Portside

On a sweltering morning in Vidalia, Louisiana, Shannan Cornwell and Freddie Green got in a long line to wait for food.

The couple has struggled to pay for groceries amid soaring prices and health setbacks, they said. She had back surgery. He had undergone cancer treatment.

They turned to a local food bank to supplement their diets. Although they’re grateful for the food, lately they’ve noticed changes in what they receive. For months in the spring and summer their pickups did not include any meat, Cornwell said.

“You have to learn how to adapt to what you have,” Green said. “Which is hard,” Cornwell added.

In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute.

The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history.

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. Each truck here represents a delivery that would never arrive to feed communities.

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the year’s deliveries had been scheduled.

“Healthy foods are the first thing to be cut from someone’s budget when they’re struggling to make ends meet, and so it’s really a lose-lose for everyone involved.”

Stephanie Sullivan, a spokesperson at Food Bank for the Heartland

“The cost is really high for protein, and for food banks across the country there is no special pipeline to cheaper food.”

Katy Anderson, a vice president at Roadrunner Food Bank

“The next time you see one of those trucks driving down the street, you got to realize that it’s carrying less food this year than it was last year, and that’s because of the food that we’re not getting from the USDA.”

John Sillars, chief strategy officer at Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana

Most food banks rely on a combination of federal or state dollars, private giving and partnerships with businesses that donate leftover food. While the cancellations were disruptive to all food banks, according to their representatives, those that receive state funding or have strong community support said that they have weathered the cuts better than others.

The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, where Cornwell and Green’s groceries come from, gets more than half of its food from the federal government and receives very little state support. It serves rural areas of Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to U.S. census data.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.

“We’re not turning people away with no food. It’s not to that point,” said Jayne Wright-Velez, who has been the executive director at the food bank for 30 years. “But people are getting less food when they come to us.”

The organization has tried to fill the gap with produce donations, but transporting and distributing fruits and vegetables is challenging, and multiple patrons told ProPublica the produce had gone bad by the time they received it.

On a recent morning, Codie Dufrene, 23, came to collect food for her grandfather and his neighbors, who live 45 minutes from the closest grocery store.

Usually, the trunk of Dufrene’s car would be full. Not lately.

Dufrene received chicken for the first time “since way before the summer.” But the poultry came from a donation that hardly made up for the 74,000 pounds of chicken that never arrived in June.

She said that though her family is grateful and will use whatever they get, the quality of the food can be discouraging. Dufrene pointed out the condition of a cantaloupe she received. “You can tell — they’re frozen and they’re already super, super soft.” She said her mother would likely give them to her pigs, “because people can’t really eat those.”

Wright-Velez said the food bank trains its staff on food safety and does its best to check everything before it goes out, but it’s difficult to do at a large scale. “Especially in the heat of the summer, things just go bad so quickly,” she said. “The clock’s ticking as soon as we get the donation.”

The Emergency Food Assistance Program was created in 1983 to purchase farmers’ surplus food and distribute it to low-income people. The program’s budget is typically authorized every five years as part of the Farm Bill, but in 2018, the first Trump administration added funds to help farmers struggling under retaliatory tariffs the U.S. faced amid trade disputes. The additional, discretionary federal funds helped food banks serve more people; last fiscal year, they got nearly twice as much money from the fund as they did from their congressional allocation.

Now characterizing the additional funding as a “Biden-era slush fund,” the second Trump administration cut $500 million that had already been allocated. The government is still distributing food through other parts of the program, but food banks were caught off guard by the canceled deliveries because it’s rare for funding to be cut mid-year. Food bank managers, some with decades of experience, couldn’t recall a disruption like it. With the Farm Bill slated for renewal this fall, officials who run food banks worry that any additional cuts would cause them to have to scale back the number of people they serve.

Already the need is greater than what food banks have on hand, said Shannon Oliver, the director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank.

“We’re having to kind of prepare for the fact that there’s just not going to be enough food, and having to be clear with setting the expectation that we’re doing everything we possibly can,” she said.

The USDA did not respond to questions or requests for comment. In a May letter responding to senators’ concerns about the funding cut, the agency said it had made additional food purchases through another program and that the emergency food program continues to operate “as originally intended by Congress.”

“While the pandemic is over, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has not and will not lose focus on its core mission of strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious foods,” the letter said.

The Need Continues to Grow

By 8 a.m., the line in the parking lot of a library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, snaked around a chain-link fence. People had been waiting for hours to pick up groceries from Roadrunner Food Bank, which lost about 850,000 pounds of food to the funding cut, according to USDA records. As a result, people are receiving less dairy, meat and other high-protein items.

New Mexico consistently ranks among the poorest states in the nation, and it has more food bank distribution sites than full-service grocery stores, according to data provided by the USDA and Roadrunner Food Bank. And in recent months, organizers have noticed more people showing up than usual.

“They’re having to run from place to place to place to try to stitch together enough coverage for their family,” said Katy Anderson, a vice president at the food bank.

Vivian Santiago, 54, pieces together what she can from food-distribution sites across Albuquerque. She also uses her benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed her daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter. Lately her electronic benefits card isn’t lasting even halfway through the month because of the increase in grocery prices, which have risen nearly 30% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s hard out there,” she said.

Patricia Parker, 42, suffers from kidney failure and receives disability benefits.

Parker has been homeless for about six months, sometimes sleeping in her car or staying with friends. She’s looking for a job after a recent stint at a laundromat didn’t work out. As she carried Doritos, green grapes, potatoes and onions from the Albuquerque food bank, she said she appreciates the help.

“I won’t have to go days without food,” she said.

“Food insecurity across the heartland, unfortunately, is moving in the wrong direction. And the hard part is, as the need continues to grow, resources are also moving in that opposite direction.”

Stephanie Sullivan, a spokesperson at Food Bank for the Heartland

“We have seen, since the year before the pandemic, a 65% increase in the amount of visitors. … We thought it would come back down, and it hasn’t. It keeps growing.”

Karen Ratzlaff, chief philanthropy officer at Blue Ridge Area Food Bank

“We are working with very small frontier and rural communities who have possibly one grocery store or even a small market, sometimes not even that.”

Jocelyn Lantrip, a spokesperson at Food Bank of Northern Nevada

“We’ve had over a 90% increase in food requests since 2019.”

Dave Patterson, chief operating officer at Food Bank of the Southern Tier

Workers at food banks and pantries said that the canceled deliveries add to the growing challenges they face. Many staff members said they had seen a decline in private contributions and volunteers. Grocery stores and food manufacturers, which started managing their inventories more efficiently during the pandemic, now have less leftover food to give. Other Trump cuts have disrupted AmeriCorps, which helps staff mobile food pantries and other services, and are ending the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided food from local farmers.

Food banks with more resources can be more creative. Several told ProPublica they’ve hired someone whose job is to find grocery stores in the area willing to donate food. But in areas where grocers are scarce, there are fewer options. In some cases, food banks are among the only places where people can get fresh fruits and vegetables.

“When we see federal cuts like this, that affects entire communities and villages and towns,” said Stephanie Sullivan, assistant director of marketing and communications at Food Bank for the Heartland, which serves 93 counties across Nebraska and western Iowa.

“We are focused on bringing in more donated food into our warehouse to help ensure that our neighbors have consistent access to healthy food.”

Stephanie Sullivan, a spokesperson at Food Bank for the Heartland

“There’s only so much food we can get our hands on, and so only so much money we can raise to buy more food. It’s just really hard to make up that in that significant of a way.”

Jocelyn Lantrip, a spokesperson at Food Bank of Northern Nevada

“This is an unprecedented time, and this isn’t a situation that philanthropy or just sourcing enough donations is going to get us out of. These are policy choices that have created this situation.”

Shannon Oliver, director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank

“There’s Not an Option B”

Cuts and changes to foundational federal programs for low-income people — namely, SNAP and Medicaid — are a looming concern. The increase in need even before these changes take effect could signal that food banks are a “canary in the coal mine” for what’s to come, said Christopher Bosso, a food policy expert at Northeastern University and the author of a book on SNAP.

Hunger will also be harder to measure now that the USDA has canceled an annual food insecurity survey, calling it “redundant” and “politicized.”

“It feels like the idea is to make it harder to identify the consequences of the policy changes that we’re seeing right now,” said Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.

Food bank administrators emphasized that they could not fill the gap created by benefit cuts in the administration’s multitrillion-dollar spending bill. Feeding America, a national nonprofit association of food banks and other organizations, estimates that for every meal its food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. The majority of people who receive food assistance also receive Medicaid, so reductions in both programs could force people to choose between health care and groceries.

The legislation cuts SNAP by $187 billion, or 20%, through 2034, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill, which has expanded work requirements for some recipients and taken protections away from others, will also increase the amount of money that states must contribute to the program for the first time in decades. Experts say it’s unclear how cash-strapped states will be able to shoulder that cost.

Two experts on food insecurity told ProPublica that hunger is expected to rise with the new program rules as it has when SNAP spending has been reduced in the past. There could also be ripple effects: Research has shown that people enrolled in SNAP are less likely to be hospitalized. And grocery stores where the majority of customers use these benefits could close, said Gina Plata-Nino, the interim SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that works to eradicate hunger.

The people who are harmed are “working incredibly hard,” Plata-Nino said.

“They are Americans who are falling on hard times and just need those resources to be able to have economic mobility and be able to escape poverty,” she said. “Without those resources, it just makes them even poorer and less equipped to be able to handle the tough economy that all of us are facing now.”

Michael Heaton, 76, takes care of his 31-year-old son, who has autism; the two live off Heaton’s Social Security and his son’s disability payments. After the pandemic, Heaton, who is retired, said he saw his SNAP benefits shrink from $600 a month to just over $100. To supplement their diets, he goes to pantries and food-distribution centers around Albuquerque.

On a recent morning, he picked up two bags. “This fills that gap,” he said. “We only take what we need, we’re not trying to be gluttonous or anything.”

Even food banks that rely less on federal funding are worried about what comes next if the emergency food assistance program is reduced or altered in a significant way.

“There’s not an option B,” said Brian McManus, the chief operations officer of the Food Bank of Central New York.

Louisiana, one of the states most reliant on SNAP, stands to be among the places hardest hit by further cuts.

“It’s unfortunate that in a time where the social safety nets are being cut, that our resources are also being cut,” said Wright-Velez.

If people haven’t experienced food insecurity, or don’t know someone who has, they might forget something important, she said:

“Those are real people on the other end of those cuts.”

“We’re preparing to be there for our partners — our partner agencies and our mobile food pantry sites, our school food centers and the like — to help weather what might be a larger storm of people needing food and assistance.”

Dave Patterson, chief operating officer at Food Bank of the Southern Tier

“Children, seniors, families who are on difficult times are going to get less food.”

John Sillars, chief strategy officer at Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana

“Food banks across the country are all trying to figure out: How are we going to work toward making sure that the communities that we serve continue to have the things that they need in the face of all of this?”

Katy Anderson, a vice president at Roadrunner Food Bank

In all, the USDA records indicate that food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived.

Food banks had planned to schedule more deliveries in the coming months. Those orders are not reflected in this data.

Anna Donlan contributed design. Illustrations by Justin Metz for ProPublica. Art direction by Andrea Wise. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

Ruth Talbot is a news applications developer at ProPublica.

Nicole Santa Cruz is a reporter covering issues of inequality in the Southwest.