A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Eight times a year, the regional banks in the Federal Reserve system study their local economies and bring back stories of what they're seeing. They publish those stories in a report called the Beige Book. Our colleagues over at the Indicator, Wailin Wong and Robert Smith, talked to the Kansas City Fed recently. Its latest Beige Book included outcomes from the Trump administration's government freezes and spending cuts.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: Funding cuts from the USDA were highlighted as particularly impactful regarding services for seniors. Specifically, one pantry reported cutting back the amount of food they can give from three to five days of shelf stable food to two days of food every 30 days due to funding cuts. Steven Howland, you wrote that line, and it's very specific. We always hear about food banks struggling generally, but this is a drop of five days' worth of food to two days' worth of food. What happened?
STEVEN HOWLAND: Yeah, so the USDA cut about $500 million from food banks. And that substantially impacted the amount of food that food banks could provide to their pantries. So this particular food pantry was responding and trying to serve as many people as they can, but it's going to be less food that they can provide to each person.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: The Trump administration cut a billion dollars from USDA programs that provide fresh food for school lunches and then also this money for food banks. They said the Biden levels of food assistance were unsustainable.
SMITH: We wanted to hear what food banks in the region were doing to respond, so we called up one that provides food to 27 counties in Missouri and Kansas.
STEPHEN DAVIS: My name is Stephen Davis, and I'm the president and CEO of Harvesters - The Community Food Network.
SMITH: Now, food banks always need more food. You never call up a food bank and they say, oh, no, we're good - we got everything we need right now. But Stephen Davis says it's especially bad this year.
DAVIS: Food is incredibly expensive. We all know that. All the other costs have gone up - rent, mortgages, health care costs - so your dollars are just not stretching as far. And often where people have to make sacrifices is on the food that they would purchase.
WONG: Stephen from Harvesters said they have a lot of different ways of getting food to give away, everything from cans donated by community members to deals with food manufacturers to use stuff that would have gotten thrown out. The USDA budget cut really hurts because this was money they could've spent on staple foods that might not get donated.
SMITH: He estimates that this will mean they will lose out on 2.4 million pounds of food.
DAVIS: So you think about 2.4 million pounds of food - we distributed 61 million pounds of food last year. But that's a meaningful amount of the food that we distributed that we could use to serve families that all of a sudden just went away.
WONG: And as we saw in the Beige Book, that can mean essentially food rationing, giving out less food to families so they can serve more people.
SMITH: Now, of course, Harvesters is going back to their donors and volunteers. They're hustling more extra food from manufacturers. But Stephen says he doesn't know what will happen if the money doesn't come back.
WONG: Or if the economy gets worse. Remember, it might be scary right now, but the unemployment rate in the U.S. is still low. Who knows what the next Beige Book will bring?
Wailin Wong.
SMITH: Robert Smith, NPR News.
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