Oregon food banks receive truckloads of foods like frozen chicken and pork, milk, canned and fresh vegetables and fruit from the federal government every week. But starting in April, Oregon will receive fewer of those shipments, after the Trump administration has canceled a number of deliveries.
The administration halted millions of dollars worth of emergency food deliveries to food banks across the country, including Oregon, with no assurance on when it might resume the deliveries, according to Oregon Food Bank officials.
In this provided image, staff use a forklift in the Oregon Food Bank warehouse in Northeast Portland in 2024. The Trump administration has halted millions of dollars worth of emergency food deliveries to food banks across the country, including Oregon.
Courtesy of the Oregon Food Bank
The Oregon Food Bank distributes food to 21 regional food banks, which then serve some 1,400 distribution sites across the state. Right now, the food bank is receiving about 45 truckloads of food per month from the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, which is managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
However, starting next week through July, the food bank now expects to receive only about 30 truckloads per month.
That’s about $6 million worth of emergency food that will not make it to Oregonians who need it the most, said Shannon Oliver, the director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank.
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“Within the food that we get from the federal government, there was a supplemental source that we have been receiving food from for the last couple of years that the current administration decided to end,” she said.
That doesn’t mean that food banks won’t get any food from the federal government, Oliver said, but these supplemental food deliveries made up about 18% of all of the food Oregon was receiving and distributing. The Biden administration had announced additional funding for the program last year.
“The line we got was they want to re-evaluate to ensure that it’s aligned with the current administration’s fiscal priorities,” Oliver said, referring to communication she received from Feeding America, a network the Oregon Food Bank is a member of.
A spokesperson for the USDA told OPB in an email that the agency is still funding some food programs, but said the “Biden Administration created unsustainable programming and expectations.”
The cuts come as more families are coming in to regional food banks seeking assistance, and although food banks do receive food from other sources such as from donors or purchases with private grants, it’s unclear how they will fill the gaps, Oliver said.
“There’s not a simple answer of how we’re gonna fill the gap,” Oliver said. “It will probably be fewer distributions from each pantry or at each distribution site. They’ll give out less food. There will be some empty shelves. This is really going to hit families hard.”
The cancellation of those deliveries come as the Trump administration has cut or paused funding for several other USDA programs — including a program that pays small-scale or underserved farmers for locally-sourced meat and produce. Since 2022, when Oregon began participating in the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, the state has received over $7 million to purchase local meat or fresh fruit and vegetables from over 250 producers to then distribute that food within the community it’s grown.
“So not only are we going to have less food coming through the statewide distribution network, but at the local level, where we want there to be resilient and local growers, we’re also losing funding that supports those sources of food as well,” Oliver said.
A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services, which manages the funds for that program, told OPB it has been expecting about $4 million to continue the program past its current end date of Sept. 30, 2025. Oregon is no longer receiving that money.
“USDA has not given us any indication that they will reverse that decision or continue the program once the first two rounds of funding are spent and completed,” the ODHS spokesperson wrote in an email.
Oliver said that even if the Trump administration changes course and frees up funding for the truck deliveries, it will be too late.
“These are loads that take months of planning in advance, the 30 loads that were cancelled between April and June,” she said. “I don’t think there’s any realistic way, even if the funding was turned right back on, to replace those, just from a timing perspective.”
