As Congressional negotiations to keep government operating draw to a close, it appears that the advocacy efforts of PFMA and other state and national stakeholders have succeeded in protecting two highly effective national food and nutrition assistance programs that were at risk of being fundamentally altered through funding cuts and programmatic changes.
Both WIC – nutrition assistance for women, infants and children – and SNAP – food assistance for families in need- have been in the crosshairs of some federal lawmakers as they look to take advantage of spending talks to open up these programs and make core changes to their funding levels and how they operate.
So while the agreed language among legislative leaders would fully fund WIC and protect SNAP choice for now, the lesson for stakeholders in the industry should be the critical importance of keeping the lines of communication open with Congressional representatives and not letting them forget how important these programs are – not just to recipients, but the industry as well. While SNAP and WIC are federal programs, they are administered at the state level, and state trade associations and participating businesses have an important perspective to share when it comes to the impacts they have “back home.”
Ultimately, advocacy for WIC and SNAP should not just materialize when those programs find themselves on the chopping block, and dissipate after the immediate threat is averted. Rather we should be reminding our elected leaders routinely about the everyday importance of access to healthy food and nutrition options.
We should also be consistently lobbying for changes to these programs that we know will make them more effective and improve the experience for participants and retailers.
For WIC, retailers have long called for more flexibility when it comes to providing approved foods to participants. The program should allow the use of existing or flexible pack sizes to allow smoother integration of new food packages, do more to allow substitutions, particularly during emergency declarations and national shortages, and act to ensure stores – and thus parents – have reliable access to infant formula.
There are also changes that could make it easier for stores, especially smaller independent businesses, to participate in the program. Streamlining the authorization and onboarding process, and lengthening the reauthorization period for stores in good standing, would help businesses focus on serving customers rather than battling administrative hurdles.
For SNAP, the food industry needs to continue pushing back against efforts to restrict what options are available to participants. We also need to keep hammering home the importance of insulating SNAP purchases from processing and related fees, and preventing these ever-rising charges from infiltrating the food assistance space as they have other electronic transactions. A permanent prohibition on EBT processing fees is critical to the long-term health of the program and maximizing retailer participation.
In Pennsylvania, nearly 10 percent of all children under the age of five are part of the WIC program. In the first month of 2024, WIC program participation in the commonwealth increased to more than 179,000 participants, up 2,000 from December and more than 20,000 from the same time last year. Similarly, more than two million Pennsylvanians are now enrolled in SNAP, with increases month over month that continue despite flat population growth in the state.
SNAP and WIC stand as two extraordinarily successful public-private partnerships. As representatives of the private side of that relationship, we know that success is continually earned, not guaranteed, and it is our job to keep reminding our public counterparts of the central importance of these programs and the obligation we all have to continue improving them.