LANSING — While Michigan food banks lost nearly 3 million pounds of food in cancelled deliveries through August 2025, the actual impact on the organizations varied widely.

In March, $500 million was cut in funding for the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program that provides food to food banks and other emergency food providers through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, another Department of Agriculture program. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data obtained by ProPublica, this meant that around 94 million pounds of food never reached those food banks.

For some Michigan groups, especially those that faced greater losses, these cuts have made it more difficult to continue to serve their communities.

Annmarie Zaremba, the Director of Food Sourcing at Forgotten Harvest in Oak Park, said that her organization had lost about $750,000 worth of food in these cancelled deliveries. Much of that was protein like chicken and pork — food items that other donations tend not to include, but that are important for recipients to have in their diets.

“Our goal is always to give a variety of foods to try to create as much balance distribution as we can,” she said. “For the protein that we do have in inventory, we are being very methodical about it. We have a shipping plan for our protein so that people do get something, it might not be a frozen protein every time, it might be a bean item, and then the next distribution will switch to maybe a frozen chicken item or something like that.”

Not all of the federal support for Forgotten Harvest comes from the Commodity Credit Corporation, and other programs are still providing assistance.

Gleaners Community Food Bank in Detroit noted that, across all USDA programs, they received 5.1 million pounds less in USDA-donated food in fiscal year 2025 than the year before.

“Additionally, with 75% of our food going out through our partner network, Gleaners invested our own reserves to purchase over 700,000 pounds of food to help our partner network access food that was not donated,” Kristin Sokul, Senior Director of Advancement at Gleaners, wrote in an email. “While we have been able to meet requests for support as they have been presented to us from partners and community, and we’re still finalizing our fiscal year 2025 numbers, we expect that we will deliver fewer total pounds this fiscal year than we originally projected in our fiscal year 2025 budget.”

Notification of these changes also caught some organizations by surprise.

“It happened pretty quickly,” Zaremba said. “We had probably a month or so where there was some uncertainty for a while, and then we did get final notification that all of these loads had been canceled and they wouldn’t be replaced.”

Going forward, organizations like Gleaners are having to develop new strategies for allocating food for distribution.

“To safeguard continued access to nutritious food for our guests for years to come, we have created a Sustainability Plan to invest reserves into innovation and sustainability, increase fundraising efforts, and regularly evaluate expenses for efficiency,” Sokul wrote. “Gleaners remains focused on achieving a hunger-free community in Southeast Michigan with collaborative solutions that empower people and enable them to thrive.”

U.S. Reps Rashida Tlaib, Haley Stevens, Shri Thanedar, Debbie Dingell and Kristen McDonald Rivet all signed the letter from members of the House of Representatives, while Sen. Elissa Slotkin signed the version coming from the Senate.

But for other groups, the cuts were less pronounced — some fluctuations in deliveries are normal, according to Ed Scott, Director of Macomb Community Action, and occasional cancellations or substitutions are normal. Macomb Community Action had over 4,700 deliveries cancelled, according to the Department of Agriculture data.

“TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program) is a federally managed program that relies on a variety of factors, including supply chain logistics, product availability, vendor capacity, and federal contracting procedures,” Scott added. “As such, it is not uncommon for certain food items to be delayed, substituted, or canceled altogether. These changes are often beyond the control of local agencies and are part of the broader effort to ensure food safety, quality, and responsible stewardship of federal resources.”

A spokesperson for the Mid-Michigan Community Action Agency wrote, “at this time, our food programs are operating normally,” while spokespeople for Samaritas and Kent County Community Action noted that they had not experienced any cuts or cancellations.

The Department of Agriculture declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit in federal court against the agency in June over funding cuts to food aid programs.