Just over a week after the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, a group of policymakers and advocates outlined what it will take to make the Biden administration’s goal of ending hunger and reducing diet-related disease by 2030 a reality.
“This is where the hard work really begins,” said Laura Carroll, a White House domestic policy adviser, speaking Thursday at a webinar hosted by American University.
In the coming weeks and months, federal agencies will announce new policies and programs in line with the White House anti-hunger strategy, she said. The strategy, detailed in a 44-page document released last week, involves dozens of proposals, including raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, reinstating the expanded Child Tax Credit, creating “a pathway” toward free school meals for all public school students, and expanding SNAP access.
Efforts underway at the federal level include advancing nutrition science and a multi-agency strategy to fight food waste. The FDA is also working on a front-of-package food label, as well as updating the criteria a food product would have to meet in order to use the word “healthy” on its label, Carroll said.
Many of the administration’s proposals will require congressional action, and Carroll said the White House will work with Congress to find the best legislative vehicles for moving its proposals forward. But their passage is uncertain, given Republican opposition to measures like universal school meals and the $15-per-hour minimum wage.
And while the administration has touted the more than $8 billion in private sector commitments to help meet its goals made in the lead-up to the conference, Carroll said the White House does not yet have a plan for monitoring whether companies are following through on these pledges and reporting that information to the public. She said the administration was “considering all options” for ensuring accountability.
Brian Dittmeier, senior director of public policy at the National WIC Association, said that policymakers should learn from the temporary anti-hunger measures the federal government took in response to the pandemic, such as expanding nutrition assistance and school lunch, and letting participants sign up for benefits online instead of going in person to an office. The pandemic “has really been the jolt that we needed to modernize a lot of these programs and plug in the gaps in assistance,” he said.
Structural reforms are necessary “so we can start charting the new path of how these programs will operate over the next decade,” he said.
There are at least three upcoming opportunities for these sorts of overhauls: the Child Nutrition Reauthorization process, which is required every five years but is overdue; the USDA’s review of the WIC food package; and the annual appropriations process.
Building on the momentum of the conference to get Congress to take bipartisan action on hunger and nutrition policy won’t be easy, said Jason Gromley, director of government relations and advocacy at the anti-hunger group Share Our Strength. But while partisanship “is on full display” in the lead-up to the midterm elections, he’s optimistic that some of the animosity will die down after the elections and there will be “a traditional ‘come together’ moment.”
Still, Gromley said, the public will need to put pressure on lawmakers. “How you get Congress’ attention is you scream really loudly,” he said. “They’ve got to hear from folks back in their districts. They’ve got to hear from folks back in their state who are telling them that this is important to them.”