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A confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. begins tomorrow. He is a controversial pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, largely because of his inaccurate claims on vaccines. He's also called for major changes to the country's food policy in an effort to fight chronic disease. NPR's Allison Aubrey reports on what power he would have to carry this out if he's confirmed.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: RFK Jr. has called for an overhaul of the nation's largest antihunger program, known as SNAP. Every year, the federal government spends billions of dollars to provide direct food assistance to more than 40 million low-income Americans. Once known as food stamps, there's a lot of bipartisan support for SNAP, but there is also criticism that SNAP benefits can be used to buy things like sodas, candy and chips. Here's Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, head of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
DARIUSH MOZAFFARIAN: SNAP is one of the biggest handouts to the food industry. People talk about the farm subsidies, but the SNAP subsidy to the food industry is $100 billion, including for lots of junk food and unhealthy food.
AUBREY: He says at a time when nearly 1,000 Americans die each week from diet-related diseases, his research points to the benefits of new approaches to incentivize the purchase of healthy foods with SNAP. What Kennedy has proposed is to place restrictions on what can be purchased with SNAP benefits, so not allowing things like soda. Kennedy has called it, quote, "nonsensical" for U.S. taxpayers to spend billions of dollars to subsidize food that can harm Americans' health. But would Kennedy actually have the power to do this as health secretary? I put the question to Ty Jones Cox.
TY JONES COX: He does not. That power resides with the United States Department of Agriculture and, actually, our Congress.
AUBREY: Ty Jones Cox is the vice president of food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the impact of budget policies. Her group does not support the idea that Kennedy has proposed of restricting what SNAP recipients can buy. They said the evidence supports preserving choice for people to buy what they want while at the same time trying to encourage healthier choices.
JONES COX: I think what makes the most sense and would give us the real benefit that we're all looking for is to actually incentivize people to purchase healthy foods.
AUBREY: She points to programs such as Double Up Food Bucks, where a person's SNAP benefits double in value when they purchase healthy foods.
JONES COX: For every $1, being able to use $2 for vegetables is what gets families to be able to purchase those fresh fruits and vegetables.
AUBREY: These programs could be expanded, she says, so that their impact would be greater. There's no doubt that SNAP has a huge reach, says Jennifer Pomeranz, a food policy expert at New York University. And she says if President Trump wants to empower Kennedy to make more sweeping changes, he could try to take food assistance policy out of the hands of USDA and give it to HHS, the agency Kennedy is nominated to run.
JENNIFER POMERANZ: I would not be surprised to see Trump issue an executive order changing the relative authorities of the secretary of HHS. The only issue is that Congress is the one that authorizes how the agencies can act.
AUBREY: But she says this could really shake things up. And Tufts' Dariush Mozaffarian says there are other things the health secretary could do, too.
MOZAFFARIAN: If we start using health care dollars to pay for healthy food for the right patients as therapy - for example, patients with diabetes or high-risk pregnancy or other medical conditions - we could really start to have a health care system that focuses on health and holistic healing rather than sick care.
AUBREY: Many states are already testing food-is-medicine programs like this, and he says there's an opportunity to expand them.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
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