Gov. Josh Shapiro came to Philadelphia Wednesday to announce he’s suing the federal government over canceled funding for local food banks to buy produce from Pennsylvania farmers.
The governor also broadly criticized the Trump administration during his visit to the Share Food Program warehouse in North Philly, describing its actions on sanctuary cities, tariffs and other areas as incompetent and destructive.
“These guys don’t know how to govern,” he said, in response to a question about inaccurate sanctuary city lists that the Department of Homeland Security posted last week and then rapidly took down.
“Over the last four months, what has defined the federal government? Absolute total chaos at every level, rising prices, screwing over farmers, shutting down markets for Pennsylvania businesses, tariffs that are leading to higher consumer costs and making it much, much more difficult here at home,” he said.
Shapiro, who is widely seen as a potential future presidential candidate, sought to contrast the Trump administration to Pennsylvania, which has a politically divided legislature but “where we don’t have chaos, we have calm, where we solve problems, where we come together and actually get stuff done,” he said. “Do we get everything done at once? No, but we work together, we compromise.”
The latest of several lawsuits
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court concerns the federal Local Food Purchasing Assistance program, or LFPA, which since 2022 has paid Share Food Program and other organizations to buy and distribute produce, meat, eggs and other products from Pennsylvania farmers.
Shapiro said the state signed a new, three-year, $13 million LFPA contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in December, only to receive notice in March that the agency was canceling the deal. The funding would have supported 189 farms and 14 food banks.
Share Food executive director George Matysik said the agency provides food to more than 500,000 people per month in the Philadelphia region, and the loss of $1.5 million in expected funding over three years threatens its ability to continue providing all of that assistance.
“We had a deal with the federal government, President Trump. You had a deal with Pennsylvania farmers putting food on our tables. You had a deal with food banks serving 67 counties trying to alleviate poverty. And above all, Mr. President, you had a deal with the American people, and you broke your word,” Matysik said at the press conference.
Shapiro, who served as state Attorney General before being elected governor, emphasized that the federal government had broken a legal contract. He noted that he has already sued the Trump administration a few times in the last few months over attempts to freeze funding to programs in the state, and said he’d won every time.
In February he sued over the federal government’s suspension of $2 billion for environmental projects and other programs, which resulted in a court injunction and the unfreezing of the funds.
“I got a pretty good track record when I take Donald Trump to court. We’re going to win this, and we’re going to get our money back for the good people of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said.
A USDA spokesperson said the agency does not comment on pending litigation and referred questions to the U.S. Department of Justice.
No help from GOP lawmakers
The governor only decided to sue after trying to work through an official USDA appeal process and reaching out to agency officials. State Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding went to Washington and met with USDA staff in a fruitless effort to reverse the contract cancellation, he said.
During a visit to a Lebanon County farm in April, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins argued that Pennsylvania actually already had federal dollars for farmers that it hadn’t spent, but Shapiro said that was incorrect — the state has to pay the farmers first and only receives the LFPA reimbursement afterward.
“I’m not sure if she was misinformed — I know she’s new at this — or if she was just making a whole lot of stuff up, but she said that Pennsylvania was sitting on, quote, ‘tens of millions of dollars’ in our food bank. That’s not true,” he said.
The governor said he asked for help from Republican members of Congress who have affected food banks or farms in their districts, but they attacked him rather than trying to intervene with the USDA.
“It’s easy for me to brush off their nonsense. I deal with that every day. But it’s not easy for hungry people to be fed when their congressman ignores them. It’s not easy for our farmers to be able to make up that market share that our congressman made sure was taken away from them,” Shapiro said.
The governor’s office says Pennsylvania is one of the few states that spends LFPA dollars only on farmers within the state, with the goal of directly supporting the local agricultural economy. Shapiro’s budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts in July aims to further aid agriculture by boosting funding for the Pennsylvania Agricultural Surplus System and the State Food Purchase Program (SFPP) by $4 million each, bringing their total state support to $34.6 million.
However, the governor said local resources would not be able to make up for lost federal funds.
“Whether it’s LFPA, or SNAP, or Medicaid or any of the other things the federal government is cutting right now to make it harder for poor folks to get healthcare or get fed, we do not have the ability to backfill that in the state,” he said. “It’s on them. Those are the decisions they’re making in Washington, D.C. right now.”
Deep cuts to nutrition programs proposed
The lawsuit comes amid a broader effort by the federal government to cut billions of dollars from food and other social service programs.
For example, the USDA has told Share Food Program that it is also losing an additional $6.5 million worth of supplies that were supposed to be delivered through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, Matysik has said previously.
The U.S. House reconciliation bill passed last month would cut nearly $300 billion over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including more than $1 billion annually for Pennsylvania. Nearly 2 million state residents, more than half of them children and seniors, benefit from SNAP, according to the state Department of Human Services.
The bill, which is likely to change in the Senate, would also reduce the number of schools where all students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals, and increase food costs for school districts, according to U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon. In Philadelphia, all public school students receive free meals under the current federal regulations.
“When we take food away from kids, we don’t just harm their health. We hurt their ability to learn, to thrive, and to succeed in the future,” Scanlon said at an event at Penrose Elementary School in Southwest Philadelphia on Monday.
The Republican plan would also expand “red tape” for work requirements for SNAP recipients, end food assistance for 50,000 immigrant children with lawful immigration status, and freeze increases to the Thrifty Food Plan, which spells out the cost of a health diet and helps determine SNAP benefit levels, Scanlon said.
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