Meals On Wheels waiting lists grow as Texas braces for federal funding cuts

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Each month, Meals on Wheels Central Texas CEO Henry Van de Putte faces a growing number of seniors looking to get on the food delivery schedule offered by his organization.

Last month, the nonprofit group brought on 121 more Austin-area seniors to join the more than 4,000 clients his group serves. And as of this week, there’s another 171 who are waiting to be added.

To do that, Van de Putte and executives of the more than 70 Meals on Wheels organizations in Texas are moving more slowly on applications, having to weigh each new applicant more carefully as they wait for word from Washington as to how much of a hit their already battered budgets have taken.

“We don't want to spend dollars that we don't know are coming,” Van de Putte said. “The worst thing we can do is put someone on service and then be discontinued later on down the line.”

What few people realize is that while Meals on Wheels relies on individual contributions and major donors, its programming has also been funded in part through the Older Americans Act, part of the “Great Society” initiatives signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The act created funding for programs that help seniors remain healthy and independent.

For every $12 meal delivered by MOW Central Texas, the group is reimbursed $6.49 by the federal government. While each Meals on Wheels is a separate entity with different budgets, many have a similar formula. As Van de Putte and other Meals on Wheels groups tell it, every dollar spent keeping low-income seniors fed and checked on by volunteers and intake personnel saves taxpayers millions of dollars in emergency room visits.

“One person on our service, on the meal service, might cost just under $2,000 a year,” he said. “It prevents social isolation. It prevents premature institutionalization and hospital stays, all of which would hit taxpayers, federal, all those things at a higher rate.”

One hospital stay on average for a fall can cost $75,000, he said.

But like many nonprofits and public health agencies, Van de Putte is keeping one eye fixed intently on the organization’s daily and weekly expenditures and another on alerts from his state and national association on the latest news of the nation’s spending bill which has yet to be approved by the Senate.

Word has spread that the best Meals on Wheels in Austin can hope for is flat federal funding which would mean a 10% cut to the budget. But if rumored cuts go deeper, say 25-30%, the organization many seniors in cities and towns across the state count on, will have to make harder decisions on who to serve or what other services — transportation, personal attendants and maybe even meals served to homes and in senior centers — to scale back.

“It’s a bit of a rollercoaster to tell you the truth,” said Keith Harrison, vice president of marketing and communication for Meals on Wheels of Tarrant County. “Just as you overcome one hill, all of a sudden then something else comes at you.”

Last August, MOW Tarrant County faced a $1.5 million cut in federal funding. They adjusted their budget for this year accordingly, but then by spring, the organization received less than 24 hours notice that they would no longer be reimbursed for meals, starting the following day.

“That would have had a very large impact,” Harrison said.

Eventually the cuts failed to materialize but even as Harrison and the Fort Worth area team catches its breath, they’re watching and waiting for word from Washington on whether more cuts will be coming.

“It has been a very tough year for us financially,” Harrison said. “Community donations are down across the board.”

Unease about the current economic climate has thrown cold water on charitable giving. “You see a lot of uncertainty in the community,” Harrison said. “When they see that (the U.S. economy is) declining, they stop donating to charitable organizations.”

Funding sources, history

Meals on Wheels came to the United States in the 1950s from the United Kingdom. It received a boost in consistent funding from the Older Americans Act of 1965.

According to Meals on Wheels Texas, more than 100,000 residents across the state now receive meals daily from the dozens of local MOW operations. In addition, local MOWs provide congregate meals at senior centers. And some of them provide home repairs for seniors, transportation and personal attendant services, as well as delivering pet food and vet care.

Each of the more than 70 local operations in Texas use a variety of funding sources: individual donations, major donors and city and county money. But the federal nutrition money — about $120 million in the current budget cycle — for Texas seniors comes from a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It’s sent first to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which then distributes it to the 28 Area Agencies on Aging that reimburse locals based on their population and size of operation.

In addition, there is some additional state money that comes to local MOWs from the Texas Department of Agriculture through the Texans Feeding Texans grant program.

Could some efficiencies be built into the distribution of this funding to save taxpayer dollars? Sure, MOW executives say. But right now, Texas’ over-65 population is the fastest growing population and is expected to double from 3.9 million in 2020 to 8.3 million by 2050. Texas ranks 46th in the nation when it comes to its Older Americans Act spending, about $25 per person age 60 and older.

Federal funding has been relatively flat before and after the pandemic. No longer can MOWs tap into unspent federal aging dollars from the previous year as they were able to before the pandemic.

Estrellita Doolin, who was installed as CEO of Meals on Wheels Waco in April, compared managing a tight budget while bracing for cuts day to day to drinking out of a firehose. Right now there are 400 people in the three-county area her group serves — Falls, Hill and McLennan — on the meal delivery waiting list. And that’s in addition to the 400-500 meals the Waco MOW delivers each day in that tri-county area.

For now, they’ll have to wait until clarity from Washington about future funding reveals itself.

“We just can’t do it because we don’t have the funding,” she said. Meanwhile, she and her staff notice that the federal reimbursement checks her group receives are taking far longer to arrive.

“It used to be two days,” she said. But now it’s a week or more. “It’s creating cash flow issues for us and I’m sure everyone else.”

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