(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently slashed over $1 billion in federal funding for schools and food banks. Pritzker addressed concerns Wednesday about how Illinois will handle food insecurity in light of these cuts.
“We don’t have what right now looks like about $11 billion that we will lose to the state of Illinois. We don’t have $11 billion to fill in the gaps on education, health care,” said Pritzker. “Again, I want to remind everybody what the purpose of all of that is, of taking all that away is, it’s to give big tax cuts to people who don’t need them.”
The USDA recently cut funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. Traci Barkley, Sola Gratia Farm director, said the program ending after a year was not “a part of the plan.”
“Farmers that were hiring, investing, stretching, knowing that they could get to that next level and then serve our communities long-term with good, healthy food,” said Barkley. “I know there have been layoffs. I know there are people that are not getting the food that they counted on.”
Separately, state Rep. Chris Miller, R-Oakland, criticized the complaints.
“It’s one of those things, when you start to trim the pork, the pigs start to squeal,” said Miller.
Former gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey also took aim at Pritzker for focusing only on northern Illinois, saying, “Since when does ‘traveling the state’ exclude the area south of Champaign? Come further south and tell us how great your ideas are. I’ll supply plenty of ‘farmers’ for attendance.”
Pritzker reflected on the long-term consequences of funding cuts, noting that Illinois has seen similar damages in the past.
“The damage that gets done isn’t just during the year that you’ve lost those dollars. It gets done sometimes permanently, and we saw that. We had big programs that just went away in the state of Illinois back in 2016, 2017,” said Pritzker. “Unfortunately, Donald Trump has a whole history of breaching contracts when he was a business person.”
Pritzker called for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and conservation programs to be included in the federal farm bill and criticized Trump.
“If they don’t get a farm bill that includes SNAP and these conservation programs, these [programs] could disappear,” said Pritzker. “I don’t want to say permanently because we’ll all work to rebuild, but it takes years, and even in Illinois, we haven’t been able to restore everything that was lost.”
Miller, however, criticized the farm bill, claiming that 85% of it now focuses on food assistance rather than supporting farmers.
On the issue of undocumented agricultural workers, Pritzker said he hasn’t heard of any large-scale ICE actions targeting them but acknowledged that such deportations have happened elsewhere.
Miller emphasized the legal process for migrant workers, saying, “there’s a process and the people that use migrant workers, they know how to do it.”
