Trump Cuts $1 Billion From USDA That Was Providing Food To Hungry School Children

Donald Trump’s Agriculture Department has announced that they are ending a $1 billion program that allowed cities to purchase food for hungry school children and to provide food to food banks for hungry families. There was no particular reason to end the program, other than the fact that they are looking for ways to reduce government spending in order to justify giving the wealthiest people in the country another tax cut. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Trump administration, specifically the agriculture department, announced this past Friday that they were canceling $1 billion as part of the local Food for Schools program that used federal money to buy local food from local producers. So it helped local economies to feed hungry kids in school. And actually about 400 million of that was used to purchase, again, local food, to help local economies, to send it to food banks, to feed starving families. Let me rephrase that, just kind of dumb it down to the nuts and bolts here. Trump just took $1 billion of food away from starving Americans. That's what just happened. $1 billion that would've helped local economies, helped local food producers and fed starving children. And the Trump administration says, Nope, we're not gonna do that. Why would we wanna help local economy? Why would we wanna feed starving kids? Shouldn't they all be at work anyway?

As the Republicans tell us, for the kids who can't afford to buy school lunches, they're taking food out of the mouths of starving children. The Republican party in this country is right now, this local Foods for Schools community program, uh, was put in place back in October by the Biden administration. Biden created it via an executive order to stimulate local economies, support local businesses, and feed hungry kids. And Donald Trump comes along and says, I'm taking the food away from the hungry kids. I'm taking the money out of the local economy. Why? That I don't have an answer to. There is literally no justification for robbing local businesses of the billion dollars they were promised. I mean, not each getting a billion, but collectively a billion. You're robbing from them. So this money that they had been told is coming. They made business decisions based on this new influx of capital, right? Let's expand. Let's hire people. They thought their business was now secure, and they made decisions based on that newfound security. Children who otherwise would not get a meal that day were going to be fed. And by the way, it was going to be healthy, nutritious food. We're not shoving 'em full of Twinkies and Swiss rolls. This was healthy vegetables, locally sourced meat, and Trump took it away. Biden fed starving kids. Trump took it away.

So don't you ever let anybody sit here and tell you there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans. They're all the same, know the. They're not, and you're an idiot. If you think that Democrats, they have plenty of faults. I have talked at length about them for years. I'm not saying they're perfect by any stretch, but at least they understand that feeding hungry kids is morally the right thing to do. Republicans on the other hand, write these so-called religious right? Those people that say, well, we can't do anything if the Bible says we can't do it. They're the ones taking food outta the mouths of starving children. There's your campaign ad, by the way, Democrats. How about you run that? This thing writes itself. Trump is taking money away from starving kids. I tell you what, I'll go ahead and give you full permission right now.

You just wanna run this video as an ad across the country. Go ahead and do it. You can bleep out the profanity if you want, but that's what needs to happen. The public needs to be made fully aware of the fact that we had a program in place from President Biden that supported local businesses, helped local economies and fed children, and Donald Trump came along and killed it for no good reason. Other than, of course, we gotta cut government spending so that we can give the wealthy another tax cut.