Harris Remarks At FY25 Budget Request For The Nutritious Food in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (As Prepared)

Good morning. I want to thank you all for being here today to discuss nutritious food in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I want to welcome all of our witnesses, and I look forward to the discussion.

SNAP is our nation’s largest food assistance program with 41 million participants, which is 12.3% of the population.

The core mission of SNAP, as defined by Congress in the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008, is to enable low-income households to obtain a more nutritious diet and to decrease hunger and malnutrition. While the SNAP program is effective at meeting part of this goal, we’re failing at providing SNAP recipients a more nutritious diet.

Recent research has demonstrated that SNAP participants still experience significant disparities in diet quality and disease risk. In fact, children participating in SNAP have a higher disease risk and consume 44% more sugar-sweetened beverages than income-eligible nonparticipants.

In 2016, USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service acknowledged that soft drinks are the leading purchase using SNAP benefits, and as much as 20% of SNAP purchases are spent on sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy and sugar. SNAP participants spend more on sweetened beverages than non-SNAP participants. For these reasons, I am deeply concerned that our largest nutrition program has effectively become a multibillion-dollar taxpayer cost to buy non-nutritious foods that exacerbate the nation’s obesity epidemic.

In recent years there have been significant advances in medical research on diet-related diseases. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), eating high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and beverages, including high quantities of added sugar and saturated fat, increase your risk for overweight and obesity. The NIH also acknowledges that obesity increases the risk of heart disease and is linked to type 2 diabetes and cancer. Poor nutrition and obesity are linked to increased risk for pre-eclampsia, maternal morbidity, liver disease and others. And we now understand that high sugar foods trigger insulin production, making you hungrier, and are addictive.

We find ourselves in an obesity epidemic where 3 in 4 adults age 20 or older have either overweight or obesity and nearly 1 in 5 children have obesity. When I was in medical school, liver transplants for serious liver disease were almost exclusively done in adults, primarily those with serious alcohol use. Now, 10% of children have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, with some even requiring liver transplants. This was previously unheard of. 2005 became the first time in history where children were expected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents; the decreased lifespan was attributed to climbing rates of childhood obesity.

As Members of Congress, we have an obligation to acknowledge this wakeup call and reevaluate our priorities on supporting nutrition.  Subsidizing foods that harm health and nutrition is counterproductive to the original purpose of SNAP. Almost every other domestic nutrition program funded by this Subcommittee, including the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, specifically provides nutritious food. As a result, these programs have been found to improve diet quality and reduce health costs. However, as the largest federal nutrition program with a budget of $122 billion in FY24, the SNAP program is solely focused on providing calories rather than nutritious food. This Subcommittee has a vested interest in ensuring SNAP is delivering on its goals.

In their FY23 Research and Evaluation Plan, USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service expressed interest in exploring a pilot program to support healthy food choices by allowing restrictions on the use of benefits for less healthy foods, particularly sugar-sweetened beverages. Over the past 20 years, multiple jurisdictions, including Maine, Minnesota and New York City have expressed interest in restricting SNAP purchases of sugary drinks or food. To date, USDA has denied every official request to restrict unhealthy purchases. Establishing a restriction pilot is a proposal worth exploring. Let me be clear - this would not be a program change across the entire country, but limited pilots to test this concept. I look forward to discussing the current state of nutrition in SNAP as well as opportunities for improvement.