The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has slashed two programs that provided more than $1bn 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.
“These proposals would cause millions of children to lose access to free school meals at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs,” said a statement from Shannon Gleave, the president of the School Nutrition Association. “Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies.”
The USDA had announced $1.13bn in funding for both of the programs this past December. State officials learned of the cuts on Friday.
They come as Donald Trump’s second presidential administration has aggressively cut federal spending and imposed tariffs, which collectively have forced food organizations and farmers to cut staff as well as halt investments.
Food banks have already been seeing demands due to rising food prices, and Republicans in Congress are pushing to make significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap).
A USDA spokesperson told Politico that funding for the programs chosen for elimination “will be terminated following 60-day notification”. The spokesperson said the programs were created by executive orders issued during Joe Biden’s presidency and “no longer effectuate the goals of the agency”.
The spokesperson also said other agreements that were previously in place “still have substantial financial resources remaining [and] will continue to be in effect for the remainder of the period of performance”.
The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, criticized the Trump White House for cutting programs which would have provided $12m in food-related funding for schools and food banks in her state.
In a press release, she said Trump and his billionaire spending-reduction adviser Elon Musk “have declared that feeding children and supporting local farmers are no longer ‘priorities’, and it’s just the latest terrible cut with real impact on families across Massachusetts”.
“There is nothing ‘appropriate’ about it,” she said. “Trump and Musk are continuing to withhold essential funding in violation of court orders, and our children, farmers and small businesses are bearing the brunt of it.”
