Spending Cuts put Farmers and School Lunches at Risk

The Trump administration has claimed to be eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government, particularly through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump and DOGE have outlined $160 billion in non-defense spending cuts. They have pushed to close the Department of Education and have already defunded USAID, which is key to stabilizing fragile states and curbing extremism. This political aim isn’t new, and its intentions aren’t necessarily wrong. Presidents and politicians from across the aisle have pushed to reduce government inefficiency. However, this cost-cutting campaign now impedes upon key programs that support key groups, including farmers and students. The USDA’s Local Food Purchase Program (LFPA) and Local Food for Schools (LFS) were Biden-era programs that aimed to financially support food banks and schools purchasing locally grown produce. LFPA and LFS covered over one billion dollars in funds, supporting 42 different states across the country. School lunch programs across the country have been expanding since 1946, when Truman’s School Lunch Act created federally assisted school lunch programs. In the 1970s, these programs began to include breakfast. Under Michelle Obama’s 2010 “Let’s Move!” program, school lunch nutrition regulations tightened, and the quality of school lunch food shot up. Now, farms and schools across America are experiencing a drastic regression of these programs. 

Cost-cutting programs are impacting the agricultural industry by removing a reliable and stable market for farmers to sell their goods. In Iowa, farmers lost over $11.3 million—smaller poultry, cattle, and egg producers were harmed the most. Farmers who banked on stable federal funding scaled operations and hired more workers. Now, they face a reckoning since LFPA funding has been cut off completely. Wild Rose Pastures, a farm that sustainably produces turkey, chicken, eggs, and beef in central Iowa, told the Iowa Farmers Union that its revenue grew 50 percent from 2024 to 2025. Now, Wild Rose Pastures says the future of their business is uncertain—major revenue streams they had come to account for are quickly receding. In neighboring Illinois, the Illinois-EATS program is in jeopardy; its primary federal support has been cut. The program, which supported 170 farmers in the state and delivered locally produced food to over 800 locations statewide, relied on $43 million in USDA funding.  As the IDOA explains in their statement on LFPA and LFS cuts, the programs were particularly to fund smaller farmers; therefore, smaller farmers will be the most affected by the retraction of federal support.

Farmers and schools are tied very closely together. As Arizona Scottsdale School District’s Patti Bilbrey told CBS, “It wasn’t just about keeping food costs low. It meant supporting your community and your local farmers in the state.” Schools in New York, as well as the rest of the nation, are feeling the LFPA cuts, too. According to the LFPA funding rewards records, New York received almost $49.6 million to procure locally sourced school lunches and food for food banks; this has been cut off. Similar situations repeat across the country, putting pressure on schools that had to purchase lunches when food prices rose during and after the pandemic. In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey criticized the administration’s cuts, which affect nearly $12 million in funding for school lunches in her state. In a statement on the cuts, she declared that this showed the administration believed that supporting farmers and students were no longer “priorities,” and this would negatively affect families across the state. The School Nutrition Association warned that cuts would also impact student diets since farm-fresh foods would become less readily available across the country. USDA research also consistently shows that a lack of nutritious farm-to-school meals not only affect students now but also students in the future; children in the education system who were able to try out these meals were more willing to eat healthy meals in the future. Cutting off communities from early exposure to healthy meals and preventing students from building healthy eating habits would likely worsen our country’s obesity epidemic. Opposition to the cuts has been relatively weak since feeble efforts result in little to no change.

As an administration that is supposedly on the side of making America healthy again and supporting farmers, the Trump administration should restore the LFPA and LFS programs. For relatively little cost compared to the total cost-cutting—$163 billion in cuts compared to the $1 billion total of LFPA and LFS—these programs have supported farmers, the fight against obesity, and schools.