Trump’s ‘efficiency’ leads to huge waste

The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trump’s second term.

- TEVIS GARRETT GRADDY-LOVELACE

Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programmes have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesn’t even include the administration's actual destruction of edible food.

The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America don't have enough food to eat — even with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programmes to help them.

Yet, huge amounts of food — on average in the U.S., as much as 40 per cent of it — rots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year.

This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the US. alone over 4 million metrictons of methane ~ a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

As a scholar of wasted food, I have watched this problem worsen since Trump began his second term in January 2025. Despite this administration's claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage.

Supplying fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables and dairy, requires skilled workers on tight timelines to ensure ripeness, freshness and high quality.