NEW YORK (Reuters) - Meals on Wheels America, the umbrella organization for 5,000 providers of home-delivered meals for seniors, said on Saturday that online donations have surged since the White House released a proposed budget that could lead to a big drop in its funding. 
 
 FILE PHOTO -- Seniors share a laugh while finishing up their meals in Sun City, Arizona, January 4, 2013. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo 
 
 The organization, which provides advocacy services for the national network, received about $50,000 on Thursday after the budget blueprint was announced, compared with $1,000 on a typical day. 
 
 President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal includes a 17.9 percent cut for fiscal 2018 in funds for the Department of Health and Human Services, which provides most of the government support for Meals on Wheels, the organization said. 
 
 The budget proposal did not say how the cut would affect the Administration for Community Living, the HHS agency that funds nutrition programs for the elderly, Meals on Wheels spokeswoman Jenny Bertolette said. 
 
 Meals on Wheels said on its website that it is difficult to imagine a scenario under which the next federal budget would not have an impact on its services. 
 
 “While Meals on Wheels America and local Meals on Wheels programs are seeing an uptick in giving, it does not replace federal funding,” Bertolette told Reuters in an email. 
 
 The White House referred questions about the HHS budget to the department. 
 
 An HHS representative referred to a statement from Secretary Tom Price released earlier this week. “HHS is dedicated to fulfilling our department’s mission to improve the health and well-being of the American people. This budget supports that mission and will help ensure we are delivering critical services to our fellow citizens,” the statement said. 
 
 Trump’s budget proposal calls for a sharp increase in military spending and a like reduction in most discretionary non-defense programs, prompting a wave of concern from Democrats and some of the president’s fellow Republicans. 
 
 Bertolette said the national Meals on Wheels association did not know whether its local members have seen a similar jump in donations. 
 
 One in six seniors “struggles with hunger,” according to the organization, which provides its services free of charge for those who cannot afford to pay. 
 
 Seniors who have fresh meals delivered daily show greater improvement in health and well-being than those who get frozen meals delivered once a week or no meals at all, the organization said, citing research from Brown University and funded by AARP Inc. 
 
 According to the website, Meals on Wheels America hosts a resource center on nutrition with the help of federal funding. ||||| Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, March 16, responded to questions about Meals on Wheels and after-school programs. (Reuters) 
 
 Meals on Wheels, the popular nationwide program that provides hot meals to needy seniors, has become a rallying point for critics of President Trump’s proposed budget, which slashes spending on social initiatives to beef up military spending. 
 
 But on Sunday, the Trump administration answered an emphatic "no" to the question of whether the budget would gut Meals on Wheels. 
 
 Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director, said that the funding source the administration seeks to eliminate — the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grants — accounts for just 3 percent of Meals on Wheels’ overall funding. 
 
 “Some of the stories are just either grossly wrong or nearly grossly wrong, all the stories about how we cut Meals on Wheels,” Mulvaney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 
 
 OMB spokesman John Czwartacki said later Sunday that Mulvaney meant to say that Meals on Wheels' national headquarters gets 3 percent of its funding from the government and that he was not referring to the amount of funding that comes from community development block grants. It is unclear what percentage of the program's funding comes from HUD, but it is a relatively small amount. 
 
 Meals on Wheels is not a federal program, nor do its local groups directly receive federal funding. Rather, the groups run on a mix of local, state and federal money, as well as private donations and the work contributions of volunteers, which vary depending on the funding structure of each affiliate. 
 
 Most federal money that ends up supporting Meals on Wheels comes from a separate program run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the overall HHS budget by 17.9 percent, but has not yet detailed where those cuts would fall and whether they would impact the Administration for Community Living, which funds nutrition programs for the elderly, as The Washington Post's Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler explained. A top official at Meals on Wheels told Kessler that the organization anticipates the cuts will impact its funding. 
 
 [For the Record: White House budget director did not say Meals on Wheels did not show results] 
 
 Democrats sought Sunday to shame the Trump administration for a budget that takes away resources for programs like Meals on Wheels. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the Trump budget would “take money from Meals on Wheels and give it to the Defense Department.” 
 
 “We take an oath to protect and defend our country, but our strength is measured in more ways than just taking money for the health, education and well-being of the American people, which is a source of our strength,” Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So compassionate acts of mercy? I don’t know what faith that is.” 
 
 Mulvaney defended the administration’s budget from criticism that its cuts to social programs would be painful for millions of working-class voters in rural states like West Virginia, where voters went heavily for Trump in last fall’s election. 
 
 “The president knows who his voters are,” Mulvaney said, arguing that the budget demonstrates “compassion.” 
 
 Noting that Trump supporters are sensitive to how their tax dollars are spent, he added, “Could I, as a budget director, look at the coal miner in West Virginia and say, ‘I want you, please, to give some of your money to the federal government so that I can give it to the National Endowment for the Arts?’ And I just think we finally got to the point in the administration where we couldn’t do that.” 
 
 This article has been updated. ||||| CLOSE The impact of Donald Trump's budget on Meals on Wheels is unclear and varies from place to place. USA TODAY 
 
 Jack Zimmer delivers a meal to Martha Scott in 2014 as a volunteer for the Community Emergency Assistance Program (CEAP) in Brooklyn Center, Minn. (Photo: Todd A. Buchanan, Special to USA TODAY) 
 
 WASHINGTON — President Trump's first budget proposal to Congress last week specifically identified steep cuts to hundreds of domestic programs, but Meals on Wheels wasn't one of them. 
 
 The popular program — which mainly uses volunteer drivers to provide hot meals to older Americans across the country — doesn't directly receive federal funding. As Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters Thursday, "Meals on Wheels is not a federal program." 
 
 Nevertheless, Meals on Wheels quickly became the poster child for the impact of Trump's budget cuts. Even before the budget's release, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., tweeted that Trump had called for the "elimination" of Meals on Wheels, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus quickly dubbed it the "Starvation Budget." 
 
 The truth: Trump's budget calls for the elimination of one program that some of the nation's 5,000 Meals on Wheels groups rely on: Community development block grants, a $3 billion program that started in the Ford administration to give states and cities more flexibility in how they combat poverty. 
 
 But Trump's proposal — known as the "skinny budget" because it's the first, vague outline of a more formal submission to come — is largely silent about the program that provides the vast majority of federal funding for senior services. 
 
 "The budget will adversely impact older adults," said Sandy Markwood, CEO of the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. "We just don’t know how much." 
 
 Here's why. The majority of Meals on Wheels programs get most of their federal funding through the Administration for Community Living, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services that serves the elderly and disabled. That agency has a $227 million line-item for "home-delivered nutrition services." 
 
 Those programs are authorized though the Older Americans Act, a law so popular that its renewal passed Congress last year without any recorded opposition. And while Trump didn't single out that specific program, Health and Human Services will receive a 16% across-the-board cut. 
 
 "We're very concerned. We’re concerned about the cuts that were explicit in the skinny budget, but we’re also concerned about what we see as the handwriting on the wall with the percentage cuts to HHS," Markwood said. "Some of these details we won't know for a while." 
 
 Meals on Wheels America, a national group that represents 5,000 programs throughout the country, said it was bombarded with questions about the budget and could not respond to press inquiries. 
 
 The impact is likely to vary from place to place. Every Meals on Wheels affiliate gets money from a different mix of state, local and federal government funds, along with individual donations and philanthropic organizations. 
 
 "We like to say that when you've seen one Meals on Wheels program, you've seen one Meals on Wheels program," said Sandra Noe, the executive director of Meals on Wheels of Northwest Indiana. Like many programs, it gets funding from an area agency on aging through the Older Americans Act. 
 
 The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the community development block grant program that Trump targeted for elimination, couldn't say how much of that money ultimately flows to Meals on Wheels. It's certainly a small fraction: Social services are capped by law at 15% of the block grants, and the most recent HUD figures show all senior services receive about $33 million. 
 
 "We've spent $150 billion on those programs since the 1970s," Mulvaney said, referring to the block grants. And since the federal government started to apply more performance measurements to federal programs in the Bush administration those block grants have been "just not showing any results," he said. 
 
 "We can't do that anymore. We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good. And great, Meals on Wheels sounds great. Again, that's a state decision to fund that particular portion — 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." 
 
 But scientific studies have found Meals on Wheels programs are effective in improving nutrition among the elderly. And they're cost effective, because keeping older adults in their homes is less expensive than nursing-home care. 
 
 "It's not just a meal, but a wellness check," Noe said. "That volunteer, that driver is able to tune into whether that person's health is failing, or if they’ve fallen or can't get out of their chair. And we’re delivering relief from isolation, and we’re delivering relief to their family as well." 
 
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– Fears that the Meals on Wheels program would be gutted under President Trump's first budget has translated into a significant boost in donations to the group. The national umbrella organization said it received $50,000 in online donations Thursday after Trump released his prelminary budget, reports Reuters. The typical daily total? More like $1,000. As USA Today and the Washington Post explain, however, it's a little early to suggest that the program will be decimated by the White House. For one thing, Meals on Wheels is not a federal program and does not receive money directly from the federal government. Instead, it ends up with a mixture of federal, state, and city funds. While Trump has proposed an overall 17.9% cut for the Department of Health and Human Services, the specific impact on the group is unclear. “Some of the stories are just either grossly wrong or nearly grossly wrong, all the stories about how we cut Meals on Wheels,” White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Still, Trump did propose elminating HUD's community development block grants, from which Meals on Wheels gets about 3% of its funding. And the program would almost certainly feel the pinch if the HHS cuts hold up, given that it gets most of its federal money through one of its agencies, the Administration for Community Living. It's just too early to tell how bad it would be. In the meantime, a spokeswoman for the group says that while the extra donations are welcome, they probably wouldn't cover the shortfall. "While Meals on Wheels America and local Meals on Wheels programs are seeing an uptick in giving, it does not replace federal funding."