Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Friday that the Trump administration will begin allowing states to bar recipients of federal food assistance from using the money to pay for soft drinks, a core component of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Mr. Kennedy announced the change to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, in Martinsburg, W.Va. He appeared there with Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who recently signed legislation banning foods containing most artificial food dyes and two preservatives, the first state to do so.
The health secretary is talking to 15 other governors about similar moves, according to Calley Means, a health food entrepreneur who recently joined the White House to help carry out Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. Mr. Kennedy told the audience in West Virginia that the food companies had used science to make their products addictive, just as tobacco firms had.
“Food is medicine,” Mr. Kennedy told a group of teachers, children and parents in the gymnasium of a local school. He added: “It treats our health. It treats our mental health.” He framed being healthy as “an act of patriotism,” adding, “If you love this country, you need to take care of yourself.”
Mr. Kennedy does not have authority over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which falls under the Agriculture Department. But Mr. Means said that the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, has agreed to grant the waivers. There is some question, however, about whether the Trump administration has the authority to grant such waivers.
Joel Berg, the chief executive officer of the nonpartisan advocacy group Hunger Free America, called Mr. Kennedy’s plan “illegal and horrible public policy.” He said a similar waiver request by the state of Minnesota was denied in 2004 because the law that created federal food assistance, then known as “food stamps,” barred the purchase only of cigarettes, alcohol and hot foods.
Mr. Berg, who said his organization’s $5 million annual budget included a grant of $40,000 from the beverage industry, said Mr. Kennedy’s proposal discriminates against low-income people. A far better plan for reducing obesity, he said, would be to expand SNAP funding so that Americans in need of help could afford to purchase healthier food.
“This isn’t really about improving the food supply,” he said. “It’s really about punishing poor people for being poor.”
About 40 million Americans rely on SNAP food assistance. Yet even as Mr. Kennedy pushes to steer them to healthier choices, Republican in the House of Representatives have proposed cutting as much as $230 billion from the program over the next decade to pay for tax cuts for wealthy Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Mr. Kennedy’s visit to Martinsburg came one day after he announced that he would shrink the Department of Health and Human Services from 82,000 to 62,000 employees, including significant cuts to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees food safety.
Mr. Kennedy’s appearance alongside a Republican governor speaks to a pronounced cultural change in the politics of food and health, as Republicans join the health secretary’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But in a decidedly Republican twist, Mr. Morrissey also announced new “work, training and educational requirements” for SNAP participants.
The governor, standing behind a lectern with a poster that declared “MAHA STARTS HERE,” also announced a new statewide exercise initiative, and said he intended to “start shedding a few pounds” himself.
Mr. Morrisey announced he would seek the required waiver to ban soft drink purchases using SNAP, along with other initiatives intended to promote exercise and to encourage West Virginians to become healthier. The state has one of the highest obesity rates in the nation. He introduced Mr. Kennedy as one of “the most talked about, vilified men in America” and “a warrior for children.”
Mr. Kennedy then urged other governors to submit waivers to his department, and said he would approve them, though doing so falls within Ms. Rollins’s purview. Politico reported this week that while the two cabinet secretaries have sought to present a united front, there are tensions between their aides over Mr. Kennedy’s aggressive push on the issue.
Mr. Kennedy’s healthy eating agenda is broadly popular. It harks back to the days of President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, who planted a garden on the White House South Lawn and initiated a healthy eating and exercise program that she called “Let’s Move.” At the time, Republicans denounced the initiative as “the nanny state.”
In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Kennedy also called on Americans to eat better and exercise more as a way of preventing the next pandemic.
“The biggest thing we can do for pandemic preparedness is to make ourselves healthy,” Mr. Kennedy said. He also falsely asserted that otherwise healthy people did not die from Covid.
“Healthy Americans were not dying of Covid,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It was a disease that attacked the sick, as with all infectious diseases.”
While it is true that people with underlying conditions were more vulnerable to Covid-19, a 2021 study of Covid mortality in more than 560,000 people found that roughly 30 percent of Covid deaths occurred in patients without underlying diseases.
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