For the last week, rumors and reports have been swirling about how Congress may finally be nearing a deal that would result in appropriating some much-needed additional funds to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, so that the organization won’t have to turn away potential program participants due to increased need and a lack of resources in 2024.
Though, as first reported by Politico, Congressional Republicans want that money to come with a pretty big catch. In exchange for funding WIC, they want to to add two major provisions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): One would create a pilot program to catalog and restrict what SNAP participants can purchase with their benefits, while the other “would collect SNAP purchasing data with the goal of eventually restricting SNAP purchases.”
Food security advocates and liberal policymakers have already raised major alarms about how rolling out these additional restrictions would both further stigmatize the use of federal nutrition benefits and could also lead to uneven application across all 50 states, especially in those where there is already a sizable backlog in administering benefits. Some states, like Alaska, have been struggling to keep up for years — at one point, more than 15,000 Alaskans’ claims were stuck in the backlog — but earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent warning letters to 46 additional states and two territories that were late on processing applications.
However, another group that has a major stake in the SNAP program has also come out to declare Republicans’ plan untenable: the leaders of America’s supermarkets.
In a letter sent last week to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the National Grocers Association — alongside nearly 2,5000 undersigned business and trade associations — said they were deeply opposed to “all efforts to restrict purchases under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, a critical resource for struggling families in [their] home states.”
“One of the many reasons SNAP works so well is the ease of processing transactions for both retailers and beneficiaries, who can make their own decisions about the food that is best for their households,” the write. “Choice also ensures families can shop with the same dignity as any other grocery customer.”
Efficiency and privacy were two of the main benefits of introducing Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards in the early 1990s. The cards revolutionized SNAP by allowing program participants to trade in paper vouchers for simple electronic cards loaded with benefits, streamlining transactions for both retailers and beneficiaries.
Three decades later, the organization maintains that a key to SNAP’s success is flexibility and that restrictions would limit the program’s ability to react to the changing needs of the community. For instance, they write, a cancer patient who is struggling to gain weight won’t have the same needs as a child who has diabetes.
“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 letter said. “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 industry’s concerns over becoming “the food police” run deeper than just telling customers what they can and cannot buy. In their letter, the National Grocers Association accuses the federal government of asking them to “spy on their customers’ buying habits and keep records of how they spend their own money.”
“No consumer purchases have ever been subjected to this Orwellian level of snooping by the Federal government, and it would set a terrifying precedent of intruding on the most private areas of our lives,” they write. “The surveillance would yield incomplete data that would be useless for scientific study because SNAP purchases are only a portion of what beneficiaries purchase. On the other side of the register, retailers would be obligated to safeguard the confidential information from both criminals and competitors looking to get an edge.”
Congressional lawmakers have until Friday to reach an agreement on four appropriation bills to prevent yet another partial government shutdown. As reported by Forbes, if a shutdown occurs, the Department of Agriculture — which administers SNAP — would be impacted. While funds for SNAP are allocated a month in advance to prevent a complete cessation of services, the clock is ticking for lawmakers to reach an overall funding agreement.
