When the Trump administration released its Make America Healthy Again report in May, it lifted up the Women, Infants and Children supplemental food program, known as WIC, as a shining example of how the government can get healthy eating right.
“WIC has a proven track record of improving children’s health,” the report said. Specifically, it noted that when WIC added a cash benefit for fruits and vegetables in 2009, research showed the change “may have helped reverse increasing childhood obesity rates.”
When the president’s budget came out a week later, it called for dramatically scaling back that very fruit and vegetable benefit.
Shannon Whaley, a leading WIC expert who served on the committee that recommended revising the WIC food package, was baffled that the administration would want to cut it.
“We are all scratching our heads,” she said.
Over at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, extensive data on participants found that the program is linked to improved health outcomes, particularly for children, and is directly tied to supporting families in making healthier food choices. The program serves 42 million low-income people, 39 percent of them children.
But over the summer, Congress passed the Big Beautiful Bill, slashing SNAP’s budget by about 30 percent — the largest-ever cut in the program’s 60-year history. Some 3.3 million families with children will lose some or all of their benefits.
Both decisions seem to run counter to the stated goals of Make America Healthy Again, the movement led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to tackle the country’s chronic disease epidemic by reforming food and health systems. A significant portion of that effort, and part of the reason it has drawn in coalitions of moms in support, is around improving children’s health.
It’s left experts wondering: Why, when the United States is so focused on healthier outcomes for children, the administration is also cutting — or considering cutting — some of the country’s best tools for obtaining them?
“There’s such a distance between all of the support that we’re kind of hearing rhetorically and then what is actually happening,” said Alison Hard, the director of public policy at the National WIC Association.
Take WIC, which serves about 6 million pregnant and postpartum people and their children under the age of 5 by allowing them to purchase a restricted set of items including formula and healthy foods. Researchers had been working for years to enhance the program’s fruit and vegetable benefit and recommended in 2017 increasing its value from what was then about $9 a month for children and $11 a month for parents.
When the pandemic hit, that recommendation was still under consideration. The U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly enacted the change on fruits and vegetables, upping the amounts to $26 for children and $52 a month for breastfeeding parents — effectively covering about half of what families should be spending on fruits and vegetables — through one of the COVID response laws at the time.
The White House’s suggestion, then, to return the amount to $9 and $11 would revert the benefit to its lowest level since 2021, and change the trajectory of a program that has enjoyed strong bipartisan support for its 50-year history.
SNAP, which gives families a debit card to purchase groceries, has also been viewed as a place where the administration could cut costs. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has characterized SNAP as a “bloated” program and Republicans have long argued SNAP is incentivizing people not to work. Some of the changes in the Big Beautiful Bill are specifically around limiting exemptions from SNAP’s work requirement. Previously, people who were not working because they were caring for children under the age of 18 could qualify for an exemption; now the cutoff is children under the age of 14. The newly expanded work requirement changes will kick 1.4 million people off their SNAP benefits.
During the shutdown, SNAP’s unpopularity among some in the administration was clear. The federal government refused to draw on contingency funds to ensure SNAP benefits didn’t lapse, going back and forth with the courts until a federal judge ruled that the government had to indeed fund the program through the shutdown. The administration did, however, continue to funnel funding to WIC.
“What I can’t quite make sense of is why they continue to find funding for WIC and not SNAP,” said Joelle Johnson, the deputy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition and food safety watchdog organization. “I don’t understand how these two programs are held in such unequal measures.”
Part of Kennedy’s opposition to SNAP as it currently exists is that it doesn’t further restrict what participants can buy. Just about everything is included except hot foods, alcohol, tobacco and household products. Over the past year, Kennedy has urged states to restrict some items, including soda and processed goods, arguing the government is subsidizing people to “eat poison.”
“We believe in choice. Every American who wants to eat a doughnut ought to be able to eat it, or drink a Coke, but federal taxpayers should not be paying to poison our children,” Kennedy said earlier this year. “We’re going to end that.”
It’s true that a significant chunk of SNAP dollars go to unhealthy food, but a 2016 study from the USDA found no difference in the buying habits of SNAP participants and the larger public. Another study found that “children receiving SNAP are less likely than low-income nonparticipants to be in fair or poor health or underweight.” Getting assistance with food costs also increased the likelihood that kids would go to preventive check-ups, the study found.
That study was cited in the MAHA report, which did not mention those nuances and instead focused on findings that SNAP participants, including children, “struggle to meet key dietary guidelines and perform poorly on key health indicators” when compared with higher income people.
“Diet quality is multifactorial,” said Joseph Llobrera, director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute. “There is a strong correlation between having the resources, having the income and better diet quality. When USDA asked SNAP participants what’s keeping them from purchasing healthier foods, affordability is the top barrier that’s identified.”
There have been efforts, albeit unsuccessful ones, in New York, Iowa and even Congress to implement guardrails on qualifying SNAP purchases. But health advocates have noted that limiting what food low-income people can purchase is, in practice, dictating what they eat in a way that’s not applied to other households. The average SNAP household benefit is $332 a month — the average American family spends $504 a month on groceries — making it difficult for families to make food purchases that entirely cut out processed foods, which tend to be cheaper and easier to prepare.
“In the current political climate, concerns about cost and dependency far outweigh concerns about the nutritional health of the poor,” wrote Marion Nestle, one of the country’s top nutrition policy experts.
Some states, like Massachusetts, have created programs to give SNAP participants more money for produce from local farmers. But the program is expensive specifically because produce is expensive and because the program is too popular for the state to fund in full.
There’s some evidence the Trump administration is thinking about how to get healthier foods to low-income populations. As part of MAHA’s strategy released in September is a proposal to set up a USDA program that sends boxes of “whole, healthy food” to SNAP participants, what would be known as MAHA boxes. It’s unclear how, logistically, the program would be carried out or whether it would be added on top of existing SNAP benefits. The Trump administration’s last attempt to send food boxes during the COVID-19 pandemic was so harried it led to a congressional investigation that found the administration used the program for political gain.
Johnson said part of the reason the topic of healthier foods for children has gained so much traction is because of health influencers and coalitions of MAHA moms who have pushed for changes.
Eden Marie James, one of the founders of one of those national groups, the MAHA Mom Coalition, told The 19th in a statement that the coalition is focused on supporting programs that have a “measurable, evidence-based impact” on children’s health and food security.
“SNAP and WIC clearly play a role in that. When these programs make it easier for moms to choose real, nutrient-dense foods like fruits, vegetables and whole foods, they align fully with the Make America Health Again mission,” James said on behalf of the coalition. “Our focus is on strengthening what works: reducing bureaucratic barriers, expanding access to healthy options, and supporting partnerships that help families use benefits in ways that improve long-term health outcomes. We are not approaching this from a partisan lens.”
The WIC fruit and vegetable benefit, for example, should be funded “at a level that reflects scientific evidence and real-world food prices,” she said, and the final decision on funding should be “grounded in data, not politics.” The group is made up of mothers across the political spectrum, James said.
Johnson said some of the most prominent members of MAHA groups that have been leading the discourse on healthy foods for kids are higher-income people who “have the luxury of looking very critically about what is in the food their kids eat. That is not bad, necessarily — those kinds of population-wide efforts will benefit everybody. But as far as I am aware that is how things tend to work in this country is that people with money and power set the tone.”
James from the MAHA Mom Coalition noted that while the MAHA movement’s most visible members may not represent the full spectrum of families involved or impacted by the movement, the coalition “is for every mom, and that includes moms who use SNAP or WIC.”
“Their voices matter to us and we are working intentionally to bring them forward,” she said, including through listening sessions at WIC offices and community clinics.
Politics, however, is still certainly playing a role in the larger MAHA movement. The issue of healthy eating in America is deeply politicized. It involves some of the most powerful companies in the country, a deeply polarizing leader in Kennedy, and a movement closely aligned with President Donald Trump.
It’s so political that even the most health-conscious grocers like Whole Foods, which has been forwarding the healthy food movement since long before Make America Healthy Again was a catchphrase, have been seen as reluctant to vocally come out in support. Healthy food advocates were similarly reticent when Kennedy put out his MAHA report, which did list many things advocates have been calling for for years. The report, however, included several fictitious citations and errors that later had to be corrected.
Layer that movement with the rhetoric on SNAP and WIC, programs that more than anything support low-income families of color who face disparities. Those disparities will now be harder to track after the USDA announced in September it would stop issuing its annual report on food insecurity — a study it has been conducting for 30 years that captures data on race and ethnicity.
One of the reasons the USDA noted: The study has been “politicized.”
With SNAP and WIC now facing cuts, experts don’t disagree with the questions being raised, but rather their attempts to answer them.
“This new administration and the MAHA movement largely is getting right the problems. And all of us in the public health community have been talking about these problems for a long, long time. We have a chronic disease problem. We have an early childhood obesity crisis. We have all of these things and all of these things are true,” Whaley said. “The problem is they’re getting the causes wrong. And when you get the causes wrong, you get the solutions wrong.”
According to Whaley’s research, the cause is clear: social disparity. But in an administration that wants to eliminate any discussion of race, gender or class, the importance of programs like SNAP and WIC in addressing the root causes of a health epidemic can get lost, especially in a conversation about cutting costs.
“Because we are sort of not allowed to talk about that right now, we are getting these solutions on food dyes and seed oils. And frankly, I think what we all agree on is access to fruits and vegetables is going to probably help all of us, but for some reason, that’s not the talking point,” Whaley said.
Wealthier families have lower levels of food insecurity, healthier diets and better overall health than lower-income families. The quality of a child’s diet is associated with multiple other factors, including race, ethnicity and participation in a food assistance program. Access to WIC, in particular, is connected to better diet outcomes.
Chastity Lord, the president and CEO of the Jeremiah Project, which works with low-income single mothers, said there is a messaging issue at the center of the administration’s efforts. The onus, she said, is still on individual people — especially low-income people — to make better choices. There are conversations about system-wide improvements around red food dye, for example, but fewer ones on how systems like SNAP can keep people in poverty healthier — and why they’re worth funding.
“How do we not catch amnesia that the quality of our country is deeply dependent on the quality of our citizens? The quality and the ability of our workforce is highly dependent upon what they’re putting in their body, what they have access to, what they have the choice and the capacity to be a part of,” Lord said. “Can we backwards-scaffold this to not an altruistic, ‘Shouldn’t you have fruit?’”
Because for the millions of families who are facing a holiday season with reduced SNAP benefits, Lord said, it’s impossible to even consider the quality of their food if they don’t have the support to buy food in the first place.
“The red dye conversation is important,” Lord said, “but have you had a conversation with a mom today who is trying to figure out how she’s going to get through Thanksgiving?”
Great Job Chabeli Carrazana & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
