TEFAP spends 93 cents of every dollar on food. Washington canceled the next half-billion before it shipped.

Every food bank in the country runs on the same federal plumbing: The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, buys commodities from American farmers and ships them to state agencies, which pass them to food banks, which pass them to pantries and soup kitchens.▸ It is not a grant program in the usual sense — it is a supply chain, funded by four separate legal authorities that Congress rarely discusses together and that USDA can, it turns out, turn off one at a time.

Four separate laws fund TEFAP.▸ Entitlement commodities ($455.1 million) are formula funding under the Food and Nutrition Act. Administrative funds ($156.2 million) reimburse states for storing and trucking the food, under the Emergency Food Assistance Act. Farm to Food Bank grants ($3.7 million) require a dollar-for-dollar nonfederal match and went to 27 states in FY2024. And the largest piece — bonus commodities, $1,626.1 million, combining routine Section 32 surplus purchases with discretionary Commodity Credit Corporation buys — exists entirely at USDA's option; nothing in statute requires it. Altogether, per the CRS report, TEFAP moved $2,241.1 million in FY2024, and 92.9% of it — $2,081.2 million — was food shipped straight to food banks and pantries. Running the delivery system itself cost 7 cents of the dollar; there is almost no bureaucracy to cut here, because there is almost no bureaucracy.

That discretionary bonus-commodity line is also the one USDA can zero out overnight, and in FY2025 it did.▸ In December 2024, USDA announced an additional $500 million in Commodity Credit Corporation purchases for TEFAP, on top of the regular entitlement and bonus foods. By March 2025, the new administration had suspended it, citing "unsustainable" expectations — canceling months of orders food banks had already placed. The same week, USDA also ended two related programs that let food banks and schools buy directly from local farms, the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement (about $420 million) and Local Food for Schools (about $660 million) — a combined $1.1 billion in locally-sourced food funding gone alongside the TEFAP cut. In central Appalachia, Grist reported that Appalachian Sustainable Development had to discontinue a weekly food-box program — about 2,000 boxes a week, roughly $30,000 per distribution cycle — that had supported 40 regional farmers along with the households it fed.

None of the money above counts the labor that turns commodities into meals.▸ Feeding America's own participation estimate, published in November 2024, found that more than 50 million people received charitable food assistance at least once during 2023 — from a Feeding America network food bank or an outside provider. Sustaining that network, per its Spring 2025 Impact Report, is more than 2 million volunteers a year, working alongside the network's 200-plus food banks and 60,000-plus partner agencies. Divide one number by the other and the ratio is stark: roughly 25 people relying on the system for every volunteer keeping it running. TEFAP commodities are the raw material; unpaid labor is what actually gets it onto a plate — and neither line grew when the $500 million bonus-purchase cut hit in March 2025.

Dollar figures cover fiscal year 2024, the most recent year with finalized USDA data as reported by the Congressional Research Service; the FY2025 cancellation is reported separately because no finalized FY2025 total yet exists. The 50 million and 2 million figures come from two different Feeding America publications with different reference periods, noted on each row of the table beneath the chart.