A billion school meals costs the same as one B-2 bomber

Plus: Trump’s shocking antisemitic slur

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Today is a day of mourning.

I’m truly devastated by the tragic death of 28-year-old Liverpool striker Diogo Jota, who died this morning in a car crash alongside his younger brother Andre. Diogo was my favorite player — small, smart, scrappy, and clutch, he was a perfect underdog — and more importantly, he was a dedicated father of three very young children. I wrote a bit about him here. RIP Diogo: You’ll never walk alone.

Back home, we took a giant leap toward returning to government as it was on July 3rd, 1776: a monarchy, ruled by an intemperate bozo determined to exploit and leech off of working people to the maximum extent possible.

Side note: Did you hear what Trump said about Jewish people during a speech in Iowa tonight? After months of using accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel to attack his enemies and violate civil liberties, he let the mask slip with this unbelievably blunt slur:

When will Zohran Mamdani apologize for this?! But seriously, the NY Times ran a preposterous hit piece on the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor tonight, providing a known eugenicist anonymity to do so, but did not make any mention of Trump’s comments.

In tonight’s newsletter: We’re talking with somebody who is on the front lines in the fight against the government’s war on working people, to get a better understanding of exactly how the GOP’s disastrous new law will impact those who can least afford it.

And as such, instead of the Midweek Rundown, we’ll do another Weekly Recap for paid subscribers on Saturday — there will be much to discuss, so please consider becoming a member. There’s just so much reporting to do!

Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write.

For the next two days only, you can help keep Progress Report afloat and fighting for 50% off a normal subscription. Just $3.50 a month can make a huge difference.

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From the frontlines: Starving kids to fund secret police

Calling it a “transfer of wealth” is too antiseptic and forgiving: the passage of the GOP’s reconciliation bill represents the greatest organized theft in American history. It will strip 17 million Americans of their health insurance; deprive many millions more of timely medical care; starve children and defund their schools. And it will use the plunder to further enrich oligarchs and fund a massive expansion of a secret police force that terrorizes non-white people and disappears them without recourse.

At any other point in American history, doing so would be abjectly illegal, but the most perilous part of this moment is that the systems meant to keep them in check have failed. The Supreme Court today smoothed the way for this supersized American gestapo to deport people to random war-torn countries with zero due process.

So where do we go from here? First, we understand and catalogue the damage so that there is no ambiguity as to who is responsible for the suffering that is to come.

Starvation will skyrocket; cuts and eligibility tightening to SNAP are expected to throw anywhere between 8 to 11 million Americans, including children, off of the already meager food aid program. Other cuts to the social safety net will result in even more people going hungry and further straining the overworked charities that are bracing for disaster.

This afternoon, I spoke with George Matysik, the executive director of Share Food Program, the largest hunger relief organization in Pennsylvania, about the tsunami that is about to his organization and countless others. Along with cuts to SNAP benefits, low-income Americans are staring down rollbacks of WIC’s fresh fruit and vegetable program, a billion dollars in cuts to a USDA program that allows schools to buy fresh food from local farms, and many other acts of budget cruelty.

“This never had anything to do with wokeness or DEI,” Matysik told me, pulling no punches. “Those are just buzzwords used to divide the working class. This was really about the biggest theft of resources from the working class to go to the rich anytime in modern American history.”

Our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

Off the bat, what are you most worried about?

At a time when need our food bank has gone up about 120% in the last three years, they’re pulling resources away from the communities that need it most. For the first time in our country, we have a trillion dollar budget for defense. It costs $4.1 billion for a single B2 bomber. It costs $4.10 to feed a kid school lunch — literally 1/1,000,000,000th of the cost.

There are parts of this [bill] that we don't even know about because it's been such a flood the zone technique that this administration and Congress are using here, giving Congress 36 hours to actually review the bill before it went up for vote. Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents one of our areas that we serve, he was one of the two Republican no votes, and he was saying they didn't have a chance to read the bill.

From what you’ve seen of the bill, along withe SNAP cuts, which provisions worry you the most?

SNAP benefits are front and center on this, but we’ll see the downstream impacts from Medicaid cuts. We’re seeing the complete elimination of SNAP-Ed, which is nutrition education programming that we do at schools. These guys talk about MAHA, but these programs are bring nutrition education to kids that we serve in school districts. And these are programs that have been completely eliminated, down to zero. The cuts that we have seen have been reckless in their execution and mean spirited in their intent.

The claim is that this impacts only adults, but that’s been manipulated, right?

When we look at SNAP benefits, the majority of families receiving SNAP benefits have kids at home, and you see some of the choices that they made, even around what constitutes an adult or a dependent. They lowered number from 18, so the expectation now is that the kids are going to have to go work at the age of 14.

You mentioned demand at your food pantries has gone up 120% over the past three years. I imagine that rollbacks of benefits since the pandemic has been a culprit. Walk me through how that happened.

There's really a progression you can follow going back 2018 or 2019. We were seeing need increasing in 2018 and 19, and then 2020 happens. And look, it was unprecedented. As food banks, were doing almost true emergency relief, where you couldn't go to the grocery store get food. So through June of 2020, we're just seeing unprecedented demand.

As the supply chain kicks back in and as pandemic relief comes in, especially in late 2020 going into 2021, we saw poverty go down in the biggest decrease in poverty we've seen since LBJ’s administration, when a lot of these programs that are now under attack were created. So we saw a major decrease in folks coming to us. We had this health and economic crisis happening simultaneously, and as we came out of the health crisis, it was like Washington assumed we were out of the economic crisis as well, and pulled back on all of those resources.

So go to January of 2022, we start to see a slight uptick. Month after that, another uptick, and that’s where we began tracking what’s become a 120% increase in need, as the price of food continues to go up. For us at food banks, we rely heavily on donated product as well, and when government cuts happen, oftentimes we'll go to more try to get more donated food.

Now, with all of the reckless tariffs that are being put in — for us in Philadelphia, we happen to have the Port of Philadelphia and the Port of Wilmington, and most of the cargo that goes through those two ports is produce, mostly coming from Central and South America. And so when you put in tariffs willy nilly, what we end up seeing is supply chain disruptions that happen at the ports and reduce our ability to get donated product.

So you’re getting hit from all sides. What do you think you — and other food banks — will do as demand rises?

We don't stop doing the work; we continue to try to find ways to source the food and source the funding. It's not lost on us, though, that that the entire charitable system, all donations to all charities — this includes everything from food banks to major research universities — was about $560 billion in the United States last year. If you look at the four wealthiest billionaires in the country, they have the wealth of more than double the entire charitable system.

There is only so much that we can do. It doesn't mean we don't that we stop doing the work that we can do, but we also recognize that yes, our job is to find and distribute food to the folks that need it, but it's also to continue to advocate for those individuals.

What are people who come to your food banks saying? Are they worried? Do they know that much about the bill or what’s coming?

It’s frustrating — not that he didn't do things that were wrong, but when I'm going on CNN and they're covering the Diddy trial right now, I'm like, what are we doing here? Let's get our priorities right here.

Obviously the awareness needs to be raised on this across the board, because oftentimes, when you talk about these big monolith bills with trillions of dollars in spending, folks don't necessarily see the repercussions of that, and they may not see it for another six months to a year, and then it's not really clear where that came from, right? Cuts have happened, but it doesn't necessarily feel connected to a person.

Credit where credit's due. Starting with George W Bush, and then Trump, when they actually handed out checks to folks, it was something that was very tangible for people — not as effective in terms of actually benefiting people, but it certainly had that tangible result of people saying “oh, I remember getting that check.”

The reality is that by doing these cuts over a number of years, they're able to hide the sins of the greatest transfer of wealth in modern American history,

So when do you anticipate things getting really bad?

They already are. We are already struggling. We are already doing everything we can to stock our shelves and getting more and more requests from our sites on a daily basis. I don't know what the next three-to six-months holds in terms of increase in need, but I know that we're already seeing those increases happening and have been. And so this is only going to make big matters much worse for us and the folks that we serve.

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