The United States spent over $100 billion on food stamp assistance last year for over 42 million recipients.
An additional $7 billion was spent on the Women's, Infant and Children (WIC) Nutrition Program and almost $30 billion was spent on child nutrition of which most went to school lunches and breakfasts.
About 60% (over 20 million) of all K-12 students the United States participate in the School Lunch Program funded by the federal government. Another 32% participate in the School Breakfast Program.
In total, the federal government spent over $140 billion on various food and nutrition programs last year.
All of this data is contained in an annual keydata report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that administers these programs.
As we look to 2025 I expect that the food stamp program, officially referred to as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will receive increased scrutiny by the Trump administration and in various states.
For example, legislation was recently introduced in Texas to ban the use of food stamps to purchase soft drinks and other sugary beverages.
The soda companies are not happy about it.
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| Source: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas-take/article/texas-food-stamps-soda-ban-20244503.php |
West Virginia and Utah are other states that are considering such a ban.
In order to implement such a ban the states would need a waiver from the Department of Agriculture.
In the past, states such as Minnesota and Maine sought a waiver to limit sugary drinks and/or candy from the SNAP program but those waivers were denied on the argument of administrative complexity.
However, a new day is upon us in Washington, D.C.
The old rules and ideas no longer apply.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is in favor of the ban and stated he is going to lobby Congress to modify the SNAP rules.
You would expect the beverage industry to lobby strongly against this ban. They have already come out strongly against the proposal in Texas as the headline above suggests.
Sweetened beverages make up about 10% of all purchases under food stamps.
That is almost $10 billion of revenues to Coca-Cola, Pepsi and others.
What you might not expect is that the American Heart Association also sent a representative to testify against the ban in Texas.
Does the AHA honestly believe that sugary drinks are nutritious and heart healthy?
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| Link: https://x.com/travelingenes/status/1899988872928379149 |
Was the AHA's position above based on principle or something else?
Money has a way of taking precedence over everything else.
For example, the CEO of the American Heart Association made over $4 million in compensation in 2024.
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| Source: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more |
Some of the large recent corporate donors to the American Heart Association have been Pepsico, Kroger and Kellogg's to name a few.
In addition, WalMart, through its WalMart Foundation, provided a $900,000 grant to the AHA to address food insecurity just last year.
It is estimated that anywhere from 18%-26% of the total amount of food stamp spending in the United States is spent with one retailer---WalMart.
We are talking about $20-$25 billion in revenues per year to WalMart just from food stamps..
If you took WalMart's food stamp revenues by itself, it would rank in the top half of all Fortune 500 companies.
The food stamp business is big business and means big money.
Is it just a coincidence that the AHA took the position it did on the Texas legislation?
To its credit, after a tremendous amount of blowback, the AHA has recently reversed course and stated that its position on the Texas legislative ban was an "unfortunate mistake."
I would say so.
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| Source: https://www.dailywire.com/news/american-heart-association-retracts-food-stamp-soda-opposition |
It is just another example of how intertwined many business and charitable organizations are with government programs.
It is a big reason it is so hard to make reductions or reforms in these programs.
The dollars that flow through those government programs are funding a lot more than meets the eye.
Big pharma. Defense contractors. IT consultants. Hospital systems. Colleges and universities. Scores and scores of non profits and NGO's.
There is a long list that rely on that government money.
Sugary drinks have another problem beyond not exactly fitting the description of being "nutritious" for a program that is supposed to be about "nutrition".
Purchases of soft drinks are easily used to commit fraud in the food stamp program.
In Kentucky's Appalachia region they even have a name for it..."The Pop Train" where food stamps are turned into cash.
WKYT in Lexington, Kentucky reported on "The Pop Train" in 2014 that I wrote about in these pages before.
"It happens everyday. We see it often," said Jackson Police Chief Ken Spicer.
WKYT's Miranda Combs investigated after receiving numerous calls telling WKYT to be at the Jackson Walmart or Save-A-Lot at the first of the month when SNAP benefits -- or food stamps -- are given out. The callers and Jackson's police chief told WKYT there would be people pushing and unloading carts and carts full of pop.
Chief Spicer told WKYT people will buy the pop with food stamps, then turn around and sell it for cash. He says typically the sale is made to small convenience stores outside the Breathitt County line.
In 2016 the USDA did an analysis on what types of items food stamp recipients spent their benefits on and did a comparison to households that did not use food stamps.
A few observations from the data.
SNAP households spent 30% more on sweetened beverages than non-SNAP households.
They spent 21% more on meat, poultry and seafood.
They spent 30% less on vegetables and 35% less on fruits.
They spent 37% more on prepared foods.
They spent over three times as much on baby food as non-SNAP households.
Non-SNAP households spent ten times as much as SNAP households on flour and prepared flour mixes.
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| Credit: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1905700210690687275 |
If you look at the data the one thing that stands out in all of this is that SNAP households overwhelmingly spend their benefits on convenience items where little work or preparation effort is required.
Soft drinks in a bottle. Prepared foods. Baby foods that are ready made. Almost no interest in making or baking anything.
In President Trump's first term he floated the idea of replacing a portion of food stamps each month with a so-called Harvest Box that would be delivered to each SNAP household.
The "Harvest Box" would contain domestically grown food and include "shelf-stable" items such as juice, pasta, peanut butter, canned meat and beans. It is estimated that this would save $129 billion over a decade, driven in part by government purchasing power at the wholesale level.
In addition to insuring that everyone got nutritious food the "Harvest Box" program would also have curtailed a great deal of opportunity for fraud in the food stamp program.
This proposal failed to gain any traction in Congress due in part to strong opposition from the grocery lobby that reportedly derives about 7.5% of sales from food stamps and arguments that it was demeaning and impractical.
However, how can we be spending over $140 billion annually on food and nutrition programs in the United States and still hear that people are going hungry?
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| Source: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america |
It seems that some type of reform of the food stamp program is necessary to insure that spending that amount of money is getting the results it is supposed to.
In the 1970's conservative icon William Buckley proposed a simple, streamlined system to limit administrative complexity and costs that would insure no one would go hungry in the United States.
He proposed that the federal government provide a basic level of free food for all Americans.
The Atlantic recounted the proposal in an article in 2014 on the need to streamline and reform the nation's byzantine set of assistance programs,
The federal government would provide grocery stores with quantities of cheap dried foods. Anybody who wanted—“you, me, Nelson Rockefeller,” he quipped—could help themselves to as much as they cared to take. Buckley’s suggested list of free foods included powdered skim milk, soybeans, bulgur wheat, and lard.
That might be too simple, straightforward and draconian but it would be totally focused on eliminating the core problem of hunger with the least amount of cost, administration and bureaucracy while limiting the number of special interests who are profiting from all of it.
We can only hope that 2025 is the year that reform comes to the food stamp program among many other government programs.
