Between gas prices and grocery markups, American families are feeling the financial squeeze more than ever right now. And on Thursday, the House passed a bill to fund the Agriculture Department and other agencies using money previously slated to help pregnant women and children afford produce.
The bill, which must still go before the Senate, aims to trim 1.5% from the federal budget on agriculture spend for the new fiscal year, but it will come at a steep cost to parents to children.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (commonly referred to as WIC) would lose an estimated $141 million in funding for fruit and vegetable benefits for the roughly 5.4 million children and pregnant and postpartum women who use them.
When the bill was introduced, the National WIC Association issued a statement denouncing the cuts, saying they would reduce the benefits from $52 to $13 for breastfeeding mothers and from $26 to $10 for young children.
“These cuts break with the Trump Administration’s support for WIC during the 2025 government shutdown and directly contradict the administration’s stated goal to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’” said Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association. “WIC is a proven public health investment during the most critical developmental stages: pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood. By slashing the fruit and vegetable benefits and not ensuring sufficient program funding, this administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies. This plan is short-sighted, hypocritical, and, if passed by Congress, will harm American families.”
Republicans like Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, said the proposed budget will be enough to cover the entirety of the WIC program because participation in the program declined in the past year.
Advocates say that decline is likely because of the government shutdown, during which there was mass confusion about which benefits were available and how to enroll, The Washington Post reports. In fact, they expect WIC participation to rise as the price of groceries becomes untenable for more and more Americans.
