Arkansas is moving forward with its plan to ban government food aid from being used to buy candy and soda beginning on Wednesday, even though a federal judge ruled last week that similar restrictions in other states violated federal law.
Announcing the plan on Monday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited an urgent need to combat a “chronic disease epidemic” in America, including high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
On one floor of the state’s Department of Human Services, “our state has been approving food stamp purchases for soft drinks and candy, while on another floor, our state’s Medicaid program is paying to treat the chronic diseases those products can help create,” she said.
Food stamps is an older name for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The federally funded and state-run program provides a monthly stipend for low-income families to buy groceries. It is used by nearly 42 million Americans, or about one in eight.
In a news release, the Arkansas governor’s office cited Stanford University research that found restricting the purchase of sugary drinks with food stamps could reduce rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes. However, overall research remains mixed about whether restricting SNAP purchases improves diet quality and health.
Debates over SNAP benefits are common
Lawmakers at the state and federal level have long debated which foods should be eligible for purchase with SNAP. Currently, benefits cannot be used to buy hot prepared foods, but a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a bill that would allow SNAP to be used to buy rotisserie chicken from the grocery store.
Arkansas is one of 23 states to receive a waiver allowing it to restrict the purchase of some sugary foods and drinks. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have pushed for the ban as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.
While the goals of the state restrictions are similar, the exact rules vary. Some states want to ban the purchase of both sugary drinks and candy using SNAP and others want to prohibit only the purchase of sugary beverages.
The USDA acted illegally in approving waivers, judge finds
Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington vacated USDA approval of the pilot projects that allowed new SNAP restrictions in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia.
The judge said the ruling was not a reflection on the merits of the program, but said the projects were not permitted under the statute the USDA was citing. The agency also failed to follow its own regulations for implementing a pilot project, she ruled.
The Arkansas program is being implemented under the same regulations as the programs that were vacated. David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said that after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year, federal district courts generally no longer issue nationwide injunctions. Still, Arkansas’ decision to go forward with the program is “putting that to the extreme test.”
Sanders noted the ruling in her announcement on Monday but said, “Arkansas is moving full speed ahead, because we won’t wait around while our people get less and less healthy and we spend more and more taxpayer dollars trying to fix the problem.”
Grocery stores are responsible for enforcing the SNAP restrictions
Steve Goode, executive director of the Arkansas Grocers and Retail Merchants Association, said that he “wouldn’t want to guess” at how prepared the state’s businesses are to implement the benefits changes this week.
“SNAP benefits in retail have been the same for years,” he said, noting that this is going to be a “big change.”
“Some of our members that have stores in other states have done this already and the results have been OK,” he said. Arkansas has helped by hiring a third-party vendor to create a list of banned items for the stores to reference, which hasn’t been the case in some other states.
Meanwhile, the state has also created an app for SNAP beneficiaries to use that will help them determine which items are eligible for purchase and which aren’t.
