Food & Climate
While the project 2025 ultraconservative vision has received much scrutiny in recent weeks, its proposal to sharply cut the federal nutrition safety net which could destroy food assistance programs in America has largely flown under the radar.
These plans are detailed in the project’s chapter on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which calls for drastically narrowing the scope of the agency to primarily focus on agricultural programs. This would involve radically restructuring the USDA by moving its food assistance programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
“Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming”.
Criticizing the USDA as “a major welfare agency,” the agenda takes issue with the agency’s long-standing nutrition programs that help feed millions of low-income Americans every year, including pregnant women, infants, and k-12 school children.
It outlines policies that would substantially cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). It would also shrink federal support for universal school meal programs, according to “civileats”.
Effective federal food assistance programs
“We have really effective federal food assistance programs that are evidence-based, and there’s just a long history of seeking to continuously improve them,” said Stacy Dean, the former deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the USDA under the Biden administration.
Project 2025’s plan would reverse that trajectory. “Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming,” she said.
The proposal to restructure the USDA builds on a previous Trump-era proposal to consolidate federal safety net programs. This included moving SNAP and WIC–which it rebranded as welfare programs, a term often used pejoratively–from the USDA to HSS. It’s a move that experts pointed out would likely make these programs easier to cut, including by designating them as welfare benefits, often deemed unnecessary by conservatives.
“I think the effect would be to make [nutritional programs] more vulnerable to a kind of annual politics on Health and Human Services issues,” said Shawn Fremstad, a senior advisor at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who researches food assistance programs. He notes that the level of vulnerability would partially depend on whether these programs are mandatory or discretionary spending programs in HHS.
As Project 2025 has gained scrutiny, Trump has publicly distanced himself from the proposal.
The project was assembled and published by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long helped set the conservative agenda and informed previous Trump policies. For instance, Trump’s 2018 proposal to restructure the federal government and move nutritional programs to the HHS was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation.
Many of the policies in Project 2025’s USDA chapter are a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s previous efforts to dismantle the federal nutrition safety net.
The Trump-era rule was struck down in 2020 by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who determined that it “radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving states scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans.”
Since the rule was blocked, employment levels have improved, but food insecurity has not. In fact, the USDA found that levels of household food insecurity soared to nearly 13 percent in 2022, exceeding both 2021 and 2020 levels.
This has been attributed to both inflation and the end of pandemic food assistance. In 2022, 44 million people lived in homes without enough food, including 7.3 million children.
Cash-assistance program
The proposal to tighten SNAP work requirements is one of many that would collectively chip away at federal food assistance programs that have supported low-income Americans for decades. It would also eliminate some of the streamlined processes that allow participants in other social benefit programs to more easily receive SNAP benefits, including a cash-assistance program for low-income families and a program that helps low-income households with the often-steep costs of energy bills.
The plan also calls for reforming the voucher program for infant formula under WIC, which provides nutritional benefits to pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and children under 6 years old.
“Upending this process could result in a funding shortfall, jeopardize access to WIC for millions of parents, infants, and young children, and result in higher formula prices for all consumers,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBBP. “WIC’s competitive bidding process for infant formula saves the program between $1 billion and $2 billion each year.”
In yet another cut to food assistance for children, Project 2025 would also threaten the future of some universal school meal programs.
Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.