Trump Pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” Then Cut a Program Many Tribes Rely on for Healthy Food
by Mary Hudetz
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As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.
Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.
Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.
“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.
Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.
That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.
In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.
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