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food
House GOP Wants to Stop a Ban That Would Keep Toxic 'Forever Chemicals' Off Food Crops
"Across the country, farms have had to be condemned and livestock slaughtered due to PFAS pollution from fertilizers," said a lawyer at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Jul 15, 2025
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing to block action that would protect farms from toxic "forever chemicals" found in fertilizers made from sewage sludge.
The provision, introduced as part of a government spending bill unveiled Monday, would bar the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from enforcing the findings from a January risk assessment, which found that the sludge contains dangerous amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
According to the environmental advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the act could cause agricultural losses and pose serious risks to public health.
For decades, the federal government encouraged farmers to spread municipal sewage onto their farmland, as it was a good source of nutrients and a preferable alternative to putting the sludge in landfills.
Nearly 20% of U.S. agricultural land is estimated to use this sludge, commonly known as "biosolids," in fertilizer, and 70 million acres of farmland may be contaminated.
These biosolids contain large amounts of PFAS, which are absorbed through the roots of plants and contaminate plant and animal products that end up on store shelves.
These chemicals are known to accumulate in the body for years without degrading and cause increased rates of cancer, decreased fertility, and developmental delays in children.
The EPA's January study found that the risks associated with PFAS in these sewage sludge-based fertilizers "exceed EPA's acceptable thresholds, sometimes by several orders of magnitude." Even very small quantities of these chemicals, it found, could pose major risks.
The GOP bill, however, forbids the EPA from using any funding to "finalize, implement, administer, or enforce" that risk assessment.
"Preventing EPA from protecting public health and our food supply from toxic contamination epitomizes special interest politics at their worst," said PEER science policy director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with the EPA. "If finalized, this ban will leave ill-equipped state agricultural agencies to deal with a rapidly spreading chemical disaster."
Republicans have faced pressure from chemical manufacturing groups to kill PFAS regulations. In 2023, a report from Food & Water Watch found that eight major companies, including Dow and DuPont, spent a combined $55.7 million to lobby against bills to rein in PFAS between 2019 and 2022. The American Chemistry Council, the industry's lobbying arm, spent over $58.7 million during that same period.
The rule banning action on PFAS is part of a broader effort by Republicans to gut environmental regulations. The bill released Monday slashes EPA spending by over $2 billion, nearly 25%.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also weakened standards on PFAS in drinking water, which were adopted during the Biden administration.
"Across the country, farms have had to be condemned and livestock slaughtered due to PFAS pollution from fertilizers," said PEER staff counsel Laura Dumais, who filed a lawsuit against the EPA last year for its slow rollout of PFAS regulations. "Further delay in preventing more of these needless tragedies would be unconscionable."
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'A Terrible Time': Food Banks Brace for Demand Surge Fueled by Devastating Trump SNAP Cuts
"All of this is happening so that billionaires will receive new tax breaks, a cruel juxtaposition as millions of our nation's children will lose access to basic nutrition," said one anti-hunger advocate.
Jul 09, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's enactment of the largest cuts to federal nutrition assistance in the nation's history has severely underresourced charities across the country bracing for a surge in hunger at a time when food insecurity is already at crisis levels.
The Republican budget measure that Trump signed into law last week contains $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the next decade and shifts benefit costs onto states, prompting concerns that some states could decide to withdraw from the critical program altogether.
Analysts estimate that under expanded SNAP work requirements that are set to take effect as soon as this year, more than 5 million people—including at least 800,000 children—would be at risk of losing food aid. The Republican law broadens existing SNAP work requirements to include adults between the ages of 55 and 64 and parents whose children are at least 14 years old.
"It's a terrible time," Catherine D'Amato, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank, told the nonprofit outlet Food Bank News. "These cuts are going to force more food-insecure individuals to turn to already overextended and underfunded hunger relief organizations across the country. We anticipate that there will be a very large impact and a very large cascade."
Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, warned after Republicans pushed the unpopular budget measure through Congress that "at a time when food insecurity is rising nationwide, this legislation threatens to worsen the crisis, taking away access to food and healthcare from millions of people, including children, seniors, veterans and people with disabilities."
The organization estimated that the SNAP cuts contained in the Trump-GOP law "could eliminate the equivalent of nearly 6 to 9 billion meals annually," which is roughly equal to the number of meals that the entire Feeding America network distributed last year.
Thomas Mantz, president of Feeding Tampa Bay, told a local media outlet on Tuesday that his organization lacks "the capacity to make up for these cuts."
"For every one meal Feeding Tampa Bay can provide," said Mantz, "SNAP provides nine."
Feeding Texas CEO Celia Cole issued a similar warning.
"We're doing everything we can to fundraise and dig deep," Cole told Politico, "but there's no amount of philanthropy that can make up for the size of the SNAP cuts."
"The damage of this bill will be staggering. Decades of progress in addressing America's hunger crisis will be reversed."
The latest edition of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Household Food Insecurity report found that more than 47 million people in the U.S. lived in households experiencing food insecurity in 2023, up 13.5 million from 2021.
Advocates say the GOP budget law is set to make the situation far worse.
"The damage of this bill will be staggering," said Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center. "Decades of progress in addressing America's hunger crisis will be reversed."
"All of this is happening so that billionaires will receive new tax breaks, a cruel juxtaposition as millions of our nation's children will lose access to basic nutrition," FitzSimons added. "Many will lose access to the free school meals that fuel their health and learning, and to the Summer EBT Program, which helps close the summer child hunger gap."
Around 40 million people across the U.S. currently receive benefits from SNAP, a critical anti-hunger tool that also boosts farmers and local economies. State leaders and advocates have vocally warned that cost-sharing provisions of the Republican law could force them to enact deep cuts to SNAP benefits or other programs to cope with the budget hit.
"These proposed SNAP cuts would be nothing short of devastating for communities across Colorado, especially in rural areas," said Joël McClurg, executive director of systems for the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger. "Shifting benefit costs and further increasing administrative shares would saddle our state with new obligations that rural and poorer counties simply cannot meet."
"Already operating on shoestring budgets," McClurg said, "many of our counties would be forced to choose between absorbing new crushing costs or slashing critical services—and either path disproportionately punishes the very people who need support the most."
Feeding Texas estimates that the budgetary consequences of the SNAP cost-sharing requirements "will be severe" for the state, forcing it to "absorb an estimated $806 million annually in new SNAP obligations."
"Families already struggling to afford groceries, rent, and healthcare will face even greater hardship," said the group's CEO. "Seniors, veterans, working parents, and children will be pushed further into poverty—not because they've done anything wrong, but because the burden of balancing the budget was placed disproportionately on those already facing the greatest challenges."
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Why Mamdani Is Right About City-Run Grocery Stores
Public grocery stores would not eliminate hunger. But they could function as stabilizing infrastructure in food systems that are currently brittle and uneven.
Jul 01, 2025
Amira Santiago leaves her apartment by 8:45 am most mornings, pushing a folding cart through cracked sidewalks and traffic haze to reach the food pantry on time. She lives in East New York, in a ZIP code where grocery stores have vanished, corner delis double as pharmacies, and fresh food is scarce. What ends up in her cart depends entirely on what’s on the shelf. Usually it’s canned goods, powdered milk, maybe some onions or carrots. Today it’s dry cereal, pasta, and an overripe cantaloupe. Her son Malik skipped breakfast again. There’s nothing left in the fridge she can turn into a meal.
This is not an outlier. It is the consequence of systems that stopped functioning long ago. And it helps explain why a political upset in New York City on June 24, 2025 carries meaning far beyond the five boroughs.
That day, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblymember from Queens, defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor. The result was historic, but more importantly, it made visible a shifting political consensus. Voters rejected the narrative that government must limit its ambitions. They chose a candidate who insists that public institutions should do more than regulate; they should provide. Mamdani's platform spoke directly to people like Amira, whose daily struggles reflect the withdrawal of basic public functions from everyday life.
Mamdani’s proposal reflects the reality that food access cannot be left entirely to private enterprise.
Central to Mamdani’s platform is a proposal to launch a city-run grocery system. The plan is straightforward. Five municipally owned grocery stores, one in each borough, would operate without a profit motive. They would serve areas where the private sector has pulled out or never invested in the first place. The stores would source food wholesale, hire union labor, and reinvest in the neighborhoods they serve. These would not be pilot programs tied to foundation grants or nonprofits operating under precarious contracts. They would be permanent public institutions.
Opponents were quick to ridicule the idea. Billionaire grocer John Catsimatidis warned of industry disruption. Mayor Eric Adams dismissed the proposal outright. Think tanks called it inefficient and unnecessary. The comparison to “Soviet-style” provisioning spread quickly, suggesting central planning and bureaucratic waste. Others raised concerns about the city outcompeting small independent grocers or failing to ensure supply chain efficiency, leading to chronic understocking and quality control issues. But these objections rarely addressed the basic premise: Millions of New Yorkers, like Amira Santiago, already live in neighborhoods where food is hard to find, overpriced, and nutritionally inadequate.
Across the city, more than 3 million residents live in low-access food areas. In Brownsville, Mott Haven, East Flatbush, and parts of Staten Island, residents rely on corner stores and fast-food chains that carry little or no fresh produce. These conditions are not the result of natural market forces. They reflect decades of public and private disinvestment, often concentrated in communities of color. Grocery redlining—the practice by which supermarket chains avoid low-income neighborhoods based on demographic risk factors—has left entire ZIP codes without stable access to food. In the past five years alone, more than 100 full-service grocery stores in New York City have closed, primarily in lower-income neighborhoods.
The result is predictable. People pay more for less. They commute longer distances for basic goods. They ration meals. Children go to school without breakfast. Public health data shows elevated rates of diabetes, hypertension, and diet-related illness in these same neighborhoods. Hunger is not simply a function of poverty. It is shaped by the spatial and logistical architecture of access—or its absence.
Nationally, the picture is no better. As of 2023, 18 million households in the United States reported experiencing food insecurity at one point. Since the pandemic, grocery prices have risen nearly 30%, while SNAP benefits have failed to keep pace. In 2015, 44 U.S. counties had no grocery store at all. On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, families routinely drive 80 miles round-trip for produce. In rural Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Appalachia, the nearest full-service store might be a two-hour round trip. These are not temporary disruptions. They are ongoing crises that have been normalized.
Mamdani’s proposal reflects the reality that food access cannot be left entirely to private enterprise. When profitability becomes the determining factor for whether people can eat, large segments of the country are left behind. In neighborhoods where chains cannot turn reliable margins, stores close. Where customer data indicates low discretionary spending or high SNAP usage, suppliers scale back. The grocery industry, like any other, is designed to maximize return. It is doing what it was built to do. But the outcome is a landscape filled with price inflation, scarcity, and abandonment.
Public grocery stores would not eliminate hunger. But they could function as stabilizing infrastructure in food systems that are currently brittle and uneven. They could provide consistent access to affordable food, especially in neighborhoods where no alternatives exist. They could also serve as community hubs, offering services like SNAP enrollment, health screenings, nutrition classes, or childcare coordination. Their purpose would not be to replace private markets, but to serve where those markets have withdrawn or refused to invest.
Mamdani’s victory sends a message that voters are ready for governments that solve real problems.
The concept is far from unprecedented. Military commissaries already provide subsidized food to service members across the country. State-run liquor stores operate in Pennsylvania, Utah, and New Hampshire, generating revenue while serving a public function. In St. Paul, Kansas, a town of fewer than 600 residents, the only grocery store is city-owned and locally operated. In Alaska, the federal Bypass Mail program subsidizes food shipments to rural villages. These are not theoretical constructs. They are functioning examples of public provisioning.
Of course, the success of any public grocery system will depend on implementation. Poorly managed public programs can erode trust and fuel political backlash. Mamdani’s plan will require serious design: transparent procurement, equitable site selection, accessible transportation connections, competitive wages, and meaningful community oversight. But the risks of a poorly run store must be weighed against the ongoing costs of inaction. In New York, nearly 1 in 4 children live in food-insecure households. The absence of public response is not neutral. It is itself a decision, with measurable health and economic consequences.
What Mamdani’s campaign has done is shift the boundaries of political imagination. Cities like Chicago and Atlanta are now exploring public grocery models. Federal tools such as the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and the Community Economic Development Grant program could support them. Philanthropic institutions, once focused exclusively on nutrition education, are beginning to fund food infrastructure. Local governments have the capacity to act. What they have often lacked is the political permission to do so.
That permission now exists. Mamdani’s victory sends a message that voters are ready for governments that solve real problems. The campaign drew on a deep well of frustration among New Yorkers who have watched their neighborhoods lose not just grocery stores, but clinics, schools, and public transportation. It articulated a basic expectation: that cities should function, that infrastructure should be visible, and that the state should be present where the market disappears.
In the months ahead, other cities will watch closely. If New York moves forward, it may offer a blueprint for how public institutions can reenter the business of meeting essential needs. If it hesitates, the message will still resonate. A candidate won by promising groceries—not charity, not deregulation, but a public store with stocked shelves and affordable prices.
There is a lesson in that. Governance is not only about writing checks or issuing permits. It is also about provision. People trust institutions when those institutions show up with something tangible. In that sense, a bag of groceries might be more than food. It might be the start of a new civic contract.
If Mamdani’s proposal succeeds, it will not be because it was visionary. It will be because it was honest about what people are living through—and offered a way out.
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