Once a month, 79-year-old Ann Gaskill pulls her Dodge Caravan into the parking lot of the Ark Church in Conroe, where Combined Arms, a Houston-based veterans organization, operates one of its mobile food pantries throughout the region. Gaskill started using the program after her husband, an Air Force veteran, died, limiting her income.
Whenever the third Thursday of the month rolls around, Gaskill returns to her senior living community from the Ark with her haul of fresh vegetables and meat and starts looking for recipes to test. Whatever she doesn’t use, she passes along to friends and neighbors.
“My [mom] and my paternal grandmother helped raise my brother and me, so we always had food on the table, and that’s important,” Gaskill told the Texas Observer at her Shenandoah apartment. “If I can share with somebody, I’ll ask, ‘Can you use this?’ I’m not real big on throwing food away.”
Gaskill isn’t alone—Combined Arms’ food pantry program serves more than 8,000 food-insecure Texans, according to the organization’s website. It’s one of more than 1,600 partner organizations distributing food through the Houston Food Bank, allowing the organization to serve more than 1 million Houstonians across 18 counties.
Now, the service is under threat since the Trump administration enacted sweeping federal spending cuts this year.
Katherine Byers, the Houston Food Bank’s government relations officer, walked into a meeting in late January with officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees federal funding for food banks across the nation. By the time she walked out of the meeting, the food bank’s federal funding had suffered more than $32 million in projected funding cuts. As Byers was sitting in the meeting, she got a notice about the impending cuts. “I was like, ‘whoa,’” Byers recalled. “We kind of stopped everybody and asked USDA, and they said, ‘We don’t know.’”
Just days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, $25 million was cut from the Houston Food Bank’s portion of The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, which serves families or individuals facing immediate food insecurity. Nationwide, the program faced around $500 million in funding cuts to food banks directly. For Houston, that meant about 500 tractor trailers of food that would no longer be able to feed hungry Texans in the coming months.
The other $7 million in cuts came from the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, which had previously helped the Houston Food Bank purchase produce from local farmers to distribute. That program, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. Nationwide, food insecurity programs overall, including those impacting school programs as well as food banks, have lost over $1 billion in funding.
As a result of the cuts, the Houston Food Bank, which counts on the federal government to fund about a quarter of its food supply, had to reduce its workforce by 15 percent to compensate—something Byers said is unique to this moment, despite funding historically changing with each administration. “These were very significant cuts,” Byers said. “I would not say that we’re moving our staff in and out with this kind of frequency (historically).”
The Department of Agriculture did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Feeding Texas, part of the Feeding America system, is a statewide network of 20 food banks that collaborate to advocate for priorities addressing food insecurity in each of Texas’ 254 counties. Of those 20 banks, four rank in the 20 largest nationwide—Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and El Paso.
Feeding Texas estimates that its 20 member banks have lost a total of $57.6 million in federal funding cuts, and that’s only in immediate canceled funding. Estimates for individual food banks, like the Houston Food Bank’s $32 million number, project both immediate and future cuts, meaning $57 million is on the low end of the potential impact range.
“There’s no way to make up for the loss of federal funding, because it’s just way larger than any funding we’re going to bring in from private donors,” Celia Cole, the CEO of Feeding Texas, told the Observer. “We’ve seen a lot of generosity in the past year in recognition of some of the losses we’ve faced, but there is no other federal government, and so when we do see cuts or changes to SNAP, like we saw Congress made in the Big Beautiful Bill, that’s a concern.”
The SNAP cuts Cole referred to affect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often known as food stamps, which Congress slashed by roughly 20 percent while imposing stricter requirements for recipients to qualify. Those changes will almost certainly add demand for local food banks in Texas, which has been repeatedly dubbed the “hungriest state” in the nation and sees one in 10 of its residents rely on SNAP. (Critically, the Trump administration has said it won’t tap contingency funds to prevent SNAP benefits from running out of funding on November 1 because of the government shutdown.)
When combined with rising grocery costs, food bank funding cuts, and a recent veto from Governor Greg Abbott that killed a bipartisan bill from the Texas Legislature to fund summer food assistance for low-income children, some advocates are calling the assortment of cuts a “perfect storm.”
“We can’t food bank our way out of hunger,” Cole said. “Those federal nutrition programs are really critical, and we’re concerned that the cuts that were made to SNAP will also increase need, and we’ll see more people in our lines if they lose access to those benefits. That will definitely be difficult to make up for privately because of the scale at which the SNAP program operates now.”
Food banks exist to fill the gaps unaddressed by government resources, not to be a lone pillar of food accessibility for the average family, Cole and others said. When those tables are flipped without the corresponding funding increases necessary for them to succeed, food banks are left to compensate any way they can to serve their area’s most vulnerable.
“Most families run out of their food stamp benefits about halfway through the month, and then there’s a lot of families who make just too much to get income-based food assistance, but they are still struggling,” said Kate Bauer, a nutritional sciences professor at the University of Michigan with expertise in SNAP. “It’s all going to come crashing down in the next year because our food banks are already struggling to keep up, and demand has increased, and we haven’t even dropped people from SNAP yet, which is about to happen.”
When food banks are too strained to fill those gaps, few other resources exist. The food banks provide resources and food to hyperlocal pantries and organizations like churches, meaning when the bottom of the pyramid falls out, the rest could follow.
“Parents will do anything they can to feed their children. We see in the research consistently that for children under 5, parents regularly skip meals. They eat less than they should,” Bauer said. “There are going to be a lot more mothers out there that are going to be skipping meals just to make sure that their kids have enough.”
Rural areas like West Texas or the Texas Panhandle could be hit particularly hard, Bauer said.
“What we know about food banks in rural communities is that there’s fewer of them. They’re farther apart,” Bauer said. “In these rural communities, there are going to be fewer food pantries, [and those] that exist likely won’t have enough food.”
However, data on whether rural Texas is impacted more than other regions may not be readily available going forward. In September, Trump’s USDA ended a decades-long study on food insecurity and nutrition access that inspired targeted policy response, calling the survey “subjective, liberal fodder.” The decision has been criticized by academics and advocates from across the country, who have raised concerns that policy decisions increasing hunger won’t be held accountable if they aren’t tracked.
State programs have been implemented to try to offset some of Texas’ growing food insecurity challenges, but some remain in their earliest stages, while the problems facing Texas’ poorest communities are hitting now. The federal funding cuts, Bauer said, will only complicate the issues. Government investment, she said, is the key solution.
“People need to understand the scope of the problem,” Cole, the Feeding Texas CEO, said. “One in six Texans faces food insecurity. Hunger touches every county and community in Texas. It’s not just somebody else’s problem.”
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