Candy and sweetened beverages could soon be off the table for participants in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as the Trump administration hones in on its Make America Healthy Again agenda, and Democrats are livid.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week he is working with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “to get sodas and candy off of the food stamps program,” pointing to childhood diabetes rates, which have risen in the U.S. Democratic lawmakers said it’s a paternalistic approach to a program that’s supposed to give low-income people more options and made the argument that not all low-income Americans have access to stores that sell nutritious food.
“This administration is filled with millionaires and billionaires. They have no fucking clue about what it is to struggle,” Rep. Jim McGovern told NOTUS. “You’re gonna put all these restrictions in place? What do you do if you don’t live in an area where there’s a supermarket, where there’s only a convenience store? What do you do if you don’t have access to a place where you can get healthier foods?”
McGovern, who sits on the House Committee on Agriculture, pointed to his Republican colleagues’ current task to make $230 billion in cuts to the program: “If you want people to make better choices, then support increasing the SNAP benefit.”
Another Democrat on the agriculture committee, Rep. Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, said she would gladly work with Kennedy to help children eat healthier. But she argued his current approach lacks nuance, and doesn’t account for the prevalence of food deserts in states like hers — areas that have low access to nutritious, affordable food. She said that those communities “sadly, have to resort often to cheaper ways to provide calories to their kids.”
“Secretary Kennedy has to look at the availability and the scarcity of food, and we all have the end goal of people eating more nutritious food. But we have to be aware that for some people, scarcity is a real thing, and it’s about making sure that they are able to eat,” Tokuda told NOTUS. “Let’s increase SNAP funding so that kids can afford to have good, nutritious meals.”
Rep. Frederica Wilson, who is also a Democrat, said Kennedy “needs to stop micromanaging $6 a day for little children,” the average daily benefit for SNAP recipients.
“He needs to allow people to live, and especially poor people, to live their best life, whatever they can afford. This is why we give them the money, for these parents to make responsible decisions for what their children should have. They know nutrition. They know what their children should have,” Wilson told NOTUS.
Republicans have long threatened to cut off SNAP participants from using benefits to buy candy and beverages like soda, but now, with a health secretary focused on nutrition and chronic disease, the administration is more enthusiastic than past administrations to support such restrictions. The USDA has signaled it’s more than eager to approve state waivers to bar SNAP benefits from being used on soda and candy.
“We are paying at both ends. We’re paying for the food — the food-like substances that make them diabetic — and then we’re being bankrupted. We’re paying a trillion dollars a year on metabolic dysfunction. It’s existential and it’s not sustainable,” Kennedy told administration officials at a cabinet meeting last week.
Kennedy said he and Rollins are traveling to states that applied for waivers to restrict what can be purchased with benefits, and that they were encouraging “all the states to apply.”
Kennedy’s proposals aren’t new. In January, a group of House Republicans introduced a bill that would bar benefits from being used to buy “soft drinks, candy, ice cream or prepared desserts,” which was referred to an agriculture subcommittee. The last farm bill, passed in 2018, spurred similar debate and scrutiny from Congress about SNAP benefits being used to buy soda and candy. That push was met with intense lobbying from sugar and beverage industries before being ultimately abandoned by Congress.
But as farm bill negotiations begin this year, a GOP-controlled Congress seems interested, once again, in trying to impose a federal ban.
The new political reality also marks a departure from the first Trump administration, which denied Maine’s request in 2018 to make soda and candy ineligible for purchase with SNAP benefits. The USDA at the time cited concerns that it would be burdensome for retailers and overly restrictive on households, all “without demonstrating clear evidence of meaningful health outcomes.”
Craig Gundersen, a poverty and hunger researcher at Baylor University, told NOTUS that Kennedy’s focus on SNAP purchases contributing to diabetes is based on “zero evidence.” He argued that instead, Kennedy’s recommendations for the program could increase the stigma that low-income Americans already face when using benefits.
“You’re going to get a lot of recipients choosing not to be in the program, which will then lead to increases in food insecurity. And we do know that food insecurity is related to complications with respect to diabetes, and higher rates of diabetes amongst low-income Americans,” Gundersen said. “If you want to address these issues, fine. But do not use SNAP as a means to do this.”
Gundersen added that governments and agencies deciding what foods are too unhealthy to be eligible for the program would also present a “logistical nightmare” for governments.
At least 11 states this year have considered restricting SNAP recipients from using benefits to buy certain products like candy, soda and snacks. Only four states — Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska — have submitted waivers to the USDA to do so.
Already, it is apparent that states define ineligibility differently. Arkansas’ waiver asks the USDA to allow it to exclude “unhealthy drinks” and “confectionary products with flour and artificially sweetened candy” from the program. Indiana applied for a similar waiver, but because the state defines candy differently, not all chocolate bars would be restricted.
Neither the USDA nor the Department of Health and Human Services responded to inquiries from NOTUS, including questions about how their secretaries define what makes a product “soda” or “candy.”
Grocers and food industry groups are concerned about how they could navigate a patchwork system of state-level restrictions on their tens of thousands of products. Whenever changes are made to SNAP, retailers have to code eligible items into their store systems, meaning each state and territory would have to provide stores with a constantly updated, electronically downloadable list of ineligible products.
An organization representing retail stakeholders and food producers, FMI, The Food Industry Association, said that work could “force states to divert resources away” from upgrading technology to detect benefit fraud.
“Many states are already understaffed and running outdated systems,” said Jennifer Hatcher, FMI’s chief public policy officer, in a press call Wednesday. “We believe complex, differing SNAP restrictions sorted by states would cause delays, errors and disputes, further slowing the checkout speeds, frustrating customers and increasing operational costs.”
Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa on the Agriculture Committee said he’s been “a longtime advocate” for restricting products like soda and candy from the program, but he also acknowledged that it could take health officials a lot of work to define those parameters.
“Maybe they have a panel that reviews every product, you know? It won’t be easy, but there’s other things that aren’t easy either,” LaMalfa told NOTUS. “You gotta start somewhere, right?”
—
Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.