The truth about Meals on Wheels in Trump’s budget
President Trump’s first budget proposal to Congress last week specifically identified steep cuts to hundreds of domestic programs, but Meals on Wheels wasn’t one of them.
The popular program — which mainly uses volunteer drivers to provide hot meals to older Americans across the country — doesn’t directly receive federal funding. As Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters Thursday, “Meals on Wheels is not a federal program.”
Nevertheless, Meals on Wheels quickly became the poster child for the impact of the budget cuts. Even before the budget’s release, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., tweeted that Trump had called for the “elimination” of Meals on Wheels, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus dubbed it the “Starvation Budget.”
The truth: Trump’s budget calls for the elimination of one program that some of the nation’s 5,000 Meals on Wheels groups rely on: Community development block grants, a $3 billion program that started in the Ford administration to give states and cities more flexibility in how they combat poverty.
But Trump’s proposal — known as the “skinny budget” because it’s the first, vague outline of a more formal submission to come — is largely silent about the program that provides the vast majority of federal funding for senior services.
“The budget will adversely impact older adults,” said Sandy Markwood, CEO of the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. “We just don’t know how much.”
Here’s why. The majority of Meals on Wheels programs get most of their federal funding through the Administration for Community Living, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services that serves seniors and disabled. That agency has a $227 million line-item for “home-delivered nutrition services.”
And while Trump didn’t single out that specific program, Health and Human Services will receive a 16% across-the-board cut.