Lin says that the combination of camaraderie and affordability will keep her coming back to the center for as long as she’s physically able. “My income — a $1,400 Social Security check and a pension of slightly more than $300 a month — doesn’t leave much left over. My rent is $1,000 and I have to pay for utilities and a phone,” she says. “So many of us seniors live doubled-up or in substandard housing. We deserve better, but the government, and Donald Trump in particular, treat us like garbage.”
Low-income seniors and their advocates agree and say that pending cuts to food and nutrition programs — including funding for meals at senior centers, and cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Meals on Wheels —will increase hunger and malnutrition.
Both are already big problems.
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According to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantries, food insecurity is nothing new, and even before Trump’s Big Bad Bill championed slashing social welfare spending, 6.9 million people over the age of 65 faced hunger in the U.S. The group estimates that in 2022, one in 11 people aged 60 and older, and one in eight between the ages of 50 and 59, lacked adequate food.
Part of the reason is poverty, but isolation, the inability to shop or cook, trouble chewing and swallowing, cognitive decline, depression, a diminished sense of smell and/or taste, and the side effects of medication can also contribute to malnutrition in American seniors. These factors, in concert with economic precarity, make it difficult for many elders to remain healthy and well-nourished.
But money, unsurprisingly, is crucial to eating well, and many seniors like Elisabeth and Lin have too little of it.
According to the Social Security Administration, as of May 2025, the average monthly Social Security payment was $2,002. Millions, however, are ineligible for retirement benefits and instead rely on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a benefit provided to disabled people who did not work for the required 40 quarters needed to collect Social Security. Their monthly benefits amount to $967 for individuals and $1,450 for couples. More than 2 million adults over 65 receive SSI, with 39 percent living below the poverty line.
“Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities.”
Pre-Trump, even the federal government recognized the toll of poverty on older people’s quality of life. A July 2024 report issued by the National Institute on Aging, a department of the National Institutes of Health, noted that over the past two decades, “food insecurity among families that include adults over the age of 60 had almost doubled, affecting nearly 25 percent of such families.” The report further acknowledged that hunger and lack of access to nutritious food has had a disproportionate impact on Black, Brown and Indigenous households.
And it’s likely to get much worse.
Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, told Truthout that since Trump took office in January, $1.5 billion has been cut in assistance to food banks and pantries, including a $130 million administrative cut to the 43-year-old Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency food and shelter program.
“They are working to make the ‘Golden Years’ the ‘Hungry Years,’” he said. “Seniors used to be the third rail of American politics, but that rule is no longer sacrosanct. I think that Congressmembers who support these cuts are following their leader off a cliff. They apparently want seniors, children, and veterans to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”
Markell Lewis Miller has seen the impact of these cuts directly. As the director of community food programs at Food Gatherers, a food bank in Washtenaw County, Michigan, she oversaw the distribution of 9.9 million pounds of food to hungry Michiganders in 2024, many of them seniors.
But two months into the Trump administration, the organization’s food supply took a tremendous hit.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture is one of the largest sources of food for us, through the emergency food assistance program,” Miller told Truthout. “In March of this year, there was an administrative action, and with no warning whatsoever, we experienced a cut, by half, of what we used to get through the [emergency food assistance] program. This amounts to 15 percent of the food we give out annually. Short-term, we’ve used our reserve funds and fundraised to generate money to purchase food to replace what was lost.”
The impact, she says, has been severe. According to Miller, prior to the cut, Food Gatherers spent approximately $4 million a year purchasing food. Replacing lost items from the Department of Agriculture, she says, will require them to spend an additional $2.5 million, money that will have to be raised through philanthropic and individual donations.
Other issues also have staff worried. “Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities,” Miller says. “Grocery stores will see their sales plummet and some will close; people will also see their health decline if they lose access to fresh, affordable, and nutritious food, which can lead to malnutrition.” The cascading impact, she adds, can lead to calcium and vitamin deficiencies, as well as health issues such as depression, cognitive disorders, slower wound healing, loss of muscle mass, and frailty syndrome.
“Every dollar matters to people on fixed incomes,” she says.
What’s more, Miller and her colleagues worry that the imposition of work requirements on older SNAP recipients will further restrict access to healthy meals.
Cutting the SNAP Rolls by Making People Ineligible
for Benefits
Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director of SNAP programs at the Food Research & Action Center, sees the proposed work requirements — a mandate that SNAP recipients work a minimum of 80 hours a month until they reach age 64 — as a way to thin the rolls. “Failure to secure work will mean that people can only receive SNAP for three months in a three-year period,” she told Truthout. “But this requirement does not come with a job offer or transportation to and from a job. People who live in areas, particularly rural areas, where few jobs exist, or who are grandparents doing unpaid (but essential) child care, will not be exempted. Raising the threshold from age 54 does not take these realities into account.”
“Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have not created the infrastructure to support them.”
Other changes to SNAP will also have a deleterious impact, Plata-Nino says. “Previously, if you had a child under 18 in the household, you were exempted from the work rules. Now, the House version of the bill exempts only those people with a child under 7. They also want to exclude the cost of internet service when calculating SNAP eligibility. People with kids in school and folks with disabilities will be particularly harmed by getting rid of this deduction since they have to have the internet in their homes to function.”
Plata-Nino sounds furious as she speaks. “These changes are meant to give a tax cut to the top 1 percent,” she says. “For seniors who worked incredibly hard their whole lives, finding a part-time job is often impossible, and if they fail, they’ll lose their access to food. It’s cruel. In addition, many seniors own their own homes, but they’re still financially stressed because their property taxes have not stopped. Their fuel and utility costs have not stopped. Boilers break, and with climate change, people need air conditioners as well as heat. We know time limits on eligibility do not increase employment. But they do keep people off the program and scrambling to eat.”
Meals on Wheels Faces Cutbacks
Meals on Wheels, a national food delivery service (and congregate meal provider in some locales) has filled nutritional gaps for more than 70 years. Like SNAP, it is also on the chopping block.
Josh Protas, the group’s chief advocacy and policy officer, told Truthout that about 37 percent of funding for the 5,000 local Meals on Wheels programs that exist nationwide comes through the federal Older Americans Act.
“About 90 percent of our programs get federal money, and many get half or more of their funding from federal social service block grants, community development block grants, or other federal funding streams, some of which are now threatened,” he says. “In some states, Medicaid has allowed special medically tailored meals to be reimbursed for people in renal failure or with heart conditions. In other places, SNAP can be used to make voluntary contributions to offset the cost of meals. We don’t know if these specialized programs will survive.”
All told, he says, Meals on Wheels provides food to about 2.2 million older adults annually. But this barely scratches the surface of need. “There are many older adults we’re not reaching,” Protas says. “We estimate that at least 2.5 million low-income seniors are eligible for Meals on Wheels but are not served. One in three of our programs has a waiting list with waits ranging from a few months to years.”
To tell an adult who is unable to leave their home that they have to wait is painful, he adds, “but it’s even worse when an opening comes up and we discover that the person died while waiting.”
In addition to providing food, Protas reports that Meals on Wheels provides a secondary function: assessing the meal recipient’s living situation and providing a few minutes of conversation and social engagement each day.
“Right now, 12,000 people a day are turning 65, and we have not created the infrastructure to support them,” he says. “The needs of older adults do not get prioritized. Money from the federal government has always helped unlock philanthropic dollars, but the truth is that less than 1 percent of foundation grants go to seniors. People gravitate to causes benefiting kids and animals; older adults get second-tier consideration. Even more concerning, one of the fastest-growing unhoused populations is older people, folks who did what they could to earn a living and who still end up on the streets with nothing.”
Cuts, he concludes, will exacerbate this shameful legacy.
But seniors, disabled adults, and their advocates are fighting back. Led by the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations and the Coalition on Human Needs, they are making their opposition to SNAP cuts, Medicaid cuts, and Medicare cuts loud and clear, as well as urging for support for national programs like Meals on Wheels and local food banks like Food Gatherers. In addition, an unprecedented coalition of state attorneys general, led by Washington, D.C.’s Karl A. Racine and New York’s Letitia James, have sued the administration to stop the SNAP cuts from taking effect.
“Many older Americans rely on Medicaid and if they slash it, people will have less money to pay for food and medicine,” Joel Berg of Hunger Free America predicts. “Imagine being 63. You’ve worked in a steel plant for 20 years. The plant closes and, because of age discrimination, you can’t find another job. You will lose your SNAP benefits after three months and won’t be eligible again for three years unless you find a 20-hour-a-week job. Seniors are being attacked from land, sea, and air, and these cuts are happening on top of significant cuts that have been imposed over the last few years. People are increasingly going hungry. The nonprofit sector is a bit shell-shocked, but people are pushing back and coalescing with farmers and the food industry to pressure lawmakers.”
Note: A correction has been made to fix a typo in Gina Plata-Nino’s name.
