Some WA food bank clients getting less as providers stretch supply to cope with cuts
As the pandemic started to subside, Judy Jones figured that demand at the Thurston County Food Bank might plateau. Instead the number of new clients has continued to grow about 6% to 8% each week, the food bank’s senior director of operations said.
Then the federal government began cutting funding.
In March, the Trump administration slashed or paused a combined $1 billion from two programs upon which food banks in Washington and other states depend. At the same time, federal employees are being laid off at an unprecedented pace.
Jones said in a May 7 call that her organization expects the number of people in need to keep climbing: “We don’t know what it will get to.”
“We’re just kind of watching and waiting,” she said. “And we’ve had to create some adjustments to our own distribution to help sustain us a little bit longer — to help spread the food out longer — just anticipating that there will be less coming.”
In light of the cuts, Jones estimates that someone who normally receives 50 pounds of food per week might only get 40 pounds.
“You might think it’s not a lot,” she said. But “if somebody comes to us every week for a month, it’s the equivalent of a whole week’s worth of food in a month that they would be not receiving.”
Counting up the cuts
Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, his administration has executed sweeping cuts to federal funding, jobs and programs. The President has claimed such efforts are geared toward securing peak government efficiency and saving taxpayer dollars.
But critics say the slash-and-burn campaign is hurting Americans, including — or perhaps especially — those struggling to stay financially afloat and who’ve turned to food banks.
The Washington State Department of Agriculture received notice in March that $8.5 million in Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) funding, which was announced last December and expected to be ready to spend by late this year and into 2026, was terminated, said Katie Rains, WSDA’s food policy adviser.
The federal program, which started as a pilot in 2022, supports regional, local and underrepresented food producers by purchasing food that’s then sent to underserved communities via hunger-relief outlets.
News of another cut came later in March.
Rains says the agency discovered that $4.7 million in The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) commodities, which were on order for delivery April through June, were no longer “under review.” Instead they’d been marked as “canceled.”
TEFAP assists in giving free emergency food assistance to low-income people.
Congressional Republicans are also reportedly mulling an overhaul to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, which helps low-income families buy groceries. About 888,300 Washingtonians get aid from that program.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin took aim at Trump in an email to McClatchy. He contends that the President and GOP U.S. lawmakers are pursuing a budget that would chop billions of dollars from nutrition and food programs so that they can give more tax breaks to the ultra-rich.
“As grocery costs skyrocket and shelves are left empty, Trump is making it harder for Washington families to put a warm meal on the table,” Martin said. “As Washingtonians brace for a Trump-made recession, Republicans are taking a sledge hammer to the programs that keep working families afloat during tough economic times.”
The White House didn’t return McClatchy’s request for comment.
Impact is widespread
Thurston County Food Bank isn’t alone in seeing an increased need.
Visits to food banks in Washington since 2021 are up by about 60% on average, noted Mike Cohen, executive director of the Bellingham Food Bank. In Whatcom County, they’ve risen by more than 120% since that year.
In Cohen’s view, the federal cuts — administered quickly and without real notice — display a disregard for the community’s public health.
“It has kept me awake and it makes me nervous. It makes me scared and makes me angry,” he said. “But that pales in comparison, I think, to what our shoppers are seeing when they come into our food bank and see very little choice and very little volume of all the shelf-stable food.”
Whatcom County had planned for about $180,000 in LFPA funding this year that was suddenly yanked, he said. That money could have purchased roughly 150,000 pounds of local fruits and vegetables — a loss also felt by the local farmers growing the crops: “That was some guaranteed sales that they lost overnight.”
Most who depend on food banks for sustenance are either kids or senior citizens, he said.
The federal government’s recent actions have sparked alarm about what could happen to other support programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Section 8 housing, which has been notoriously underfunded for years.
Reached for comment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that in March, nearly $1 billion was provided to states for local food purchasing, more than $255 million of which remains unspent.
The spokesperson said Washington still has more than $6 million of unspent LFPA and Local Food for Schools funds left in its bank account, and that the state is encouraged to use that money to help people in need.
Washington’s agriculture department responded via email that all funds received “have been obligated and we, along with our grant recipients, are on track to fully spend down within the deadlines for which these funds were intended.”
Sue Potter, CEO of Pierce County’s Nourish food bank network, said the gap left by federal cuts will be hard to fill with local fundraising alone.
“We just will not be able to replace all of that food through local means if this keeps going on,” she said in a May 6 interview.
The loss of funding will mean that food bank guests will have fewer options for protein and dairy products, as well as other key ingredients, she said.
Potter said even though Pierce County is home to a robust philanthropic community, such generosity might be getting stretched thin. Donors are spoiled for choice these days when it comes to saving favorite causes, she noted — be it their NPR station or PBS channel, local library or museum.
She sees a “perfect storm” looming on the horizon. Needs are skyrocketing while safety nets unravel.
Nourish Pierce County is mulling worst-case scenarios and how to potentially pivot, Potter said. They’ve looked at alternate operating and food-distribution models and researched lessons learned from past depressions.
There isn’t a clear answer, Potter said. It’ll be hard for her organization to bear the weight. Yet the cuts will be even harder on vulnerable residents who need something as basic as food, she said.
“We don’t want people spending all day looking for food and not taking care of their families, or going to school or going to work,” Potter said. “But you’ve got to have food to function.”
This story was originally published May 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
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