Trump’s Federal Funding Chaos Puts Meals on Wheels on the Chopping Block
We rode along on a delivery to see how draconian cuts would impact senior services.
By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union
Joanne, a senior living in Raleigh, North Carolina, clutched her lunch from Meals on Wheels last week as she explained how the rising cost of rent, medicine, and food is eating away at her income.
“If I didn't have this, I don't know what I would do,” she told More Perfect Union. “You [get to] an age where you don't want to beg. You got pride.”
Meals on Wheels in Wake County serves more than 1,400 seniors every week — getting them meals, connecting them with social services, and organizing “friendship cafes” where they can talk to each other and meet with community leaders.
“What we're doing is an economic solution that benefits everyone,” Amy Akroyd, Meals on Wheels Wake County’s associate director of development and communications, told More Perfect Union. “We can serve a senior on Meals on Wheels for a year, for the same cost as 10 days in a nursing home or one day in a hospital.”
The organization is operating at a deficit, however, as it works to serve a senior population that is projected to double over the next 20 years. Fifty percent of that funding comes from the federal government — which meant chaos when the Trump administration announced a funding freeze in January.
Now, social services are also on the chopping block as congressional Republicans promise big reductions in spending in order to fund Trump’s tax cuts.
“Not only is it the morally right thing to do to take care of our seniors, it's an economic solution that works,” Akroyd said. “If that federal funding was cut, it would mean a lot of hard decisions for our program.”
This isn’t the first time Meals on Wheels has been on the chopping block. During Trump’s administration he proposed dramatic cuts in 2017 that would have disrupted Meals on Wheels’ services, with former OMB Director Mick Mulvaney defending the budget framework as “compassionate” to taxpayers. Last year, House Republicans also called for tens of millions of dollars in cuts to senior nutrition programs.
The budget framework passed by House Republicans last week called for slashing spending for social services and included “significant topline cuts” that Meals on Wheels America said could be devastating to local providers and seniors. Other programs that help seniors could be at risk, from funding for home health aides through Medicaid to the SNAP program, in which a fifth of recipients are over 60.
If anything, advocates argue, programs that help seniors should receive more funding; one in three Meals on Wheels programs have a waitlist, according to the national organization.
“A nation is not a business,” Akroyd said. “The people who receive Meals on Wheels, through the federal funding that we receive, they're not disposable. They’re worth being cared for and they're worth being heard.”