Budget director Mick Mulvaney called it the “drain the swamp Cabinet meeting,” when, on Thursday, he unveiled the federal reorganization plan that President Trump set in motion in his second month in office. The USDA would spend much less money under the proposal because SNAP and WIC would be moved into a new agency, the Department of Health and Public Welfare. On the other hand, the USDA would be the home of a new federal food safety agency, with responsibility for the entire U.S. food supply.
Congress will need to approve many parts of this realignment of federal agencies and operations. House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway expressed reservations about creating a mammoth welfare department and said the Agriculture Committee would retain oversight of SNAP. “That [jurisdiction] is a House decision,” he said.
Reorganization “is not something that will happen overnight,” said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, “and these ideas should be viewed as the beginning of a long conversation. We will advocate for those changes that make sense, and we will have a dialogue about areas where we feel USDA has the core competencies to most effectively deliver services.”
The White House proposal would result in a smaller but more focused USDA. SNAP and WIC will account for roughly 55 percent, or $80 billion, of the estimated $144 billion in USDA spending this fiscal year. The agency would retain control of school lunch and other school food programs along with public nutrition programs that distribute food. The White House said non-commodity nutrition programs would be consolidated at the new Department of Health and Public Welfare — the renamed Department of Health and Human Services — which would handle social services across the board.
In most states, SNAP and WIC are run by the same agencies that handle cash assistance to the poor. “This creates an unnecessary administrative burden and potential duplication” on the part of the federal government, said the White House. Centralizing the programs, it said, will mean better coordination of benefits.
A stream of blue-ribbon reports have endorsed a single food safety agency, as have consumer groups on a regular basis. The White House said it would combine the USDA’s meat inspection agency and the FDA’s food safety operations into a new Federal Food Safety Agency, lodged at the USDA. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has about 9,200 employees and expends $1 billion a year; the FDA has 5,000 food safety workers and programs costing $1.3 billion a year.
“USDA demonstrates strong and effective leadership in food safety and maintains an expert understanding of food safety issues from the farm to the fork. This proposal would cover virtually all the foods Americans eat,” said the White House.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, said moving SNAP and WIC out of the USDA “would strip their long-standing connection with agriculture policy, weakening the traditional, bipartisan coalition that supports these programs. This is of particular concern. The nutrition assistance programs have largely eradicated the severe malnutrition that was prevalent in parts of the United States a half-century ago, before these programs were created or expanded.”