After months of deliberation, it appears that Congressional lawmakers may finally be nearing a deal that would provide a very much-needed boost in funding to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, better known as WIC, which served approximately 6.26 million people a month in 2022.
However, there’s a pretty big catch.
In addition to providing an undisclosed amount of extra funding to WIC — whose leadership has said the program needs an additional $1 billion to serve all those who will seek its services this year — three sources familiar with the talks indicate that the possible deal involves adding what’s known as the SNAP-choice pilot program to the Ag-FDA spending bill, as first reported by Politico’s Meredith Lee Hill.
Despite the name, the SNAP-choice program would actually restrict what kinds of foods and drinks participants could purchase using their benefits. This addition to SNAP would fly in the face of decades of bipartisan support for maintaining beneficiaries’ autonomy, as well as bipartisan precedent for rejecting proposals for similar programs.
For instance, in 2003, then-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty applied for a waiver from President Bush’s Department of Agriculture, asking that Minnesota be allowed to determine which foods and beverages were eligible for SNAP benefit. This waiver was rejected. Seven years later, in 2010, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg applied for a similar waiver from the Obama administration, eventually followed by Maine’s Governor Paul LePage under the Trump administration. Both these waivers were also rejected.
The reason these waivers have been overwhelmingly rejected in the past is largely twofold. Policymakers and government workers have raised flags through the decades over how potentially taxing administering state-specific programs would be in terms of both time and resources, especially in the many states where there is already a substantial backlog in fulfilling benefits. Additionally, grocers and food producers have voiced similar concerns.
“Restricting eligible items to those approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will quickly drive-up food costs and strangle the program with needless red tape with no meaningful public health outcome to show in return,” the National Grocers Association wrote in a letter Tuesday to congressional leaders.
The letter, which was signed by nearly 2,500 businesses and trade groups, continued: “The government will need to categorize more than 600,000 products and update the list each year with thousands more products. Grocery store cashiers will become the food police, telling parents what they can and cannot feed their families.”
The larger concern for food security advocates, however, is that programs like SNAP-choice reinforce damaging long-held stereotypes about the people who need federal nutrition benefits — that they are lazy, uneducated or purposely make poor decisions regarding their health — which have been standard fare since the Reagan-era when he spun campaign trail stories about "food stamp queens" on welfare buying steaks and lobster with taxpayer dollars.
This is one of the main reasons organizations like the Congressional Hunger Center, a D.C-based nonprofit that trains leaders to combat food insecurity and hunger, have long opposed programs that interfere with SNAP participants’ choices.
“CHC opposes limiting food choice for SNAP participants,” they told the organization Center Forward. “Anti-hunger advocates have worked hard to eliminate ‘stigma’ in SNAP by making food purchases through electronic benefit transactions (EBT cards). Eliminating food choice would reinstitute stigma in SNAP. Additionally, USDA research indicates that the diets of SNAP participants are generally comparable to the diets of Americans of similar economic means, and that Americans of all income groups need to improve their diets.”
However, the pressure is really mounting with yet another partial government shutdown looming at the end of the week if Congress can’t agree on four appropriations bills — and because, as CNN reported, WIC advocates are warning that states could start having to turn people away as soon as next month if Congress doesn’t provide additional funding shortly. The impact would be magnified because the estimated $1 billion shortfall will have to be absorbed in the remaining months of the fiscal year, which ends September 30.
“Congress needs to cut the partisan games and stop gambling with the well-being of families,”
“The time for political distractions is over. For fifty years, WIC has demonstrated its value as an essential public health resource — positively impacting the health of families across generations,” Georgia Machell, interim CEO of the National WIC Association, said in a statement.
