I was a Meals on Wheels volunteer.

President Trump’s budget director should try volunteering for Meals on Wheels delivery one Sunday morning.

I once did. For several years, my weekly route offered a poignant glimpse into the isolation and poverty that is often hidden in plain sight in a community. It was both heartwarming and heartbreaking to see that a ring of a doorbell, with a familiar volunteer holding a lukewarm meal wrapped in aluminum, could be the highlight of someone’s day.

I could not help but seethe at White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s March 16 defense of a $3 billion cut in Community Development Block Grants whose recipients include Meals on Wheels. It is true that those grants account for a tiny portion of the nonprofit program that delivers meals to senior citizens. Yet this is an operation that runs lean, and has a waiting list as America’s population ages.

“We can’t spend money on programs just because they sound good. And Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said in the White House briefing room. “But to take the federal money and give it to the states and say, look, we want to give you money for programs that don’t work — I can’t defend that anymore.”

Could he be more callous, or more oblivious?

Here is what Meals on Wheels looks like on a Sunday morning:

Its recipients are the very definition of what President Ronald Reagan, in a previous iteration of a war on the poor, called “the truly needy” and thus worthy of government assistance.

The volunteers all gather at a distribution point at 9 a.m., where the scent of mass-produced meals of basic nutritional value wafts from the kitchen. Then we get in our cars, and head to our routes, often with stops in the unlikeliest places in the comfortable East Bay suburb of Alameda. Some don’t even have their own addresses. The recipients live in basements, in houseboats, in a nondescript apartment complex that serves as a refuge for victims of domestic violence. The vast majority live alone. One of my stops was to a converted backyard shed that a passerby might assume would be filled with garden tools and flower pots in this middle-class neighborhood. Another was to a two-story apartment building, with peeling paint and weeds popping through the sidewalk cracks, on the shuttered Alameda Naval Air Station. A long-retired sailor would roll to the door in his wheelchair. Remind me: Wasn’t Donald Trump the candidate who professed so much empathy for the plight of our veterans? On many stops, the answer to the door came slowly. On rare occasions, it came not at all, and the Meals on Wheels coordinator would dutifully have a social worker check back to determine why. Meals on Wheels, a network of 5,000 locally run programs, likes to say that its deliveries are sometimes the only human interaction a client has on any given day.

I began volunteering to accompany my daughter as part of her community service in middle school. I continued on my own for several years after her stint was completed. It was partly out of my attachment to the people I met — if I weren’t doing this, would my successor stay an extra minute to share small talk with Mrs. Keel or Mr. Jones? — and partly out of selfishness.

It gave me something in return. It put any grievances I had about my life in perspective; it removed any illusions I had about the intactness of what our elected leaders assure us is “the safety net.”

In 2005, one of my regulars donated $15 in my honor to The Chronicle’s Season of Sharing Fund. In 2006, she donated another $10 in my name and $25 in honor of “Lord Jesus Christ.” Can there by any more humbling expression of gratitude, or affirmation of the truly needy’s concern for one another?

In preparing this column, I looked online, and found that she had spent her final years in assisted living. She died on Jan. 16, four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration.

May she rest in peace, never having seen the Trump budget or Mick Mulvaney’s ludicrous attempt to characterize this cut as an act of compassion.