How One Milwaukee Food Bank Is Handling the Drop in USDA Funding

For months, Matt King kept an eye on federal food aid policies. He also stayed in constant contact with Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which, among other things, manages food disbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). King is the chief executive officer of Hunger Task Force, which operates a food bank, a 280-acre farm, and other aid programs in Milwaukee, providing nutritious food to more than 50,000 people every month in Wisconsin’s most populous city.

In particular, he was tracking available food distributions from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP. TEFAP is a federal program that provides food assistance to people with low incomes, often by supplementing food banks. An affable, soft-spoken advocate for nutrition, King was planning on the TEFAP distributions to stockpile food supplies heading into summer.

Suddenly, in late March, those TEFAP distributions were canceled. There was no formal communication around the cancelled disbursements, amounting to $2.2 million in Wisconsin, he says. They were just no longer available. Hunger Task Force lost five full truckloads of food, including canned chicken, cheese, milk, and eggs, along with other deliveries of turkey breast, chicken legs, pulled pork, and pork chops. More than 300,000 pounds of food, worth $615,000, was gone. Nationwide, a total $500 million allocated for TEFAP had been cut, leaving many food banks scrambling.

It was the second blow in March to the nation’s food safety net, as the Trump administration continued sweeping cuts to federal programs and funding. Hunger Task Force and other food banks were already coping with the loss of $500 million from the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation. The CCC oversees the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which provided funds that allowed King to purchase fresh food, especially produce, from local farmers.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said that the USDA is cutting funding allocated during the Biden administration that is excessive or unnecessary. In an April 3 letter to Senator Amy Klobucher (D-Minnesota), the ranking member of the Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Rollins said the Biden administration had “inflated statutory programs with Commodity Credit Corporation dollars without any plans for long-term solutions, and even in 2024, used the pandemic as a reason to make funding announcements.”

Matt King, CEO of Hunger Task Force, on a 208-acre Hunger Task Force Farm in Franklin, Wisconsin, which offers a unique source of fresh produce for the community. (Photo courtesy of Hunger Task Force)

During trips to Pennsylvania and Arkansas last week, Rollins said that states currently have more than enough funding for programs like TEFAP and that the cancelled funds were extra distributions that should have ended with the pandemic. “The money is there,” she said, and going forward the programs will be “more effective, more intentional.”

In fact, food banks are facing major shortfalls from USDA cuts, with a combined loss of $1 billion from cuts to LFPA and TEFAP.

Far from Washington, D.C., King’s Hunger Task Force, along with food banks across the country, faces drastic cuts to programs and funding, even as the cost of living, including food, continues to climb.

Civil Eats recently spoke with King to learn the extent of the cuts—and how his organization plans to move forward.

How will you close the gap in food deliveries created by the cuts in federal funding?

It’s been a challenge, and especially given the short notice. One of the real problematic aspects of the cut to the LFPA program, specifically, was that there didn’t seem to be much of a consideration for the impact on the small businesses and the impact on the farmers who were operating under the pretense that the program was continuing for the upcoming growing season.

Many of them had already gone out and purchased the supplies and essentially made financial commitments, only to have the rug kind of pulled out from underneath them. Many of them had already planted their seeds and had started their seedlings for the upcoming growing season. So, for us, it was talking to some of our trusted, long-time donors and explaining the situation.