Ivanka Trump slammed a government report released on Friday that claimed her billion-dollar Farmers-to-Families Food Box Program wasted taxpayer dollars, delivered rotten food, and was being used for political gain for her father former President Donald Trump.
”It’s unfortunate, yet hardly surprising to see the media work hand in hand with congressional Democrats in a desperate and transparent effort to distract from the staggering incompetence of the current administration,” a spokesperson for Ivanka Trump told Daily Mail.
President Joe Biden ended the program last May.
The 46-page report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, written by Democrats on the panel, charges the program with delivering a “windfall profits to unqualified food distributors who wasted taxpayer dollars.
The panel also found that in the six weeks leading up to the election, vendors employed by the program were “required [to] include in all outgoing boxes a letter signed by President Trump in which he took credit for sending out the food, despite the fact that the boxes were to be distributed through apolitical nonprofit organizations.”
Donald Trump also extended the Food Box program at an official battleground state of North Carolina, which also held the opening of the Republican National Convention.
Then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue spoke at the event but his speech focused more one politics, his “first words were not about USDA, but about the presidents 2016 and 2020 campaigns.”
The $4.5 billion program was started in the spring of 2020 by the former First Daughter, who go it a $1.5 billion cash infusion in early December 2020.
The program delivered 173,699,775 boxes and served nearly four billion meals, according to Trump’s Agriculture Department.
The panel found the vendors for the Food Box program to contribute to “food waste” by failing to provide timely deliveries, delivering food in unsafe packaging, and pressuring recipients to accept more food than they could reasonably distribute or store.
The state of the boxes were a health hazard, delivering “rotten food and wet collapsing boxes,” provided large amounts of commercially packaged meat inappropriate for family consumption, or delivered produce at temperatures that presented a “food safety issue.”
