Household food insecurity has doubled and childhood food insecurity has quadrupled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Food banks are overwhelmed with demand. But the Trump administration isn’t interested in doing some of the most basic things to keep people from going hungry.
Republicans have not moved to increase Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits by 15%, as Democrats have called for. The Trump administration won't reimburse schools for including hungry adults in meal programs. It won’t allow states to waive work requirements for college students to get SNAP, even with students having been forced out of school in the middle of the semester amid skyrocketing unemployment. On the other hand the Trump administration has said it will go to court to be allowed to impose stricter work requirements for SNAP benefits, stripping aid from 700,000 people.
The Trump administration has provided some waivers to give states more flexibility in things like extending electronic benefits to replace the food students aren’t getting in school, or making it easier for schools to distribute meals safely. Some waivers allow states to give all SNAP recipients the maximum amount—which is great, unless you were already getting the maximum. Where it’s refused to issue waivers, as with reimbursing schools to feed adults, the Trump administration has claimed it doesn’t have that authority, which, The New York Times observes, is “a position it did not take when Congress refused to allocate any money for President Trump’s border wall or secured legislation blocking arms sales to the Middle East.”
Congress appropriated $850 million to help food banks keep up with the huge increases in need, but the Trump Agriculture Department has only obligated a small fraction of that money so far. Food banks are also worried about an administration plan to send prepackaged food boxes. Since the boxes will include perishable goods, they’ll produce storage challenges. “We are going to have a lot more use for refrigerated trucks,” the president of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, which has served triple the usual number of families since March 1, told The New York Times. There are also questions about the companies getting contracts to send boxes out—par for the Trump administration course. But it’s sending money to farmers, which is more important to Team Trump than feeding hungry people or using federal funds efficiently.
FEMA expects to get involved in addressing hunger and homelessness with $320 million in funding to be distributed starting in June. But wouldn’t it be nice if the Trump administration and congressional Republicans hadn’t been standing in the way of the most straightforward ways of offering assistance to this point? Telling people who are hungry now that help may be coming in a few weeks is more cruelty.