Meals on Wheels is a membership organization, with 5,000 community-based programs that provide services to seniors. Though the membership organization gets a small amount of federal funding ($248,000 in 2015, about 3 percent of its operating budget), the broader network that actually provides services is a diffuse group of organizations with varied sources of funding.
Together, they spend $1.46 billion, 35 percent of which comes from one source of federal funding: the Older Americans Act nutrition program administered by the Health and Human Services Department. The White House intended to leave the 2018 funding at the same levels as 2017, and when the budget was being built, it used the figures from the continuing resolution on which the government was running, the OMB official said.
