Ever since Donald Trump won the presidency again last November, Sandy Swett, founder of the Harrison Food Bank in Maine, had been expecting a reduction in the food shipments from the federal government.
However, a 40% decline was far more than she had envisioned. In April, the United States Department of Agriculture sent the food bank 4,200 pounds of food compared to the usual 7,000 pounds Swett was used to.
“I’ve got three pallets last month, it lasted one week, and it’s supposed to last all month long,” Swett said. “I’m picking up my next shipment, which has been cut again. I won’t know until I pick it up how much of each item has been cut.”
Beginning in April, her usual 7,000 pounds of food through the USDA shrunk to around 4,200 pounds.
Trump’s administration has taken a hatchet to the federal government in an attempt to curb waste, fraud and abuse and follow the initiatives of the Department of Government Efficiency and “special government employee” Elon Musk. The USDA terminated or put up for review thousands of contracts associated with the diversity, equity and Inclusion programs and has now cut several programs meant to provide resources to emergency food provider organizations and schools which help feed millions of food insecure people across the country.
This crisis in funding pullbacks and food shipment reductions is what many food banks are now facing. Nowhere is the crunch clearer than in the state of Maine, where Trump has specifically channeled his animus towards. Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with an executive order signed by Trump which banned transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports.
In response, the USDA froze around $3 million in funding for a program primarily used to feed schoolchildren in the state and announced a review of Biden-era grants given to the state to ensure taxpayer dollars were not spent on “programs that violate federal law.”
“In order to continue to receive taxpayer dollars from USDA, the state of Maine must demonstrate compliance with Title IX,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in a press release in April. “Many of these grants appear to be wasteful, redundant or otherwise against the priorities of the Trump administration.”
The funding has since been reinstated in a win for Mills after the Trump administration and the state of Maine reached an agreement in court. However, this wasn’t the only funding going into the state that were in Trump’s crosshairs. Food shipments for many other organizations throughout the state are still taking a hit as the attack on poor Americans in Maine and their ability to eat plows ahead.
Good Shepherd Food Bank, located in Auburn, Maine, is preparing for cuts to federal food assistance programs by the USDA that will have reverberating impacts on organizations across the state that make pick ups at GSFB.
One program facing a contraction is called the Local Food Purchasing Assistance, which provides organizations with food and beverages from local and underserved producers. An extension of the program costing $1.25 million would have provided GSFB with a projected 500,000 to 600,000 pounds of locally sourced fresh produce, but instead was cut by the USDA.
Additional cuts have also been made to The Emergency Food Assistance Program or the “Biden-era TEFAP slush fund” as described in an email from USDA Spokesperson Dirk Fillpot, which provides emergency food providers with food products. This will have an estimated reduction of over 250,000 pounds of food distributed per month to the people in Maine according to GSFB.
Food banks such as Swett’s directly rely on TEFAP deliveries sent to the GSFB for a significant amount of the food they distribute to people in Maine. Her food bank serves 800 to 1,000 families a week through their brick and mortar location, delivery service, drive-thru pantry and school partnerships. With such a large contraction in the amount of food she typically receives to distribute to the community, Swett has had to reduce the amount of food offered to people who are already struggling to put food in their belly.
Around 13% of the entire state of Maine, which comes out to around 179,680 people, was considered food insecure as of 2022 according to the Map the Meal Gap database produced by Feeding America, a nonprofit aimed at preventing food waste and hunger.
For children, the percentage was even worse as 16.5%, or around 38,598 kids, were living in food insecure households in Maine between 2021 and 2023 according to a report conducted by Hunger Free America, a nonprofit aimed at ending hunger in the U.S.
People who are economically unable to consistently purchase healthy and nutritious food on their own certainly won’t benefit from lighter meals at food pantries and banks across the state, nor can they afford the inevitable inflationary impacts of Trump’s current tariff regime. Even with Trump backing down on his trade war with China temporarily, a 10% universal tariff on all imports to go with 30% tariffs on China will still have inflationary impacts on goods in a regressive nature.
Nationally, American households are staring down a decline in average real disposable income of $2,836 as a result of the tariffs in place as of May 12 according to the non-partisan policy research center Yale Budget Lab. In Maine, the state imports large amounts of lumber and energy from Canada. As of now, energy and potash outside of the USMCA agreements have been slapped with a 10% tariff while tariffs on lumber coming in from Canada are expected to more than double by September according to the National Association of Home Builders, a trade association.
“They get a big electrical bill, that means an extra trip to the food pantry,” Vice President of Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry Max Dietshe. “Electricity prices are going to go up, and prices for things like lumber, which is milled in Canada and sent back here. It’s going to hit the Maine economy hard.”
Emergency food providers also face an indirect barrage from the proposed cuts by Republicans in Congress for their ten year budget plan, adding up to at least a $1.5 trillion reduction in spending. This will inevitably lead to cuts in programs that provide healthcare and food to low income Americans such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Medicaid and SNAP enrollees make up 18% and more than 11% of Mainers respectively as of the latest available data. Cuts to these crucial programs for people already struggling to meet the bare necessities of life on their own will only lead them to rely on emergency food providers even more, exacerbating existing food supply issues within these organizations.
“Let’s take vegetables from poor people to not even balance the budget,” said Dietshe.