Free Republic

Food banks around the country said they may not be prepared to execute the Trump administration’s plan to get additional billions in food to hungry Americans...Last month, the administration set in motion a $1.2 billion program to send food to the nation’s food banks as part of its wider effort to bail out farmers hurt by the president’s trade war. Local food bank officials said they are thrilled by the opportunity to feed more Americans who need help, but worry they will not be able to process all of the newly available agricultural products that could double or triple the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is moving two agencies and roughly 700 federal employees out of Washington, D.C., to save money and improve the department’s service to taxpayers. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced Thursday that the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) will be fully moved out of the nation’s capital by 2020, according to the USDA. A location hasn’t been picked yet.“It’s been our goal to make USDA the most effective, efficient, and customer-focused department in the entire federal government,” Perdue said in a statement. “In our Administration, we have looked critically at...

President Donald Trump is clearly concerned about the plight of American farmers. He pushed the Department of Agriculture to make available up to $12 billion of temporary relief to those farms caught in the middle of his tariff war – starting this Labor Day. It’s laudable that he wants to address this problem, but let’s remember that it was a problem of his own creation. America is a breadbasket to much of the world because of our exceptional farmland. We have about two-and-a-half times as much arable land as does China, for instance, with about the same landmass. That means...

President Donald Trump signaled his support Thursday for work requirements for food stamps. “When the House and Senate meet on the very important Farm Bill – we love our farmers – hopefully, they will be able to leave the WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROVISION that the House approved,” Trump wrote on Twitter. The House version of the farm bill barely passed with a vote of 213-211 and included work requirements for single food stamp recipients. Democrats voted unanimously against the bill. The House and the Senate have to take the bill to conference, however, which will likely strip the...

Live poultry in backyard flocks are linked to several multistate outbreaks of salmonella infections that have now sickened 212 people in 44 states, federal health officials warned Monday. The most recent illnesses began on June 21, with 88 of the cases reported in the last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in an advisory. The federal agency is working with multiple states in investigating several outbreaks of salmonella infections linked to contact with live poultry in backyard flocks, it said. A half-dozen strains of salmonella bacteria have sickened people starting in the middle of February,...

Alert: $4 Billion Worth Of Waste Found In Food Stamp Program It’s very hard to come up with a list of things that the federal government gets right. Government is simply too big and there’s just no way this bloated bureaucracy can be counted on to be efficient. That’s a big reason that Trump was elected. The American people are tired of the waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington. From Breitbart: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent a total of $4 billion on improper food stamp payments to those receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent a total of $4 billion on improper food stamp payments to those receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the USDA confirmed with Breitbart News on Friday. The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service announced this week that improper payments made up 6.3 percent of SNAP money in the fiscal year (FY) 2017—the latest data available from the agency. Breitbart News analyzed the USDA’s data on food stamp spending and found that $4,007,026,532 of the $63,603,595,754 the agency spent on SNAP in FY 2017 went to improper payments. The USDA told Breitbart...

The Senate today easily passed its version of the farm bill by a vote of 86-11,paving the way for a conference committee to reconcile differences with the House's version of the sweeping agriculture and nutrition legislation. The Senate farm bill attracted bipartisan support, as expected, but key differences with the House's partisan version, which passed last week, set up potentially contentious negotiations between the lawmakers who will be tasked with melding the two measures into one. The main differences relate to proposals for the food stamp program, farm subsidy caps and conservation initiatives. Congress has until Sept. 30 to get...

"Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago." That's how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today. The unequal economy that's emerged over the past decade, combined with patchy access to health care in rural areas, have had a severe impact on the people growing America's food. Recent data shows just how much. Farmers are dying by suicide at a higher rate than any other occupational group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The suicide rate in the field of farming, fishing and forestry is 84.5...

Overall enrollment in the country’s food stamp program has dropped to its lowest level in more than eight years as the economy continues to improve and the Trump administration attempts to tackle fraud in the program. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enrollment in the program dropped in March to 40,083,954. The last time food stamp participation dipped this low was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people were enrolled in the program. "As the economy continues to improve, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is...

Overall enrollment in the nation’s food stamp program has dipped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The latest USDA data reveals that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the federal government program that administers food stamps—dropped to 40,083,954 in March 2018. The last time enrollment in the food stamp program reached that level was February 2010, when 39,588,993 people participated in the nation’s food stamp program. Although overall enrollment has reached its lowest point in eight years, food stamp enrollment has been declining steadily since...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) breeds 100 kittens per year so they can be fed toxoplasma-infected raw meat, and scientists can collect parasites from their feces to use in experiments. The kittens, only 3 months old, are then killed and incinerated. Keep in mind, after the USDA has collected the parasites, the kittens are healthy and could easily be adopted out to the public. But that’s not how the USDA works. This program has been receiving tax money since 1970 — currently $650,000 a year — and has been based in Maryland since 1982. It’s much closer to home...

A Republican lawmaker wants answers from the Department of Agriculture about taxpayer-funded research experiments at a Maryland facility that have allegedly led to the deaths of hundreds of cats and kittens. Citing documents reviewed by his office, Michigan Republican Mike Bishop described a decades-old research project at the USDA's Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, in which hundreds of kittens are bred, fed meat that is infected with Toxoplasma, and later killed and discarded by "incineration." In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue dated Monday, Bishop wrote that he was "shocked to hear that the USDA, the very...

WASHINGTON — Horse meat production won’t resume in the U.S. anytime soon, a victory for animal-rights advocates under the spending bill signed last week by President Donald Trump. The $1.3 trillion spending deal, which funds the government through September, renewed the country’s horse slaughter ban. Just months ago, animal-rights activists feared the ban could be in jeopardy. The measure includes language that prohibits the U.S. Department of Agriculture from spending money on inspecting horse slaughter facilities. Without inspections, horse slaughter plants can’t operate, so they’ll remain closed as they have for more than a decade. “I think we’re all kind...

Judicial Watch Files New Lawsuit on Clinton Pay-to-Play Issues McCabe Firing Only the Beginning Nearly 200 Busted in $3.7-Million Food-Stamp Fraud Operation Judicial Watch Files New Lawsuit on Clinton Pay-to-Play Issues Judicial Watch meticulously documented Hillary Clinton’s use of the State Department to take care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. She and Bill are the poster children for pay-to-play. Now we’re looking into a potential linchpin of that operation. We just sued the State Department for emails, calendar entries and other information in the electronic file of Dennis Cheng, who was deputy chief of protocol for two years...

In his big budget proposal Monday, President Trump offered a novel idea: Instead of giving needy people stamps they can redeem for food, why not just give them actual food? As you might guess, liberals were enraged by the notion. How dare Mr. Trump try to take food stamps away from hungry people and give them — of all things — food? Here’s how the liberal HuffPost saw it: “Facing a trillion-dollar deficit because of his just-passed tax cuts, President Donald Trump has an idea for how to get some of that money back: making poor people eat beans and...

The White House says the changes could save $214 billion over a decade. “The Budget proposes to combine the traditional retail-based SNAP electronic benefit with the direct provision of nutritious and 100 percent American-grown USDA Foods to participating households. This cost-effective proposal maintains our commitment to helping needy families avoid hunger while generating substantial savings,” the budget said. Households receiving $90 per month or more would get a portion in shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish. The remainder of the benefit would go onto the debit card...

For years after Michelle Obama’s ironically named Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, students at Penn-Trafford High School in Harrison City, Pennsylvania staged an accidental trash can rebellion. As in many districts, waste management companies were the only winners as students dumped lunch into the garbage. For this school year, Penn-Trafford High School instead tossed Mrs. Obama’s school lunch plan and now President Trump is doing the same on a national scale. As with any policy created by coercive utopians to control personal choices, nothing about the Obama plan made sense. Kids, parents and school districts hated it, and its...

The Trump administration is ending yet another of Michelle Obama’s hated, overly strict school lunch rules by bringing chocolate milk back to school lunch menus. The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday announced a new rule set to take effect on July 1 after the period of public comment. The new rule relaxes sodium limits and Obama’s whole-grain requirements. The rule will also allow milk with one percent fat back on the menu, ABC News reported. “Schools need flexibility in menu planning so they can serve nutritious and appealing meals,” Perdue said this week. “Schools want to offer food that...

Feds took disturbing action for displaying Scripture! The Trump administration has resolved another fight over religion that the Obama administration started against a meatpacking plant in Michigan. The Obama administration had actually threatened to close down the business of Don Vander Boon because he put an article on a table in a break room inside his own company about marriage being a special relationship between a man and a woman. After Barack Obama changed his mind about marriage, to deny traditional marriage and start promoting same-sex “marriage,” the official position of the Obama administration came into conflict with the Vander...