New York Times, February 29, 2008: Rethinking Help for Children
The federal nutrition program known as WIC for Women, Infants and Children has enormous reach. It helps feed about 8 million people every day and, at one time or another during the course of a year, it helps provide nourishing meals for half of all America۪s infants and one-quarter of its children.
Yet the program itself has been badly undernourished by a parsimonious Congress and, until this month, has been crippled by regulations that had not been significantly updated since the program was started in the mid-1970s.
WIC provides food vouchers to low-income pregnant women, mothers and their children under 5 years old. The program was structured so that most of the vouchers were to be spent largely on high-fat dairy products and juice, to the near-exclusion of fresh fruit and vegetables, contrary to our understanding of what constitutes good nutrition.
Starting this month, WIC prodded by a panel assembled by the Institute of Medicine will allow families to purchase small amounts of fruit, whole wheat bread, vegetables and soy products to supplement staples like cheese, milk and eggs.
Even these changes, important as they are, fall short of what might have been accomplished, largely because the bean counters at the Office of Management and Budget insisted on what they euphemistically call cost-neutrality.
In broad terms, this means no increase in the program۪s annual budget of $5 billion, and no increase in the average $38-per-person monthly allotment. So while the program is now more flexible, each person is limited to no more than $6 or $8 for fruits and vegetables every month.
This won۪t help families nearly enough, especially in high-cost areas like New York. Indeed, the overworked bureaucrats who had to write the new rules left yogurt off the list of approved foods not because they had anything against yogurt but because it would be prohibitively expensive on such a small budget.
The obvious answer is at least a modest increase in spending. Next year WIC and several other food programs will be going before Congress to be reauthorized, as must happen every five years. That will be the next, best chance for the government to update the regulations and allocate more money to low-income families. There۪s no downside to providing children an extra apple or two or more broccoli even some yogurt. The need to feed poor children adequately should not be a matter of debate.