foods he received from the pantry line earlier in the day.
“Sometimes I would say, what if this place didn’t exist, what would happen? Crime rate would’ve been gone up,” he continued. “If you can’t afford to put food on your table, but you could come to a place like this, you can get a meal and you don’t have to think about other things that are destructive.”
Arnold Blunt, 62, was also at the Community Kitchen Wednesday evening with friends he had met in the pantry line over the past two years. He said he’s particularly fond of chef Sheri Jefferson’s turkey wings, and that eating there has saved him hundreds of dollars every month.
“I thank God this place exists because it brings a lot of people together,” Blunt said. “If this place didn’t exist, we’d be protesting.”
He looked back at Jefferson, who was now surveying the dining room and greeting regulars.
“And Sheri would be protesting with us.”
the husband and wife who run our local pantry and community kitchen are freaking out about all this.
theyre rich…and mainstream democrats…but sincere in their efforts.
after last weekends’ storms and cold spell, wherein i was laid up for 3 days watching tv(sigh), i brought the laptop to the bar so as to not be in the dern bed and looked through the news…and chucked what i had planned to do this week in favor of planting a whole lot more beans and squash…because i reckon my county will need it.
Good for you!
i give them lots of peaches every year, because i somehow grow so much,lol.
and those hard kiefer pears, which come off later in summer.
they can the latter as preserves at the community kitchen.
Millions of peaches, peaches for me.
Millions of peaches, peaches for free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do5KKKxI7FQ
Thank you, amfortas. You are a kind soul. I’m sure the beans and squash will be much appreciated. Blessings to you.
Much of the produce that comes to our local food pantry here in Eastern MA, is from local farms (looking at you Amfortas) in the Connecticut River Valley and collected by a Gleaners organization. During the growing season it’s fresher and more varied than what we get from the Boston Food Bank. If the small local farms can’t survive then it will put a big dent in both the quality and variety of what’s available.
If enough semi-local people buy enough food from the small local farms to keep them in business, then they will survive ( and be able to give some food to food banks). So it really is up to semi-local people in the region who can afford to buy from the small local farms to do so, if they want those farms to survive.
There is no charitizable food surplus without potential producers of that surplus. And if those potential producers don’t get enough money from paying customers to stay in business, then there will be no potential producers and no charitizable food surplus.
the problem is barriers to entry.
private farmers market in town is sporadic…and a hassle of paperwork, due to the city wanting to horn in and wet its beak.
grocery store is a no-go, of course…they want consistency which is not how my kinda op rolls.
so ive had my signs for the truck made for a year…and it looks like ill have enough…and enough variety at the same time…to justify sittin at the former rest area just north of town, sometime in mid may, through early july.
eventually, when all the infrastructure is finally done(gettin there…plod,plod,plod…) i want to have a market day way out here.
I’m ten miles from town, and a mile down a dirt road.
but im setting in place the means to have fruits and veggies in season, all laid out on tables in that big back airy room…as well as a freezer full of dressed birds and lamb and goat…and a fridge full of eggs…and a hot gourmet lunch/brunch, to boot.
i can do all that legally “On Farm”, without any hassles.
thats the end goal…and i still have a ways to go…once the bar extension and big greenhouse are done, i hafta clean up all these piles of debris that are unused that i collected from the dump for 30 years,lol(used a whole lot of it..i estimate it saved me 50k in material cost in that timeframe)…and finish the landscaping/prettifying(thats the easy part).
for the landscaping, ive got trees from seed and rooted cuttings in the lil greenhouse,black pipe and fittings stored away,prolly 300# of various saved bean, pea and other legume seed…and free sources of herbicide free manure and rotted hay when im ready.
(give away eggs and fruit and veg for long enough, and people start helping you,lol)
and now that ive planted everything, all i gotta do is run the big sprinklers(another potential youtube vid,lol)..so i have resolved to finish the tile in the nascent kitchen tomorrow…which means kneepads and pain anyways.
aint gon be worth shootin by this time manana.
If it were not for my local food bank I would be going hungry the last week of the Month.
These cutbacks have already affected the one I go to, they can no longer provide any protein, particularly eggs.
I do live in Sonoma County, so I still recieve some very welcome fresh fruit and vegetables.
This is simply another part of “Right Sizing” the populace, it’s for our own good…
I am so so sorry…..
aye, Tom.
my lil survivor’s teachers pension is gone by the end of the day i get it.
i endeavor to get everything i need that day.
and if i remember right, you’re old and sick and disabled, no?
it shouldnt be thisaway.
i wish you were close(PNW?), id bring you a salad and a goatrib
Foodbanks and Food Pantries provide inestimable value to the Populace — AND to America, AND NOT present day murika. Even so, I am greatly troubled by their existence and their growing importance. I remember candidate George H. W. Bush’s thousand points of light, and it is difficult to forget the ongoing Neoliberal efforts to privatize government services and obligations to the Populace.
After attending a Gala Ball and Celebration of a local Food Bank where I lived in the past, I was shocked and appalled by what I saw. I expected something like the Depression food my Grandma made for me one dinner I spent alone with my grandparents — cornbread, beans with a small amount of ham for flavoring, collard greens, and potatoes. But instead, for a relatively small $200 contribution to the cause, I could enjoy music, dance, and sample or gorge on a vast cornucopia of food prepared by a large number of the local restaurants, presumably hoping to entice a few well-heeled [not me] customers to future restaurant visits. As I watched the evening unfold I felt as if I had been transported to a scene from Katniss’s Wedding Feast in the Hunger Games Trilogy. [I admit I did not see the tiny fluted glasses of emetic but most of the participants at the Gala had more then sufficiently ample stomachs.]
I strongly believe the U.S. Government has an oligation as stated in the preamble to its formal creation, “to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, … promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to our-
selves and our Posterity….” I also believe State and Local Governments share in this responsibility and obligation. Hunger afflicting vast numbers of the u.s. Populace serves none of these responsibilities and obligations. Worse still, the unrest and ill-health of the Populace undermines the responsibility to “provide for the common defence”, as proven in the Draft problems revealed in by great and catastrophic wars of the 20th Century. Although Foodbanks and Food Pantries provide vital help to the growing legions of u.s. poor, they also moderate the anger and pushback against the u.s. government’s dereliction of its responsibilities and obligations, while supplementing that dereliction with private money, I am not sure how much of which results from much larger private checks than I or most other contributors could match. … I will not abrogate my small contributions in protest of what I perceive as the undermining of government obligations with tones of Elite self-aggrandizements, but I will continue contributing to Foodbanks and Food Pantries. As they say: “There is No Alternative.” And now, the u.s. government supports are cutoff at the knees.
The u.s. is a large and wealthy country — wealthy in land, resources, and creative and industrious people. There is no reason that anyone who lives in this country should be without food, housing, schooling for their children, medical CARE — NOT INSURANCE — and the hope of a better life for their children. These are NOT just American dreams.
These and so many other ills and inequities of murika drive me to drink ..
Anecdata from flyover country. Earlier this week a pal was at a function and talked with the head of the local multi-county food bank. A dozen 18-wheelers had been cancelled with no notice and no suggestion if/when shipments would resume. Tech bros depriving food to the hungry in the name of efficiency. Rule #2 is thriving!
I am also in flyover county. Our local food bank which serves several counties just had 50,000 pounds of food delivery cancelled. It included eggs, milk, meat and produce. From what I understand, the food is now rotting away in trucks somewhere. The counties the food bank serves are poor ones with few resources. What a cruel and terrible waste when so many are going hungry.
Foodbanks and Food Pantries provide inestimable value to the Populace — AND to America, AND NOT present day murika. Even so, I am greatly troubled by their existence and their growing importance. I remember candidate George H. W. Bush’s thousand points of light, and it is difficult to forget the ongoing Neoliberal efforts to privatize government services and obligations to the Populace.
After attending a Gala Ball and Celebration of a local Food Bank where I lived in the past, I was shocked and appalled by what I saw. I expected something like the Depression food my Grandma made for me one dinner I spent alone with my grandparents — cornbread, beans with a small amount of ham for flavoring, collard greens, and potatoes. But instead, for a relatively small $200 contribution to the cause, I could enjoy music, dance, and sample or gorge on a vast cornucopia of food prepared by a large number of the local restaurants, presumably hoping to entice a few well-heeled [not me] customers to future restaurant visits. As I watched the evening unfold I felt as if I had been transported to a scene from Katniss’s Wedding Feast in the Hunger Games Trilogy. [I admit I did not see the tiny fluted glasses of emetic but most of the participants at the Gala had more then sufficiently ample stomachs.]
I strongly believe the U.S. Government has an oligation as stated in the preamble to its formal creation, “to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, … promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to our-
selves and our Posterity….” I also believe State and Local Governments share in this responsibility and obligation. Hunger afflicting vast numbers of the u.s. Populace serves none of these responsibilities and obligations. Worse still, the unrest and ill-health of the Populace undermines the responsibility to “provide for the common defence”, as proven in the Draft problems revealed in by great and catastrophic wars of the 20th Century. Although Foodbanks and Food Pantries provide vital help to the growing legions of u.s. poor, they also moderate the anger and pushback against the u.s. government’s dereliction of its responsibilities and obligations, while supplementing that dereliction with private money, I am not sure how much of which results from much larger private checks than I or most other contributors could match. … I will not abrogate my small contributions in protest of what I perceive as the undermining of government obligations with tones of Elite self-aggrandizement, but I will continue contributing to Foodbanks and Food Pantries. As they say: “There is No Alternative.” And now, the u.s. government supports are cutoff at the knees.
The u.s. is a large and wealthy country — wealthy in land, resources, and creative and industrious people. There is no reason that anyone who lives in this country should be without food, housing, schooling for their children, medical CARE — NOT INSURANCE — and the hope of a better life for their children. These are NOT just American dreams.
These and so many other ills and inequities of my country drive me to drink …
Two or three years back, post C-19, the local free, organic mostly, food give away, was a much simplistic affair. I volunteered as well as received produce, eggs. The line formed about 45 prior to opening. The folks were local, 5/10 mile radius. The “rules” were posted, not difficult. Now the line forms up to 3 hours prior to opening. The folks here, rural SW Ore-gon, drive up to 30 miles to wait in line. The new “rules” are such that you can pick up for other families, via, the new IPad tracking device. Are you this, that…senior, disabled, language…size of fa ily determines your market basket. The “temperature” has changed, uncomfortable, jockey for position. Thinner provisions. I gave up volunteering post spinal cord injury. I prefer not to go to receive as it does require a long commitment…2 hours. I miss the good peoples. Very busy, very long… Thanks for this post. Garden is started, small patio pots.💐
spray bottle and fish emulsion, man,lol.
foliar spray in the evening…and for fruitset, a couple of tablespoons of unscented epsom salts(magnesium sulfate) as a root drench every week or two.
and coffee grounds and teabags and such.
and the bigger the pots, the better.
i have a remuda of ranchers who bring me their empty lick tubs.
drill holes in the bottom, fill 3/4 with the city/county dump mulch(from cow manure from feedlot and yard waste from town…i add charcoal dust i make from the fires, and eventually the retort in big greenhouse) and rest with compost i make or buy.
easier on the back, etc.