Meals on Wheels, the popular nationwide program that provides hot meals to needy seniors, has become a rallying point for critics of President Trump’s proposed budget, which slashes spending on social initiatives to beef up military spending.
But on Sunday, the Trump administration answered an emphatic “no” to the question of whether the budget would gut Meals on Wheels.
Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director, said that the funding source the administration seeks to eliminate — the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grants — accounts for just 3 percent of Meals on Wheels’ overall funding.
“Some of the stories are just either grossly wrong or nearly grossly wrong, all the stories about how we cut Meals on Wheels,” Mulvaney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Meals on Wheels is not a federal program, nor do its local groups directly receive federal funding. Rather, the groups run on a mix of local, state and federal money, as well as private donations and the work contributions of volunteers, which vary depending on the funding structure of each affiliate.
Most federal money that ends up supporting Meals on Wheels comes from a separate program run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the overall HHS budget by 17.9 percent, but has not yet detailed where those cuts would fall and whether they would impact the Administration for Community Living, which funds nutrition programs for the elderly, as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler explained. A top official at Meals on Wheels told Kessler that the organization anticipates the cuts will impact its funding.
read more at washingtonpost.com
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