Trump Farmers to Families program is delivering mixed results at best

To be clear, plenty of food is getting to where it needs to be, somehow. But things would be so much better without such incompetence and corruption, starting at the top.

In reality, though, some of the program’s core promises have gone unmet. That’s due at least in part to the fact that many of the companies awarded the lucrative contracts are ill-equipped to handle food in any real quantity. Food bank operators report having to pay the bill for delivery from their own budgets, receiving boxes that are leaking or falling apart, and that arrive full of commercial-grade bags of meat with no instructions for how to prepare it.

Despite these failures, new public records reviewed by The Counter indicate that the boxes have cost well above what USDA typically pays farmers and manufacturers for food it buys for food banks and schools—and, in some cases, well above what they’re actually worth. Multiple food-aid professionals we interviewed for this story said they could provide the same service for a fraction of the price by purchasing food through their existing networks, even after accounting for the costs of cardboard, transportation, and labor. Even so, the Trump administration has doubled down on support for the program. Just last week, it announced an additional $1 billion in funding. - The Counter