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The food bank that serves the Washington area bought as much food in April as it would normally buy over three years as it scrambled to respond to an unprecedented level of need. The economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, which has now left at least 20 million Americans unemployed, has pushed the nation’s network of food banks to the brink. Food pantries and other nonprofits are still seeing lines of cars with families waiting for hours to pick up food. “There’s only so much we can do,” said Radha Muthiah, president and CEO of the Capital Area Food Bank. “The federal government has an incredibly important role to play here.” (Evich, 6/8)

Cotton farmers were paid 33 times as much in federal subsidies in 2019 as the income they actually lost to trade disruptions, one study showed. Farmers in Georgia, the home state of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, were paid more in federal aid per acre than anywhere else in the nation, another found. Some farms collected millions of dollars in payments despite a limit of $250,000 per farmer. The Trump administration’s $28 billion effort in 2018 and 2019 to compensate farmers for losses from its trade wars has been criticized as excessive, devised on the fly and tilted toward states politically important to Republicans. (LaFraniere, 6/7)