The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a small, six-person food distribution team that works directly with food banks across the Northeast to get food onto shelves, part of a program feeding low-income seniors. Half of them were fired earlier this month under cuts spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a union leader told GBH News this week.
Ellen Mei, the union representative for the regional office, said the cuts are among 16 employees who lost their jobs cut at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service , which serves Massachusetts and six other northeastern states from New York to Maine — about 15% of the office’s staff.
She worries that means the amount and the quality of the food will be hit.
“And of course, the food banks don’t have enough food, then less people are going to get fed,” Mei said.
Health policy experts like Stephanie Ettinger De Cuba at Boston University’s School of Public Health say the sudden loss of staff could put the work of feeding vulnerable people in danger.
“What people need to understand is that the regional office does really vital behind-the-scenes work that makes all the systems that we interact with on the street, in our lives, actually work,” she said. “People sometimes just don’t understand how much of what seems to just run smoothly is because government is actually working.”