What To Expect From The New Administration on Food and Nutrition Policy

Food and nutrition policy could be a key area for major changes as the Trump administration comes into office next week, particularly with the controversial nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services. Food Fix newsletter founder and editor-in-chief Helena Bottemiller Evich, who led coverage of food and agriculture issues at POLITICO for nearly a decade, spoke with Spotlight recently about what to expect. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Great to talk to you Helena and congrats again on the success of Food Fix. I guess let’s start with our look at the new administration’s agenda with food stamps and the Farm Bill.

Sure—let’s see, where to start. So, regardless of the incoming administration, Congress is gridlocked and remains gridlocked. It’s hard to see a lot of big things getting done, especially something like the Farm Bill, which requires bipartisan compromise. The conventional wisdom on the Farm Bill and SNAP benefits is that it’s going to be hard to do when Republicans need Democrats to get a bill passed. And if they need Democrats to get it done, then that means that they can’t go after SNAP benefits or try to meaningfully cut SNAP. The interesting thing about SNAP is that that program continues whether or not there’s a Farm Bill. And so, anti-hunger advocates have a saying, no Farm Bill is better than a bad Farm Bill. And I think that’s kind of the mantra going into this year. I’ve started to say publicly though, that I think it’s quite possible, maybe even likely, that there isn’t a Farm Bill this year and maybe just isn’t ever another Farm Bill. It’s just so hard to do and I don’t see how the politics are any easier this year. I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s quite possible we’re in a long freeze with the Farm Bill.

That puts the focus on the administration and what it wants to do. And that’s where we get to the really big question mark. We just don’t know anything about Brooke Rollins‘ thinking on SNAP or any of these issues (Rollins is the nominee to be the next Secretary of Agriculture). What she says in her confirmation hearing about SNAP, about WIC, about school meals, will be really the first time we’re getting anything on the record from her.

Elon Musk and the DOGE movement, meanwhile, have targeted SNAP for cuts

The DOGE effort has had some conversations about SNAP as they look at all of the government programs that have waste or errors or just things that they want to cut. The thing that was particularly flagged with SNAP were the error rates, which have gone up. The error rate is like the overpayment or underpayment of a SNAP benefit based on what that household was supposed to receive under the administration of the program. Those rates have gone up during the pandemic and a lot of that is because states are really short staffed and there’s been a push to not have such long wait times for SNAP applicants. There’s a lot of work to do there and I think we will see more Republicans shining lights on the error rates and really making hay about that because it’s a big program spending billions of dollars. I’m definitely watching that really closely.

One of the things we are seeing as we gear up for the second Trump administration is this tension between true populist policies and conservative policies, and the upcoming debate about the expanded Child Tax Credit is a good example of that. For conservatives, the mantra has been less government spending, smaller government programs, full stop; that’s the goal, right? But some of this Child Tax Credit stuff, when you’re looking at anti-hunger measures, income inequality and the broader sort of parental stress levels, it becomes kind of a populist issue. I do think that’s an interesting issue where you might see some of these fault lines come out more, like where you have more of the traditional conservatives or Republican establishment maybe not being as crazy about spending money on that kind of thing. But we also saw the last Trump administration was fine spending money, right?

I think that’ll be an interesting one to watch. And then on the nutrition side, goodness, where do you start?

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr dropped out and then endorsed then-candidate Donald Trump, we immediately saw this new food issue jump into the campaign. You saw Trump saying, we’re going to clean up the food supply, we’re going to get toxins out of food. And that immediately struck me as very new and different. I covered the last Trump administration, and they were not in any way focused on these issues. So, the RFK alliance has created this new, so-called movement under the Make America Healthy again banner, or MAHA. And similar to this tension between populist and conservative ideology, we now have some issues where MAHA and MAGA are not always going to see eye to eye.

One example would be on food additives and food dyes. One of the big complaints in the MAHA movement is that the U.S. government has not more strictly regulated the additives and chemicals in the food supply compared to say Europe. Europe is stricter and that is something you typically hear from the left. It’s been a progressive complaint. And so now we’re seeing a bit of a realignment on things like that and the question becomes, is the Trump administration going to have an appetite to regulate on some of those issues?

And then zooming out even further, if you listen to what RFK is saying on these issues, if he’s confirmed to lead HHS, which I think he will be, they’re talking about really changing healthcare incentives and trying to get more at prevention and moving away from pharma and more towards things like nutrition intervention. One of the arguments you’ll hear RFK world make is, why are we spending so much on Ozempic and these glp-1 medications that are very effective for weight loss and combating obesity and diabetes and other conditions when we could just buy healthy food for someone and support American farmers? How will that actually impact policy? I don’t know. But that’s just a very new argument that’s being made.

And some of the folks that work in the food as medicine space are already experimenting with things like produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals as part of Medicaid. They’re running pilots essentially to test how these programs might work to potentially help manage or treat different diet-related diseases. This has all been happening at a smaller scale, and it’ll be interesting to see whether a Trump administration adopts that policy further. Again, it’s going to be really important to watch these confirmation hearings and RFK’s confirmation will be crucial. Because I think senators are going to be pressing him on, what are you actually going to do? And then what can they do without Congress? What can they do administratively is a whole other issue?

But there will be some things where folks who work in this space will find non-traditional alliances.

But probably more on the nutrition front than the anti-hunger front?

Probably. But we don’t know. One thing we’ve heard from Brooke Rollins recently is she described USDA’s budget as bloated. So, if there is a general push to cut spending, SNAP would be the first target just because it’s so big, but you really can’t fundamentally change that program without Congress. They would really have to make that a priority and be willing to expend some political capital to really make any changes. So, we’ll see.

But can major changes be made to SNAP this year, given that the continuing resolution basically has it staying with a stable funding stream until the end of the year?

I don’t foresee that happening. I think they would have to do it in the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is where you can make like actual policy change. They can do some things in the spending bills, like, put some money in there to run pilots to ban sugary drinks from SNAP or something like that. And actually, that’s one area where I’ll be watching to see what Brooke Rollins says about that in her confirmation hearing, because the MAHA folks and RFK Jr. specifically have talked about trying to ban processed food and sugary drinks from SNAP, arguing that it’s basically subsidizing chronic disease. That is an area where USDA could take some actions without Congress.