The Trump administration is facing backlash from Democrats and school nutrition advocates over its recent decision to kill two federal programs that provided more than $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms.
The decision, which comes as Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, underscores the MAGA movement’s antipathy toward food aid programs benefiting millions of poor Americans, including many children.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has slashed two programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms and ranchers. About $660m of those funds were contained in the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to schools and child care facilities but is now being eliminated. The rest were part of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to local food banks and other organizations. The USDA unfroze funds for existing agreements, but a second round of funding in fiscal year 2025 has been nixed.
On Tuesday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins faced a pointed question about her department’s cuts for such programs on the Trump-friendly Fox News network. After reading a headline about the cuts, anchor Bill Hemmer asked, “How do you justify that?”
Rollins responded with a rambling, and transphobic, explanation in which she called the programs “nonessential” and equated them to other contracts she said the USDA canceled that supported what she called “food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco.” In essence, the secretary portrayed these vital programs, which help make sure kids and poor people don’t starve, as forms of Biden administration largesse, baselessly claiming they are evidence of the previous administration trying to “push … taxpayer dollars out that is not reaching its intended target.”
But much like Elon Musk, who stood earlier this year and admitted his so-called Department of Government Efficiency would make “mistakes” that he vowed to correct “quickly,” Rollins seemed to leave room for a reversal. “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure,” she said. “But right now, from what we are viewing, that program was nonessential, that it was a new program, and that it was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.” The secretary’s random slight against transgender people felt in line with the Trump administration’s tactic of using anti-trans attacks to distract his followers from the pain his economic policies are likely to inflict on the country. As for the potential for a reversal, we should all be disgusted by the cruelty in requiring people who’ve benefited from these programs, hungry school children and people reliant on food banks, to hang their hopes of being fed on Musk or Rollins having an epiphany about their deservedness. Relatedly, ESPN football analyst Mina Kimes spoke about that cruelty in an episode of the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast. Kimes recounted her experience retweeting a story of Musk’s withholding of aid from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which she said ultimately and surprisingly led Musk to reverse course on the specific program highlighted in the story. The point being: It is an indignity for anyone to have to live at the whim of the uber-wealthy and well-connected officials steering the Trump administration.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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