logo
Arkansas moves to ban 'junk food' from SNAP program: 'Definition of crazy'

Arkansas moves to ban 'junk food' from SNAP program: 'Definition of crazy'

Fox News15-04-2025

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced a plan to restrict the types of food that can be purchased with food stamps, becoming one of the first governors to seek federal permission to ban items like soda and candy from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
At a news conference at the Arkansas Capitol Tuesday, Sanders said her administration had submitted a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would prohibit the use of SNAP benefits for soft drinks, artificially sweetened candy and snacks made with flour, while expanding eligible items to include hot rotisserie chicken, which is currently excluded.
"Right now you can use food stamps to buy a soft drink or a candy bar from a gas station, but you can't use them to buy an Arkansas-raised hot rotisserie chicken from a grocery store," Sanders said. "That's the definition of crazy."
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins praised Sanders' move in a statement to Fox News Digital.
"Gov. Sanders is confronting childhood disease head on, and it starts with what families consume," Rollins said. "Today's waiver announcement is a welcome one, and I look forward to moving through the approval process swiftly. I encourage more states across the nation to follow the bold lead of states like Arkansas as we Make America Healthy Again."KENNEDY APPLAUDS 'VISIONARY' INDIANA GOVERNOR'S MAHA EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The waiver request is part of the Trump administration's "Make America Healthy Again" or MAHA agenda, which seeks to address chronic disease and healthcare costs by reforming federal nutrition programs.
"We finally have a president who, along with Secretary Rollins, has put a laser focus on solving America's chronic disease epidemic," Sanders said. "Reforming food stamps is a great place to start."
Trump's policies on food and health are taking the spotlight in his second administration, with a shift toward state-driven solutions focused on prevention rather than treatment. The MAHA initiative is led in part by Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also appeared Tuesday at a similar SNAP reform announcement in Indiana.
Speaking in Arkansas, Rollins praised the state's leadership.
"What we are doing here today is affirming the value of federalism in all aspects of governance," she said. "No federal bureaucrat can understand the needs of Arkansas families better than their own governor."
Rollins added that SNAP reform was a key issue for Trump.
"This is one of the things he campaigned on, and this is what the American people voted for," she said.
Sanders said the program, originally designed to fight hunger, has been twisted by outdated regulations and perverse incentives.
"One third of our state has diabetes or is prediabetic," she said. "We're paying for it on the front end and the back end."
The waiver would affect nearly 350,000 Arkansas residents enrolled in SNAP and is scheduled to take effect in July 2026 if approved. According to Sanders, 23% of SNAP spending, or $27 billion per year, is used on soft drinks, candy and desserts, while the state spends $300 million annually treating chronic illness through Medicaid.WHOLE MILK SHOULD BE BACK AT SCHOOLS, EXPERTS SAY: 'NUTRITION SCIENCE HAS EVOLVED'
"This is not about taking anything away," she said. "It's simply saying that taxpayers are no longer going to cover the cost of junk food like candy and soft drinks." Rollins praised Arkansas's SNAP reform plan as a bold step toward improving public health, calling Sanders "courageous" for addressing childhood disease through nutrition.
"We are working to realign USDA and every taxpayer dollar around what is the best and most effective spend," Rollins said.
Arkansas Department of Human Services Secretary Kristi Putnam noted that the same state agency running SNAP also manages Medicaid.
"In one program, we've subsidized foods that we know make people less healthy. In the other, we're devoting significant resources to treating the same conditions brought on by unhealthy food," she said. "This makes no sense."
Critics, including the Food Research and Action Center, have argued the restrictions are punitive and unsupported by data. Trade groups representing beverage and candy manufacturers have also criticized the move. As reported by The Associated Press, American Beverage accused officials of "choosing to be the food police," while the National Confectioners Association called the plan "misguided."
Sanders addressed concerns about food costs, noting her administration's work to eliminate the state grocery tax.
"I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that you're gonna be better off having purchased a pack of Skittles and that your hunger is gonna be satisfied after that purchase," she said.
Rollins stressed that funding levels for SNAP would not change. "It just opens up the opportunity to buy better and more healthy food moving forward," she said.
The Arkansas waiver request was formally submitted Tuesday and includes a 30-day public comment period. The USDA and the governor's office are expected to begin coordination on implementation details this week.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Atlanta Budget a Safeguard Against Potential Trump Cuts, Lawmakers Say
Atlanta Budget a Safeguard Against Potential Trump Cuts, Lawmakers Say

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Atlanta Budget a Safeguard Against Potential Trump Cuts, Lawmakers Say

Atlanta City Council members say proposed cuts to federal aid programs many Black Atlantans count on and concerns about a national recession were on their minds last week when they approved another record-setting fiscal year budget. 'Everyone seems to assume we're going to have a recession,' council member Howard Shook told Capital B Atlanta on Wednesday. 'Things are so unpredictable in [Washington] that it's just hard to say what's going to happen.' Council members said they put more funding in this year's budget because they worry an economic downturn related to President Donald Trump's tariffs on foreign goods will have a domino effect on Atlanta's economy, and as a result will impact the city's tax revenue. They're also concerned about the effects anticipated reductions to federal aid included in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will have on city operations. 'The budget is trying to grapple with the potential that some federal money is going to go away,' council President Doug Shipman told Capital B Atlanta on Wednesday. The federal budget bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22 still has to be approved in the U.S. Senate and signed by Trump before becoming law. Major cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other critical programs many low-income Black Atlantans rely on for medical coverage and for paying their bills are included. More than half of Georgia SNAP benefit recipients were Black in 2020, according to the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute. Roughly 25% of Black Georgians were enrolled in Medicaid in 2023, according to the State Health Access Data Assistance Center. Only about 10% of white Georgians were on Medicaid the same year. In its current form, the Big Beautiful Bill would also cut funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's rental assistance programs by more than $26 billion, or roughly 43%. Shipman said those cuts could have a devastating impact on federal funding for affordable housing efforts in Atlanta, which is one reason the City Council voted to increase funding in its next fiscal year budget. 'The city is having to take on more of the burden of the programs that have historically been federal in nature,' Shipman said. 'We're going to try to do our best to continue to support folks [with] rental assistance, affordable housing, [and] new units.' Capital B Atlanta has reached out to Mayor Andre Dickens' office for comment. Shook and other council members voted unanimously in favor of the estimated $3 billion budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins on July 1, despite concerns about running a deficit next year, which includes a general fund budget of about $975.4 million. The city was already projected to have a $33 million deficit for the current fiscal year budget, largely due to lack of attrition and overtime pay for the Atlanta Police Department, according to lawmakers. Dickens' office told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that it has already cut the anticipated deficit in half by limiting hiring for vacant city job openings. Shook said the city's workforce was reduced by about 400 positions to help balance the current fiscal year budget. He said the mayor's office has agreed to periodically report to the council the status of department spending next fiscal year to avoid running a deficit again. Balancing the budget has become an ongoing problem in Atlanta, a city of only about half a million residential taxpayers, that is responsible for providing municipal government services to an estimated 6.3 million metro area residents who work in or commute into the city. 'There's a very widespread recognition that FY26 will have to exist in and compete with a time of really unrivaled [macroeconomic] uncertainty,' Shook said. 'We're not going to wait for quarterly budget reports, as has been the custom.' The post Atlanta Budget a Safeguard Against Potential Trump Cuts, Lawmakers Say appeared first on Capital B News - Atlanta.

Scoop: Dems fight Trump's budget bill with "Big Betrayal of Women" forum
Scoop: Dems fight Trump's budget bill with "Big Betrayal of Women" forum

Axios

time2 hours ago

  • Axios

Scoop: Dems fight Trump's budget bill with "Big Betrayal of Women" forum

The top women in Senate and House Democratic leadership will host a forum this week on how women are affected by President Trump's "big, beautiful bill," Axios has learned. Why it matters: Democrats argue the GOP's proposed cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP, and restrictions on reproductive health services, disproportionately affect women. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Min.), the No. 3 Senate Democrat, and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) will host the "Big Betrayal of Women" forum Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Shalanda Young, formerly a top Biden administration official, will give witness testimony at the forum. The big picture: The forum is part of Democratic efforts to define the bill on their own terms, with the minority party holding little leverage to actually stop its passage. Klobuchar and Clark are joined by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nv.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) in hosting the forum. Other women lawmakers are expected to join the event. Three women — identified as "Nancy" from Iowa, "Felecia" from Kansas and "Katina" from Virginia — will also testify at the forum. The women rely on SNAP and Medicaid to support themselves and their children. Young is now a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University's Tax Law Center. The bottom line: Trump and Republicans made up ground on Democrats among women voters in the 2024 election. Democrats will need strong margins with women to win in the 2026 midterm election.

Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right
Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Big Data Can Make America Healthier. How to Do It Right

Credit - Ezra Bailey—Getty Images Big data can help make Americans healthier, and the Trump Administration has stated—in its recently released Make America Healthy Again report and elsewhere—that building a national big-data platform is one of its primary goals. As scientists who use large data sets to study health, we're excited about its potential and the willingness of the federal government to invest in it, particularly since big data has been underutilized in the U.S. compared with other developed countries—and since the number of ways it can be used grows nearly daily. It's a huge opportunity. But there are lots of concerns when assembling sensitive health data and combining it with other sensitive data, like credit scores, tax records, employment, educational records, and more. Some of those concerns with the Administration's plans have already surfaced. The Administration's first goal of assembling big data to studying autism has left some worried that if used inappropriately, such data could lead to harm, rather than help, for those with autism. Others worry that big data could be used to perform and justify shoddy research that supports predetermined conclusions without adhering to rigorous scientific methods—a concern reinforced by the discovery that the Make America Healthy Again report cited non-existent sources to support its claims. So how can we reap the benefits of big data while minimizing its risks? Here are some guiding principles: The health care system already possesses health data on millions of Americans. Medical records are now almost always digitized, permitting doctors' notes, medical imaging, laboratory tests, insurance claims, and more to be linked (in theory) across doctors' offices, hospitals, nursing homes, and any other place people receive care. However, data collected about a patient in one setting often doesn't get connected to data from other settings—making it hard for researchers to get a full picture of what, exactly, is happening to each of us within the larger health care system. Read More: Gun Injuries of All Kinds Go Up During Hunting Season The federal government also has data on us that can be connected to health care data to answer important questions. For example, comprehensive and detailed data on Americans' occupations linked with health, insurance, and other data could help shed more light on relationships between our work and our health—helping to better answer curious questions like why taxi drivers are less likely to die from Alzheimer's disease or why female physicians don't outlive their male colleagues. The first step of making big data more helpful is to simply link the data—which, while possible, is difficult to accomplish without centralized effort. Once linkages have been made, data can be anonymized so that those studying sensitive questions aren't privy to confidential information about specific individuals. In addition to governmental data, many other sources of data can provide insights into our health. For example, smartwatches not only have data on how our hearts are beating (e.g., they can identify abnormal heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation), but they can also identify subtle changes in mobility that might be predictive of early neuromuscular diseases like Parkinson's disease. Meanwhile, grocery stores have data on the foods we eat, and with increasing interest in how diet affects our lives, these data could be linked to detailed measures of health. Read More: Could the Shingles Vaccine Help Prevent Dementia? Similarly, social-media platforms possess data that can offer insights into changes in our mental health, and through large-scale analysis of online photos could even identify, in real time, early visible markers of disease. These are moonshots, of course, and whether we want to use data in this way is an open question. But the potential to improve health could be large. Creating a way for scientists to link outside data to existing government and health data—while responsibly maintaining individual anonymity after the linkage—could open many novel research opportunities. Keeping all of these data sources organized, secure, and accessible to scientists is a tall order. Researchers who use big data often dedicate substantial resources to finding the data they need, organizing it, and ensuring its accuracy; the better the database is maintained, the easier it is for researchers to actually perform their analyses. The secure online platform where Medicare and other government health care data are currently accessed has been described by researchers as 'tedious and prone to system errors' and in need of major improvements. Meanwhile, security concerns have led the government to stop letting researchers store the data on their own secure servers, the easiest and most cost-effective way to actually work with the data. Access to Medicare data by researchers has become prohibitively expensive, costing about $30,000 a year or more for a single user to work on one project using the online platform. Read More: Why We Can't Rely on Science Alone to Make Public Health Decisions Proposals to drastically cut medical research funding have been reported, and if passed, these research funding cuts will come at the cost of discoveries to improve health that will never be made. High-quality research of any kind requires investment, whether it's in a biology lab under a microscope or working with data on powerful computers. A new data platform is only as valuable as researchers' ability to access it in a functional and cost-effective way. Any roadmap to designing a national data platform that links together health care and other sensitive data must consider the many valid concerns about collecting data in the U.S., including privacy concerns and how data will be used. The Pew Research Center finds that large majorities of Americans say they are concerned about how the government uses data collected about them (71%), while also admitting that they have little to no understanding of what the government even does with such data (77%). Here are some strategies—in addition to many of the cybersecurity and privacy safeguards already in place—to both protect the data and help earn the public trust: Mistrust and unease with government data collection is readily traceable to historical abuse of Americans' data (as well as recent allegations of improper access), so it's not surprising that many are wary of the Trump Administration's plans. Ensuring data cannot be weaponized by the government against individuals is perhaps the single biggest barrier to creating a useful database, but it can be done. Those currently using federal health care data must already undergo training and comply with very high data-security standards. Misuse of the data—such as even attempting to figure out the identity of an anonymous individual in the data—or failure to protect patient privacy can lead to criminal penalties. A platform of sensitive data without well-delineated restrictions on who can use it and what they can use it for is a recipe for problems. Other ongoing efforts by the Administration to compile data under the vague goal of 'increasing government efficiency' have been met with pushback and lawsuits from organizations concerned about data being used against members of the public. Current use of federal health data also requires researchers to provide the government detailed plans to justify the use of specific data. This allows the government to ensure that no more data than is needed to answer the specific question is provided to researchers. Read More: Why Do Taxi Drivers Have a Lower Risk of Alzheimer's? Researchers must also obtain ethical approval from an Institutional Review Board prior to accessing and analyzing data, a second checkpoint. These boards, which exist in light of egregious failures of medical research ethics in the 20th century, help ensure that analyses are designed to minimize risk to patients—even if it is only their data, and not their bodies, at risk. Transparency into who is using this sensitive data and what exactly they are doing with it can engender trust between researchers and the American public. Just like researchers already do for clinical trials, those accessing the data platform should specify their plans in advance, and those plans should be easily and publicly available. Transparency around which data were accessed and what computer code was used to analyze it not only promotes trust, but such data- and code-sharing practices among researchers make it easier to appraise the quality of the work, identify mistakes, and root out misconduct. We can only assume that Americans' unease with governmental data use stems from knowledge that, as with all powerful tools, linked data has the potential to be used in potentially harmful ways. But when in the hands of qualified scientists using rigorous scientific methods and privacy safeguards, a robust real-world data platform like this could lead to new discoveries about how all of us can lead healthier lives. Contact us at letters@

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store