Hunger Threatens to Plague “Golden Years” of Older Americans Due to Trump’s Cuts
By Eleanor
J. Bader , Truthout
“I don’t have enough comida (food),” she
tells Truthout in a mix of English and Spanish. “You
know, leche (milk), pan (bread), pollo (chicken),
cereal —everything es muy caro (very expensive).”
Her rent, she says, is $1,200 a month, and she pays
approximately $300 per month for electricity, gas, phone, and internet service.
The total, she adds, exceeds her monthly income: a $229 retirement pension from
her job as an office assistant and $849 in Social Security. “My daughter has to
help me, but it’s hard for her, so I come to the church every week to get what
I can —a container of milk, pasta, bread, and maybe a package of meat. It
helps.”
Like Elisabeth, 74-year-old Lin — she, too, asked not to
disclose her surname — has trouble making ends meet, but she goes to a senior
center in her New York City neighborhood almost every weekday for a meal. She’s
been doing this since 2011. “We’re a family here, and if I have a problem,
there’s someone to help me,” she told Truthout. “If it’s something
small, there’s always someone sitting near me to make me laugh and remind me
not to take my troubles too seriously. If it’s a big problem, I can go upstairs
to see a worker who will help me figure out what to do.”
The center, she says, asks for a voluntary contribution of
$2 per meal. “It’s a good, square, balanced lunch,” Lin says.
Lin says that the combination of camaraderie and
affordability will keep her coming back to the center for as long as she’s
physically able. “My income — a $1,400 Social Security check and a pension of
slightly more than $300 a month — doesn’t leave much left over. My rent is
$1,000 and I have to pay for utilities and a phone,” she says. “So many of us
seniors live doubled-up or in substandard housing. We deserve better, but the
government, and Donald Trump in particular, treat us like garbage.”
Low-income seniors and their advocates agree and say that
pending cuts to food and nutrition programs — including funding for meals at
senior centers, and cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) and Meals on Wheels —will increase hunger and malnutrition.
Both are already big problems.
According to Feeding
America, a national network of food banks and pantries, food
insecurity is nothing new, and even before Trump’s Big Bad Bill championed
slashing social welfare spending, 6.9
million people over the age of 65 faced hunger in the U.S. The group
estimates that in 2022, one in 11 people aged 60 and older, and one in eight
between the ages of 50 and 59, lacked adequate food.
Part of the reason is poverty, but isolation, the inability
to shop or cook, trouble chewing and swallowing, cognitive decline, depression,
a diminished sense of smell and/or taste, and the side effects of medication
can also contribute to malnutrition
in American seniors. These factors, in concert with economic
precarity, make it difficult for many elders to remain healthy and
well-nourished.
But money, unsurprisingly, is crucial to eating well, and
many seniors like Elisabeth and Lin have too little of it.
According to the Social Security Administration, as of May
2025, the average
monthly Social Security payment was $2,002. Millions, however, are
ineligible for retirement benefits and instead rely on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a
benefit provided to disabled people who did not work for the required 40
quarters needed to collect Social Security. Their monthly benefits amount to
$967 for individuals and $1,450 for couples. More than 2 million adults over 65
receive SSI, with 39 percent living below the poverty line.
“Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They
impact whole communities.”
Pre-Trump, even the federal government recognized the toll of poverty on older people’s quality of life. A July 2024 report issued by the National Institute on Aging, a department of the National Institutes of Health, noted that over the past two decades, “food insecurity among families that include adults over the age of 60 had almost doubled, affecting nearly 25 percent of such families.” The report further acknowledged that hunger and lack of access to nutritious food has had a disproportionate impact on Black, Brown and Indigenous households.
And it’s likely to get much worse.
Joel Berg, CEO
of Hunger Free America,
told Truthout that since Trump took office in January, $1.5
billion has been cut in assistance to food banks and pantries, including a
$130 million administrative cut to the 43-year-old Federal Emergency Management
Agency’s emergency food and shelter program.
“They are working to make the ‘Golden Years’ the ‘Hungry
Years,’” he said. “Seniors used to be the third rail of American politics, but
that rule is no longer sacrosanct. I think that Congressmembers who support
these cuts are following their leader off a cliff. They apparently want
seniors, children, and veterans to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”
Markell
Lewis Miller has seen the impact of these cuts directly. As the
director of community food programs at Food Gatherers, a food bank
in Washtenaw County, Michigan,
she oversaw the distribution of 9.9 million pounds of food to hungry
Michiganders in 2024, many of them seniors.
But two months into the Trump administration, the
organization’s food supply took a tremendous hit.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture is one of the largest
sources of food for us, through the emergency food assistance program,” Miller
told Truthout. “In March of this year, there was an administrative
action, and with no warning whatsoever, we experienced a cut, by half, of what
we used to get through the [emergency food assistance] program. This amounts to
15 percent of the food we give out annually. Short-term, we’ve used our reserve
funds and fundraised to generate money to purchase food to replace what was
lost.”
The impact, she says, has been severe. According to Miller,
prior to the cut, Food Gatherers spent approximately $4 million a year
purchasing food. Replacing lost items from the Department of Agriculture, she
says, will require them to spend an additional $2.5 million, money that will
have to be raised through philanthropic and individual donations.
Other issues also have staff worried. “Cuts to Medicaid and
SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities,” Miller says.
“Grocery stores will see their sales plummet and some will close; people will
also see their health decline if they lose access to fresh, affordable, and
nutritious food, which can lead to malnutrition.” The cascading impact,
she adds, can lead to calcium and vitamin deficiencies, as well as health
issues such as depression, cognitive disorders, slower wound healing, loss of
muscle mass, and frailty syndrome.
“Every dollar matters to people on fixed incomes,” she says.
What’s more, Miller and her colleagues worry that the
imposition of work requirements on older SNAP recipients will further restrict
access to healthy meals.
Cutting the SNAP Rolls by Making People Ineligible for
Benefits
Gina
Plato-Nino, deputy director of SNAP programs at the Food Research & Action Center, sees
the proposed work requirements — a mandate that SNAP recipients work a minimum
of 80 hours a month until they reach age 64 — as a way to thin the rolls.
“Failure to secure work will mean that people can only receive SNAP for three
months in a three-year period,” she told Truthout. “But this
requirement does not come with a job offer or transportation to and from a job.
People who live in areas, particularly rural areas, where few jobs exist, or
who are grandparents doing unpaid (but essential) child care, will not be
exempted. Raising the threshold from age 54, which it has been since 1996, does
not take these realities into account.”
“Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have
not created the infrastructure to support them.”
Other changes to SNAP will also have a deleterious impact,
Plato-Nino says. “Previously, if you had a child under 18 in the household, you
were exempted from the work rules. Now, the House version of the bill exempts
only those people with a child under 7. They also want to exclude the cost of
internet service when calculating SNAP eligibility. People with kids in school
and folks with disabilities will be particularly harmed by getting rid of this
deduction since they have to have the internet in their homes to function.”
Plato-Nino sounds furious as she speaks. “These changes are
meant to give a tax cut to the top 1 percent,” she says. “For seniors who
worked incredibly hard their whole lives, finding a part-time job is often
impossible, and if they fail, they’ll lose their access to food. It’s cruel. In
addition, many seniors own their own homes, but they’re still financially
stressed because their property taxes have not stopped. Their fuel and utility
costs have not stopped. Boilers break, and with climate change, people need air
conditioners as well as heat. We know time limits on eligibility do not
increase employment. But they do keep people off the program and scrambling to
eat.”
Meals on Wheels Faces Cutbacks
Meals on
Wheels, a national food delivery service (and congregate meal provider
in some locales) has filled nutritional gaps for more than 70 years. Like SNAP,
it is also on the chopping block.
Josh Protas,
the group’s chief advocacy and policy officer, told Truthout that
about 37 percent of funding for the 5,000 local Meals on Wheels programs that
exist nationwide comes through the federal Older Americans Act.
“About 90 percent of our programs get federal money, and
many get half or more of their funding from federal social service block
grants, community development block grants, or other federal funding streams,
some of which are now threatened,” he says. “In some states, Medicaid has
allowed special medically tailored meals to be reimbursed for people in renal
failure or with heart conditions. In other places, SNAP can be used to make
voluntary contributions to offset the cost of meals. We don’t know if these specialized
programs will survive.”
All told, he says, Meals on Wheels provides food to about
2.2 million older adults annually. But this barely scratches the surface of
need. “There are many older adults we’re not reaching,” Protas says. “We
estimate that at least 2.5 million low-income seniors are eligible for Meals on
Wheels but are not served. One in three of our programs has a waiting list with
waits ranging from a few months to years.”
To tell an adult who is unable to leave their home that they
have to wait is painful, he adds, “but it’s even worse when an opening comes up
and we discover that the person died while waiting.”
In addition to providing food, Protas reports that Meals on
Wheels provides a secondary function: assessing the meal recipient’s living
situation and providing a few minutes of conversation and social engagement
each day.
“Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have
not created the infrastructure to support them,” he says. “The needs of older
adults do not get prioritized. Money from the federal government has always
helped unlock philanthropic dollars, but the truth is that less than 1 percent
of foundation grants go to seniors. People gravitate to causes benefiting kids
and animals; older adults get second-tier consideration. Even more concerning,
one of the fastest-growing unhoused populations is older people, folks who did
what they could to earn a living and who still end up on the streets with
nothing.”
Cuts, he concludes, will exacerbate this shameful legacy.
But seniors, disabled adults, and their advocates are
fighting back. Led by the Leadership
Council of Aging Organizations and the Coalition on Human Needs, they are making
their opposition to SNAP cuts, Medicaid cuts, and Medicare cuts loud and clear,
as well as urging for support for national programs like Meals on Wheels and
local food banks like Food Gatherers. In addition, an unprecedented coalition
of state attorneys general, led by Washington, D.C.’s Karl A. Racine and
New York’s Letitia
James, have sued
the administration to stop the SNAP cuts from taking
effect.
“Many older Americans rely on Medicaid and if they slash it, people will have less money to pay for food and medicine,” Joel Berg of Hunger Free America predicts.
“Imagine being 63. You’ve worked in a steel plant for 20
years. The plant closes and, because of age discrimination, you can’t find
another job. You will lose your SNAP benefits after three months and won’t be
eligible again for three years unless you find a 20-hour-a-week job. Seniors
are being attacked from land, sea, and air, and these cuts are happening on top
of significant cuts that have been imposed over the last few years. People are
increasingly going hungry. The nonprofit sector is a bit shell-shocked, but
people are pushing back and coalescing with farmers and the food industry to
pressure lawmakers.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Eleanor
J. Bader is a Brooklyn, New York-based freelance writer who focuses on
domestic social issues and resistance movements. In addition to Truthout,
she writes for The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Indypendent,
New Pages and other progressive blogs and print publications.
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