Statement on the Advancing Budget Reconciliation Proposing Deep Cuts to the Safety Net & Food Assistance

Yesterday, the House voted to advance the budget reconciliation process with instructions to make trillions in deep cuts to critical safety net and food assistance programs. 

This is deeply concerning, especially at a time when rising costs are crushing families. Today nearly 4 million households aren’t able to afford their basic needs – and of these, almost all have at least one working adult in the home. People are working but still not able to make ends meet.

Now more than ever, people need relief from the sky-rocketing cost of food and other basic needs. These proposed cuts will only exacerbate the hunger crisis and put even more pressure on California’s already overwhelmed food banks. For every meal provided by a food bank, SNAP provides nine – food banks simply cannot make up the gap created by cuts to SNAP.

California’s food banks are already operating under immense stress, serving more than 6 million people each month. This year, food banks have seen the cancellation of more than 400 truck loads of federal food commodities and the sunsetting of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program – which is a program critical to both food banks and small and midsize farms. 

The funding cuts required of the Agriculture Committee in this budget reconciliation process would make even less food  available for our communities — and hunger will continue to rise. 

In addition to SNAP and TEFAP, proposed cuts would dramatically reduce the number of schools able to offer free meals to all their students and impose burdensome paperwork requirements, limiting access for millions of children. Nearly 2.5 million children across 4,000 schools in California would be affected –– undermining our state’s bold leadership in implementing School Meals for All. 

We urge Congress to reject these harmful cuts and instead protect and strengthen SNAP, TEFAP, and school meals to ensure no one in our state goes hungry.