President Donald Trump has required a letter signed by himself be placed in food assistance boxes made available through a $3 billion program created during the COVID-19 pandemic that buys food from farmers and distributes it through charitable organizations such as food banks.
While anti-hunger activists around the country have denounced the letter as a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using government property for partisan political gain, Maine-based food banks say the larger issue is that the program itself is wasteful and fails to get food to hungry families in the most rural areas of the state.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Program was created by Congress in March as part of the CARES Act to purchase produce, dairy and meat from local farmers to be boxed and shared with food-insecure people.
“This whole way they set this up is a fiasco for the state of Maine,” said Dixie Shaw, who runs Catholic Charities Maine’s food banks in Caribou and Monticello.
Maine food banks currently rely on a single out-of-state food distributor to get USDA-bought food. Shaw says shipments are not making it into her area.
“People are still hurting,” she said. “All I care about is that we get food up here.”
‘The politicizing of food distribution’
A letter from President Trump required to included in millions of USDA food boxes. | Document obtained by POLITICO.
Employees of food pantries in Maine receiving food through the federal program say about a month ago they began noticing a letter included in boxes written in both English and Spanish and featuring Trump’s signature.
“As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities,” the letter reads. “As part of our response to coronavirus, I prioritized sending nutritious food from our farmers to families in need throughout America.”
Some food banks in Maine are concerned the letter will be perceived by their clients as a partisan endorsement on their part, potentially jeopardizing their nonprofit tax status.
“We were and remain concerned about these letters because of the politicizing of food distribution and the implied endorsement of a political candidate so close to an election,” said Kristen Miale, president of Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn, one of the local organizations distributing USDA-purchased food. “To address these concerns, Good Shepherd Food Bank sent a communication to all pantry partners stating that the inclusion of the letter is a USDA contractual requirement and does not reflect a political endorsement.”
The requirement applies to contracted distributors, not the food banks and pantries they rely on to give out the food, Miale noted.
“Unfortunately, with handling over 6,000 boxes weekly, we do not have the capacity to open every box and remove the letters. Boxes arrive to us shrink-wrapped in pallets. Doing so would require diverting significant resources away from feeding Mainers and risk product spoilage as the products in these boxes are highly perishable and need to be turned around quickly,” she said.
‘A camera-friendly program hastily erected overnight’
From the launch, the program distributed food in a highly unequal manner. Some regions received more boxes than they had residents, while other areas, including the entirety of Alaska and Maine, initially had no local distributors.
To address the distribution gaps, the USDA opened a second round of funding to distributors. In June, Westbrook food distributor Native Maine won a $1.4 million contract to distribute food boxes.
Maine Farmers Exchange in Presque Isle also received a 10-week contract to distribute food “truck-to-trunk,” with the company delivering food boxes directly to local distribution points where they are dropped into the trunks of waiting cars.
But those contracts expired and there were no firms in Maine that were awarded contracts during a third round of funding that will see the remainder of the $3 billion authorized for the program spent. Instead, Vincent Farms in Delaware is the closest distributor to win a contract. The Delaware food distributor is coordinating with Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn and Hampden and other local charities to dispense boxes in Maine.
Volunteers process food at the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn. | Good Shepherd, Facebook
“I don’t think they had any idea of what it’s like here in Maine,” said Bob Davis, owner of Maine Farmers Exchange. “They’re used to delivering to high-density areas that have the refrigeration space. Up here, we have small pantries that can’t handle the capacity of food Vincent Farms is responsible for delivering. That all has to be stored.”
Davis said truck-to-trunk distribution was a much more effective method of getting food to northern Maine than relying on food banks like Good Shepherd in the southern part of the state as an intermediary.
A mapping project built from public records by The Counter, a nonprofit news outlet that focuses on food issues, found that more than a 1,000 counties across the country received no aid in May and June, while some individual organizations received nine truckloads a day.
“Despite patches of relative abundance, the map paints a picture of a camera-friendly program that was hastily erected overnight, a program where savvy food aid organizations who were in the right place at the right time had a better chance of securing boxes for their communities,” the analysis reads.
On top of its inefficiency, the public-private distribution model has created an opportunity for an expensive payout to private businesses.
“Numerous contracts went to inexperienced or unlicensed distributors, and in many cases, companies received handsome payouts for mediocre food boxes,” The Counter reported.
“Across the board, I think there were premium prices paid for all of those boxes,” NPR quoted San Antonio Food Bank CEO Eric Cooper. “Some of these food boxes, they were $40, $50, $60 for what you’d get at a grocery store for about $20.”
A more effective means of getting food to hungry families, some critics argue, is by bolstering existing programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps.
“Notably, it is run by the department’s Agricultural Marketing Service, which helps farmers sell their products, rather than the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which administers food aid programs,” NPR reported.
“There’s a better way to do this,” U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told NPR. “Expand SNAP which delivers benefits electronically and allows people to buy the food they need at grocery stores. Most independent observers agree that this is a much more efficient mechanism for delivering food aid.”
Top photo: Shelves of canned foods sit partially empty at the SF-Marin Food Bank on May 1, 2014 in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan, Getty Images
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