Meals On Wheels Faces Funding Crisis Under Trump Administration

The blueprint suggests cutting funds for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by about $6.2 billion, a 13.2% decrease from its 2017 funding level.

Arkansas relies on services like Meals on Wheels as much as any other state.

Seven days a week, Meals on Wheels volunteers deliver food to 100 homebound seniors in Alexandria, Virginia. The beneficiaries of LSC funding include homeless veterans, low-income workers and victims of domestic abuse. In fact, he says he hasn’t left his Norfolk apartment in over a year.

“How else would I eat?”

Mulvaney said a plan to eliminate a pot of federal dollars that underwrites some Meals on Wheels programs is justified because the program that feeds more than 2.4 million seniors and people with disabilities “is not showing any results”.

“We do 52,000 meals a year”, Supplee said. “I do believe that”, Davis said.

He said there’s some proof that Meals on Wheels helps reduce seniors’ needs for medication and decreases hospitalization.

“They take a personal interest, its neighbors helping neighbors”. “And I don’t think you could look and find another program that could replace it”.

Davis sees the impact of Meals On Wheels beyond the meals that he worries could change lives if taken away.

Mulvaney defended the administration’s decision to cut the program during Thursday’s White House press briefing, saying that while Meals on Wheels “sounds great,” the results it delivers aren’t necessarily worth the cost.

Any decent human being who understands the extent of this need and grasps the poignancy of the image of lonely, hungry seniors would have either avoided this budget cut, or tried to explain it in compassionate terms.

“The problem with a skinny budget is it is lean on details”.

“We can’t spend money on programs just because they sound good”, Mick Mulvaney, the director for the Office of Budget and Management said. The network is already serving 23 million fewer meals now than in 2005, and waiting lists are mounting in every state.

Meals on Wheels, a program that supports the delivery of meals to seniors who can not afford food or can not prepare it, started in Australia and has been in the United States since 1954.

Everyday across the country, Meals on Wheels delivers free, nutritious meals to needy people who are home bound, like 82-year-old Joyce Prewett of Alexandria.

“We received 50 times the normal amount of donations yesterday”, said Jenny Bertolette, vice president of communications at Meals on Wheels.

Some communities use money from CDBG – the program Mulvaney proposes eliminating – to fund Meals on Wheels.

Without the program, “I’d go back to not eating correctly, and I would have to go to the doctor more often”, he says. Meanwhile, Quartz notes that for the $16.5 million taxpayers are estimated to have paid for President Trump’s five trips to Mar-a-Lago this year, Meals on Wheels could feed almost 6,000 seniors for a full year.