Stop Subsidizing Our Junk Food Culture

A good policy idea can languish for years, even decades, before it’s suddenly pushed forward with the right timing by powerful supporters. A proposal to end federal subsidies of unhealthy junk food is an idea whose time may have come.

You know there’s a problem when soda is the item most frequently purchased by the 41 million Americans who benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. Almost a quarter of food stamp dollars are used to buy foods such as sweetened beverages, candy, desserts, and salty snacks. Not surprisingly, adults who are on SNAP have a higher obesity rate than those with similar incomes who aren’t. A stunning 42 percent of American adults are obese, and much of our gargantuan government spending aimed at battling diabetes, heart disease, and chronic conditions is driven by that fact.

Two cabinet secretaries — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services and Brooke Rollins at the Agriculture Department — appear to be targeting junk food. Kennedy told Fox News that “we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.” And Rollins wonders whether we should be using “tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious.”

While he was at Stanford University, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the incoming head of the National Institutes of Health, was the lead author of a paper that estimated that cutting out sugary drinks from the food stamp program would save 141,000 kids from obesity and 281,000 adults from type 2 diabetes.

Such estimates explain why at least ten states are moving to ask Secretary Rollins to let them end federal subsidies of unhealthy foods. (Banning junk food from SNAP at the federal level requires congressional action.) Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has announced that her state will be first in line to request such a waiver. Last week, the Idaho house voted to ask for such a waiver. But the vote was close — it passed 38 to 32, with not a single Democrat in favor. The reason is that Big Ag and its food lobbyists have grown fat on a program that costs over $113 billion a year nationwide. They don’t want restrictions on their intake of cash calories. Even nonagricultural business groups, such as Idaho’s Association of Commerce and Industry, opposed the house measure.

So too does the federal bureaucracy. The Agriculture Department that Rollins runs still features on its website a report that bizarrely claims that “no clear standards exist for defining foods as good or bad, or healthy or not healthy.” It goes on to maintain that any “restrictions would increase program complexity and costs.” This reads like the last excuse of a shameless bureaucracy. Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst for the left-wing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Axios that health bureaucrats are opposed to solutions that “single out the lowest income Americans in a way that’s really stigmatizing and burdensome for them.” She noted with some satisfaction that no changes to SNAP “have ever been approved under either Republican or Democratic presidents.”

Some conservatives also express doubts about potential changes to the program. Phil Kerpen, the head of the free-market lobby American Commitment, told me, “The whole focus should be on cleaning up all the Swiss cheese exemptions in work requirements for food stamp recipients. That way, we can move people into jobs and off the rolls.” Kerpen also fears that “having government decide which foods are good and which are bad is a slippery slope, and the bad basket will be targeted for state and local taxes and the kind of restrictions tobacco and alcohol currently have.”

But there’s no reason why the Trump administration can’t pursue a two-pronged strategy — issue waivers to states that want to restrict junk food and push for budget reforms in Congress to require working-age adults to work or participate in job training to qualify for benefits. Public support for this idea tops 75 percent nationwide, and a Wisconsin ballot question with similar wording last April — the same day voters elected a Democratic state supreme court justice — was approved with over 79 percent of the vote.

Now is the time for the Trump administration to move on what it calls 80–20 issues, commonsense ideas that an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on. Lopping off junk foods from the food stamp program should be a no-brainer, and it would force progressives and agricultural-state Republicans to break cover and defend the status quo.

After all, the letter “N” in “SNAP” stands for nutrition. Reforming the bloated food stamp program would be just about the most highly visible and immediately beneficial way to make America healthy again.