Trump wants to cut funding to Meals on Wheels - now donations to the service have increased by 5,000 per cent

Anyone could have seen it coming a mile off - Donald Trump’s first budget outline was never going to be particularly popular.

It turns out Trump wants to slash all funding for Meals on Wheels, the service that delivers meals to elderly people living alone.

Around 34 per cent of its funding comes from the government.

Yahoo reports that Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget director, said during a press briefing:

We can’t spend money on programmes just because they sound good. Meals on Wheels sounds great … but to take the federal money and give it to the states and say, look, we want to give you money for programs that don’t work — I can’t defend that anymore. We’re going to spend money, we’re going to spend a lot of money, but we’re not going to spend it on programmes that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.

But an analysis of eight studies found that six of them concluded that the service “significantly” improved diet quality and nutrition, as well as offering more opportunities for recipients to socialise, and have a higher quality of life.

And:

But the silver lining: the service received 50 times more donations than usual in one single day (eg, an increase of 5,000 per cent), as well as a flood of people wanting to volunteer, according to Yahoo.

Here's one recipient responding to the news:

People also took to Twitter to show their support:

They also pointed out the irony of a very rich man cutting the funding for a service that helps poor people eat.

A similar thing happened late last year, when donations to Planned Parenthood flooded in after Mike Pence threatened that service.