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Stephanie Sundstrom lives a half-hour out of Bemidji in the woods of northern Minnesota. She’s had it battling with high grocery prices.

“It’s extremely frustrating, like, to the point of exhaustion because it’s been going on for so long,” said Sundstrom. She said she’s thankful for what she has, but worries about others with less. How are they getting by?

“I don’t buy beef. I rarely buy pork. I don’t buy eggs, Sundstrom said. “I have to use the little money I have in my budget to make sure we can eat until the next time I get paid.”

Sundstrom said it’s less expensive to eat junk food — potato chips and all the rest — than nutritional food such as fresh produce.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates food prices will rise 2.2 percent over the course of this year, slightly below last year. If they’re correct, that increase would be way down from just a few years ago. Grocery prices jumped nearly 10 percent in 2022. They were up nearly 6 percent in 2023.

Many consumers think price gouging is driving high grocery prices. But Minnesota Grocers Association President Pat Garofalo said grocery stores, just like their customers, are struggling.

“This was not as a result of your local grocery stores making more money,” Garofalo said. “This was just a result of a significant disruption throughout the entire worldwide supply chain.”

As for egg prices — the source of a lot of recent concern for grocery shoppers — Garofalo said they’re up so much because of the toll avian flu has taken on chicken flocks.

Mastel’s Health Foods in St. Paul sells more supplements than conventional groceries, but they’re also known for their locally produced eggs.

“We have really, really high-quality eggs,” co-owner Laruen Gaffney said recently before showing an empty space in a refrigerated case intended to hold egg cartons.

Like many businesses, Mastel’s limits egg purchases to two dozen per shopper per visit. The store gets its eggs from a small-scale supplier in southern Minnesota. Although Mastel’s is struggling to keep eggs in stock, Gaffney said the amount the store pays for eggs has not increased — so she hasn’t raised what her customers have to pay.

As for other products, other stores — Gaffney, who’s worked in food sales for almost two-and-a-half decades, said she thinks higher prices are here to stay.

“I’ve almost never seen the prices come back down,” Gaffney said.

But Jason Amundsen, co-owner of Northeast Minnesota egg producer Locally Laid, said he believes the egg prices will come down when culled flocks are repopulated.

Amundsen said he has also kept his egg prices steady, but he’s concerned about the Trump administration tariffs — that stand to make chicken feed more expensive — might force him to charge more.

“A lot of feed comes from China, oddly enough, a lot of grains — you’re just monkeying with the markets, I guess, unnecessarily,” explained Amundsen. “It provides even more risk in an already risky environment for us for feed. So that’s not a good thing.”

Tariffs on other food inputs could also fuel grocery price increases.

Back near Bemidji, Stephanie Sundstrom said she’s hoping grocery prices will begin decreasing soon.

“We keep thinking that, ‘OK, at some point they’re going to have to start dialing back on price increases,’ but they’re not. It’s completely draining,” Sundstrom said.

For now, Sundstrom said, she’ll keep trying to stretch her budget to keep food on her table.

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The Internal Revenue Service, better known as the IRS, is cutting more than 6,000 jobs in the middle of a busy tax season.

The cuts are part of a widespread downsizing throughout the federal government being led by Elon Musk's deputies at the informal "Department of Government Efficiency."

IRS employees were notified about the looming job cuts on Thursday. Most of the people affected are probationary workers who had been on the job for a limited time.

Landing right in the middle of tax season, the job cuts are expected to make it harder for taxpayers to get questions answered and for the government to collect all the money it's owed.

The move drew protests from government watchdogs, who worry it will compromise the government's ability to go after wealthy tax cheats.

"I just shook my head sadly," said Susan Long, who founded a data collection group at Syracuse University that tracks IRS audits. "It's just so counterproductive if your goal is to save money and be efficient. This is not what any rational person would do."

For more than a decade, the IRS was starved for resources. Customer service suffered, with 9 out of 10 phone calls going unanswered. Audits of millionaires plunged, while the government scrutinized taxpayers who claimed a credit for the working poor.

That began to change in 2022, when congressional Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided $80 billion over a decade to modernize technology and add staff at the IRS. While Republicans later cut that funding by at least 25 percent, the investment still made a difference. Thousands of additional telephone operators were hired. And new revenue agents began hunting for unpaid taxes. Many of those new hires are now on the chopping block.

Tax experts say any salary savings from the job cuts will be dwarfed by the lost tax revenue that otherwise would have been collected.

"For every $1 that the IRS spends on high-end enforcement activity, the agency collects $12 in uncollected taxes," said Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School who served as an adviser on tax policy during the Biden administration.

She warned that the job cuts carried out in the name of efficiency will backfire.

"What you're doing is making it harder for us to make progress on waste, fraud and abuse, making the system more inequitable, and ultimately costing trillions of dollars in tax revenue which is owed to the government but which is uncollected," Sarin said.

The union representing IRS workers has asked a judge to halt the job cuts.

"Indiscriminate firings of IRS employees around the country are a recipe for economic disaster," said Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. "Much of the IRS workforce is outside of the Washington, D.C., area, which means these layoffs are disrupting their local economies and hurting middle-income families in every state."

The Trump administration defended the layoffs.

"There are more than 100,000 people working to collect taxes, and not all of them are fully occupied," said Kevin Hassett, director of the president's National Economic Council. He also noted that the IRS job cuts represent a small fraction of the overall layoffs engineered by Musk and his DOGE team.

Copyright 2025, NPR

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The Duluth NAACP is hosting its annual Freedom Fund Dinner on Saturday. Donations from the dinner will go to the Duluth NAACP as well as a newer organization called Ignite Empower Transform.

Through its Economic Empowerment Center started last year, the nonprofit’s single employee is working to address economic and racial inequality in Duluth, one community member at a time. In Duluth and across the state, there are racial disparities in income. Black and Native American households in northeast Minnesota made $30,000 less on average than white households in 2022, according to a state analysis of Census data.

Tiffany Fenner, Ignite Empower Transform’s community coordinator and one of the organization’s board members, Amanda Linquist, joined Minnesota Now to share more about the new nonprofit.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

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Derek Copeland was 11 days away from hitting his one-year mark with the U.S. Department of Agriculture when he received his termination letter on Feb. 14.

“You have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the notice said.

Copeland was shocked. His performance appraisal stated that he was “fully successful” in performing the critical functions of his job as a training specialist at the National Detector Dog Training Center in Newnan, Ga.

Moreover, while he’d been at the USDA less than a year, he’d spent his career working with dogs. Copeland had recently retired from two decades of service in the Air Force, most of that time in canine units, running kennels and training dogs to sniff out narcotics and explosives, among other tasks.

In Georgia, his job was to train dogs and their handlers to find agricultural products that aren’t supposed to come into the U.S., a critical layer of protection for the U.S. food system.

“I gave blood, sweat and tears to this country for 20 years to continue service to the federal government, doing what I was trained to do by them,” he says. “I kind of feel like I was just thrown out like a piece of trash.”

Copeland is part of a slew of federal employees who’ve been fired in recent days. Now, many are vowing to fight back, and attorneys exploring legal action say they may have a case.

A mass firing of probationary employees

Since last week, the Trump administration has fired more than 10,000 federal employees, including at the National Institutes of Health, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Energy and elsewhere. Still more are getting termination letters this week.

It’s part of President Trump’s broader plan, executed in large part by his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, to dramatically downsize the federal workforce from its current 2.3 million employees, eliminate waste and save American taxpayers money.

A majority of those fired were still considered probationary, a status that lasts one to three years, depending on the position. Federal employees gain civil service job protections only once their probationary period is up.

Already, the Alden Law Group and Democracy Forward, a nonprofit organization that’s a frequent foil of the Trump administration, have filed a classwide complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, asking it to intervene in the mass firings of probationary employees.

Attorneys elsewhere say the workers may have other pathways to contest their dismissals, based on the language in the termination letters.

“The suggestion that somehow their skills or their abilities or knowledge is not a fit, that’s probably defamatory — and definitely if there’s a statement that their performance was inadequate,” says David Branch, an employment attorney in Washington, D.C., who has sued federal agencies on behalf of federal workers for years.

“If you can prove that this statement is false,” he says, “you probably have a claim for infringement upon your good name and reputation under the Fifth Amendment.”

Research to secure America’s food supply

In Logan, Utah, Michelle Kirchner was also working to protect the country’s food system until she was fired on Feb. 14, the same day as Copeland.

A postdoctoral researcher with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, Kirchner had been hired last spring to run a project helping alfalfa growers in Western states control pests while protecting pollinating bees. Alfalfa crops support the U.S. dairy industry.

Kirchner spent last summer in eastern Washington state, where temperatures at times topped 100 degrees.

“There’s no shade because it’s just alfalfa as far as the eye can see, and the sun just beats down on you all day, and there are just bugs everywhere,” she says.

And she loved it.

Kirchner spent her days sampling fields for pests and pollinators and talking with growers about their operations and their priorities for research. Her work was recognized with a performance award.

Then in January, she and a colleague won a $25,000 grant through the Alfalfa Pollinator Research Initiative to further their study into protecting pollinators. Their proposal was chosen by the growers themselves.

“They were very excited about it. I had many of them tell me that personally,” she says.

Over 10 months, Kirchner has submitted three peer-reviewed manuscripts for publication. Now, she fears the research is “dead in the water.”

“My supervisor looked at me and said, ‘We won’t be able to continue this without you,’” she says.

The USDA’s Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory was founded in the late 1940s. Now, key members of the lab’s research team are gone. Kirchner is struggling to make sense of the dismantling.

“The Agricultural Research Service part of the USDA is usually pretty buffered from a lot of the more partisan political actions, just because it’s people’s food,” she says. “You shouldn’t mess with people’s food.”

Not a “surgical approach”

Copeland is equally confounded by the termination of probationary employees at the dog training center in Georgia.

“It makes absolutely zero sense,” he says.

Copeland says the center had been looking to hire more training specialists to fulfill a growing demand from U.S. Customs and Border Protection for dogs and handlers.

The law enforcement agency uses dogs at airport terminals and other ports of entry, screening bags, passengers, vehicles and cargo warehouses for products that pose a danger to America’s crops.

“There’s so, so many crazy different diseases that can really mess up our food system,” Copeland says.

He’s incensed at talk he has heard on television that the Trump administration is taking a “surgical approach” to firings while also weeding out lazy federal employees who don’t want to return to the office.

“We were in an office actually doing the work that secures and protects this nation’s borders, which supposedly is a big priority,” says Copeland. “It’s all bull****.”

Probationary employees are often “the most industrious”

In his more than three decades practicing employment law, Branch has never seen a purge like what has unfolded over the past week. The mass firing of newer employees doesn’t make much sense to him.

“Probationary employees are usually … the most industrious employees there,” he says. “These folks know that they have a year to prove themselves, some folks two years, and if they don’t, they can be terminated for any reason.”

The challenge, he says, will be convincing a federal judge that the termination letters are in fact defamatory.

Branch is urging federal employees who believe they were illegally fired to collect any feedback or comments they received that refute the government’s claim that their performance was somehow poor or inadequate.

“They can”t tarnish your reputation. They can’t infringe upon your liberty interest. You have a liberty interest in your name, in your reputation,” he says. “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law.”

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From soft drinks and beer to aerosols and shelf-stable soups, many everyday grocery items sold in steel and aluminum cans could be in store for a price hike.

President Trump announced this month that he planned to impose a 25 percent tariff on all imported steel and aluminum in a bid to boost American producers by cracking down on foreign competition.

But food and beverage industry experts warn that driving up the cost of imported steel and aluminum could make it more expensive to manufacture cans in the U.S. — a price increase that will ultimately be passed on to consumers.

Ken Henricks, owner and president of Alter Brewing Co. in suburban Chicago, said the increasing cost of cans could hurt the craft beer sector at a time of rising inflation and growing competition from large beer companies.

“We just don’t have any more room to give without raising pricing. And if we raise price, I know that with people’s buying power being less today, our volumes will decrease,” he said. “We’re really at a tough spot.”

The tariffs on steel and aluminum aren’t new. In fact, it was Trump who implemented them during his first term in office. At the time, Trump put only a 10 percent tariff on aluminum and permitted some far-reaching exemptions to the steel tariffs, which the Biden administration kept in place. Now, Trump says, those exemptions are being removed and the aluminum tariff is being increased to 25 percent as of March 12.

The policy shift comes as consumers still face high costs for a range of products. Inflation rose again in January, with consumer prices increasing 3 percent year over year.

U.S. can production relies on foreign steel and aluminum

Steel and aluminum have a slew of uses across multiple industries, but the food and beverage business in the U.S. relies on both materials for cans.

The U.S. produces 135 billion metal cans each year, according to industry data provided by the Can Manufacturers Institute. That includes roughly 115 billion aluminum beverage cans and 20 billion steel cans for food and other products.

American can manufacturers source raw materials from both the U.S. and abroad. While imports account for only about 10 percent of the aluminum used by American can-makers, some 70 percent of the tin mill steel used to make steel food cans in the U.S. comes from foreign sources, which means makers of steel cans could see their prices rise more sharply.

Domestic production of steel and aluminum lags

If foreign steel becomes too costly, it will be hard for American producers to pick up the slack, according to Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain resiliency at the Consumer Brands Association, a trade group for consumer-packaged goods.

“The industry sources the majority of ingredients and inputs from U.S. sources, however, specialty products like tin mill steel can only be sourced from the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries due to lack of domestic supply,” he said in a statement.

After Trump imposed tariffs on steel in 2018, nine American tin mill steel producers shut down, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. Only three production lines remain open in the U.S. today, the group said.

Domestic aluminum producers could struggle to ramp up production too.

Charles Johnson, president and CEO of the Aluminum Association, praised Trump’s efforts to uplift the industry, while adding in a statement, “Today, there is not enough smelting capacity in the United States to supply the growing aluminum industry with the input materials it needs.”

Businesses wait to see how they’ll be impacted

Kat Kavner Woolf, co-founder and CEO of Heyday Canning Co., is hopeful that can prices won’t skyrocket. Her small business, launched at the end of 2022, uses steel cans for its soups and beans.

“The biggest thing for us right now is just the not-knowing,” Woolf said. “And because we are small, we don't have a direct relationship with these suppliers that are pretty big. We don’t have anyone that we can just pick up the phone and call and be like, ‘Where is your steel coming from?’”

Henricks, of Alter Brewing, said he had recently been hoping to negotiate a lower price with his aluminum can supplier due to the growing volume of his order. But after Trump announced the tariffs, Henricks went into the meeting with the goal of simply holding his can costs stable moving forward. “I couldn’t even get a commitment there,” he said.

Breweries such as Alter could see prices rise for other materials they use as well. The Brewers Association, which represents more than 9,500 small and independent brewers, said in a statement that tariffs could also increase the costs of “fermenters, steel tanks, brewhouses, and building materials, while a 25 percent tariff on aluminum, the preferred packing method for many craft brewers, would further increase the cost of cans for small producers.”

Costlier cans could mean higher prices and different packaging

Food and beverage industry experts warn that it’s American shoppers who will end up paying for the tariffs at the cash register if steel and aluminum can prices rise.

Robert Budway, president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, said the tariffs will “create an inflationary impact on the consumer, who relies heavily on canned foods to meet their everyday needs of feeding their family nutritious, affordable meals.” Madrecki, with the Consumer Brands Association, said the “impact of tariffs on steel and aluminum will be felt by [consumer packaged goods] manufacturers and consumers at the grocery store.”

In a recent earnings call, Coca-Cola’s chairman and CEO, James Quincey, said the impact of tariffs wouldn’t be “insignificant, but it’s not going to radically change a multibillion-dollar U.S. business.”

In 2018, Coca-Cola and Boston Beer, the maker of Samuel Adams, said they were increasing prices after tariffs were announced, USA Today reported.

Yet on the recent call, Quincey also suggested that if aluminum cans became more expensive, the company could package more of its drinks in plastic bottles.

An estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in global waterways each year, the vast majority of which is single-use plastics, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Copyright 2025, NPR

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On a recent snowy afternoon, Gale Livingstone, a first generation farmer, is working in the propagation greenhouse at Deep Roots Farm, which she owns and operates. Four volunteers are putting collard greens, bok choy, kale and scallion seeds in seed starting trays — just a few of the vegetables Livingstone is growing this spring.

“It’s a pretty tedious, lengthy process,” she says.

Trained as an accountant, Livingstone turned to farming about 15 years ago to grow her own food. She started with five-gallon buckets, pierced holes at the bottom and filled them with soil and seeds.

She leased land until 2020, when she was able to buy it with the help of government funding.

Livingstone is one of about a million American farmers who benefits from financial assistance provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) each year. But she says she isn't sure what the future holds.

One week after President Trump was inaugurated, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo freezing spending on federal loans and grants. Funding for a number of programs that support small farmers like Livingstone was halted. Although that memo was rescinded shortly after it was issued and attorneys general from across the nation filed suit against the federal government, farmers are still feeling the squeeze. 

The Trump administration has also effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, a move that is having a ripple effect on farmers who export their products for food aid. Millions of dollars in grain have been sitting unused in Kansas, where farmers export sorghum, wheat, rice and lentils.

Dãnia Davy, an attorney and founder of Land and Liberation, a consultancy firm that specializes in Black farming and land justice issues, says the nation's Black farmers, who historically have earned less and owned smaller plots of land, feel these financial strains most acutely.

For years, Livingstone considered herself a success story in Black farming. She credits USDA grants with her ability to own her land, rather than rent it as she used to, and make farming her primary livelihood.

Black farmers have historically had less access to loans and other resources in the U.S. The USDA in a 2021 memo vowed to end discrimination against Black farmers.

Livingstone, a Maryland native, says the system is far from perfect.

"The USDA loan process is inefficient," she says, noting that she submitted her loan application to purchase her land within two weeks.

"In addition to being a woman farmer, a minority, socially disadvantaged, they had all these special categories that qualified me to borrow, but it took about nine months to complete the acquisition," she says.

The loan included funds to build a home, but farming involves a lot of unexpected expenses and losses, she says.

"I don't have a home. I am currently living in an RV on the property," she says.

In the next month she's adding goats on the farm. She hopes to bring in pigs and sheep next. Livingstone has applied for more USDA grants from the Climate-Smart Commodities Project, which allocates $3 billion for projects across the U.S., including crop rotation and less water-intensive irrigation techniques. She hopes to use the funds for fencing, among other things, she says, but those grants are currently frozen.

A federal judge's order issued on Feb. 10 noted that the Trump administration had  continued its funding freeze despite a temporary restraining order issued late last month.

In a statement to NPR, A USDA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing programs that have been on hold and that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins expects to make determinations as quickly as possible. Rollins "understands that farmers, ranchers and loggers have made decisions based on these funding opportunities, and that some have been waiting on payments during this government-wide review," the spokesperson said, adding the agency expects to share more information this week.

For now, Livingstone is taking a cautious approach.

"I'm not starting anything," she says, "I can still operate my business without any of those projects," she says.

"Just as I was feeling good about how things are going," she says, "this freeze is chilling."

Davy says part of the challenge with government grant awards is that they often require the farmer to pay for work out of pocket and file for federal reimbursement later.

"I'm usually like the Suzy Sunshine," says Davy, "But I cannot gloss over the reality that we are in a very dark moment in America's history."

Uncertainty isn't anything new for Black farmers

"I've been fighting the government since 1983," says John Boyd Jr., a fourth-generation Black farmer.

He and his wife, Kara, are two of four plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit in federal court filed on behalf of Black farmers and other farmers of color in 2022. It alleges that the government broke its promise to provide billions of dollars in debt relief to Black farmers.

Earlier this month, the Boyds arrived at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., where a group of about 25 fellow farmers from North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and other states had gathered in the lobby. A three-panel judge was set to hear an oral argument on an appeal.

"I feel anxious today," says Boyd, who is president of the National Black Farmers Association. He's tall, dressed mostly in black, including a cowboy hat and brown boots.

"A broken promise"

President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) signed in 2021, set aside $5 billion in debt relief and other efforts to help socially disadvantaged farmers, like Boyd. It was part of an effort to help USDA makeup for a history of discrimination.

But after white farmers filed lawsuits, the program was repealed and lawmakers passed a second race-neutral program through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Billions of dollars in relief would now go to any farmer identified as "economically distressed," including some white farmers.

"It's a broken promise," Boyd says, referring to the Biden administration's earlier plans to provide debt relief to Black farmers.

He owns and runs Boyd Farms, about 2,000 acres in Bakersville, Va., where he grows soybeans, corn and wheat, and raises cattle.

"Total debt forgiveness would give me the opportunity to plan the next steps on what to do with my land," Boyd says. "Securing loans is a full-time job."

The father of four says the land is his legacy. He wants it to stay in the family, "but my children have watched my struggles," he says, "and they have prepared to make a different living."

"Every day I think about what's going to happen with my land and part of me hurts and I have an emptiness inside," says 59-year old Boyd. "There is a part of me that's deeply saddened that I haven't identified what's next for my land."

"It's not over today"

Back in Washington, D.C., plaintiffs and their supporters in the class-action suit gather in a hallway after oral arguments conclude.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," Ben Crump, a high-profile civil rights attorney, tells farmers. He says the three-judge panel seemed receptive.

"They were listening, asking questions, and we are going to continue to fight to overcome this 21st century version of 40 acres and a mule," he says, referring to the promise the federal government made to give land to freed slaves after the Civil War.

"We have a good chance here. It's not over today," John Boyd says.

Boyd leads the group in prayer.

"Father God, we come to the court, we come in faith, we come in your name. Amen."

A ruling is expected in a few weeks. For now, these farmers remain hopeful.

Copyright 2025, NPR

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