During his first term in office, President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, which provided about $450 million in supplemental funding for USDA’s The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) for FY 2020.
In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut $500 million from USDA’s The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which buys food from domestic producers and distributes it to food banks nationwide. (Note: TEFAP was initially designed in 1981 to support farmers while assisting low-income persons.)
President Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins this week told the Senate’s Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee, “There is plenty of money in the system, we just have to be better at how we are spending it,” and noted that the USDA alone spends more than $400 million a day on food assistance programs including SNAP.
With the video below, Rollins added: “Ending COVID-era funding programs doesn’t defund food assistance. It ensures we’re good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
USDA alone spends $400+ MILLION each day on food assistance programs.
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) May 6, 2025
Ending COVID-era funding programs doesn’t defund food assistance. It ensures we’re good stewards of taxpayer dollars. pic.twitter.com/3lT7Fu6or9
Chris Clayton, agriculture policy editor at The Progressive Farmer, replied to Rollins: “Yes, but the produce farmers — fruit and vegetable farmers — who lost money on LFPA, LFS don’t have the same safety net that the commodity producers have. The vast majority of them don’t get to be part of a $10 billion aid program. That’s what USDA is missing here with these wholesale cuts.”
Note: LFPA is the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement, a USDA program that delivers locally produced food to local food banks and organizations that reach underserved communities.
ABC News reported on Thursday: “Food bank managers across the country say their supplies have been strained by rising demand since the covid pandemic-era emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits ended two years ago and steepening food prices. Now, they say, demand is compounded by recent cuts in federal funding to food distribution programs that supply staple food items to pantries nationwide.”
Note: On Friday, the USDA announced that the agency was “part of the largest effort to combat EBT fraud in United States Secret Service history,” which involved the surveillance of more than “100 locations in southern California, including multiple SNAP retailers,” and “resulted in numerous arrests and the collection of high value evidence.”
