Republican state legislators are filing a flurry of bills addressing junk food, vaccines, fluoride.
BY: ANNA CLAIRE VOLLERS
Stateline
Republican state legislators across the country are filing a flurry of bills to advance the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda promoted by activist lawyer and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s in line to be the next U.S. health secretary.
Under the MAHA banner, state lawmakers are working to regulate candy and soda purchases under social welfare programs, remove fluoride from public water systems, roll back state vaccination requirements, and remove ultra-processed food from schools.
They’ve enlisted celebrities to help. They’re using #RFK and #MAHA hashtags on social media to share legislative wins. Lawmakers even walked the red carpet at a January gala celebrated as the official start of the MAHA movement in the Trump era.
“It’s pretty exciting for me,” said Wyoming Republican state Rep. Jacob Wasserburger, who has sponsored a MAHA bill in his state.
“I was a pretty overweight kid when I was growing up. … When I was about 16, I started trying to get healthy, and it seemed to me like there were some badly flawed issues with our health care in this country that weren’t being addressed,” he said.
Kennedy is a vocal vaccine skeptic with controversial and sometimes misleading views on a number of public health policies, from fluoride in public water to the underlying causes of HIV and autism. He’s decried ultra-processed foods, government overreach and greedy corporations for harming human health and the environment.
His often unorthodox — and in some cases, false — views have inspired some conservative lawmakers and given political cover to others, spurring them to reshape public health policy in myriad ways.
Candy, soda and SNAP
One popular MAHA measure is to prevent families who qualify for food stamps from using their benefits to purchase candy or soda.
Republican legislators in states including Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming have introduced bills directing their respective state agencies to ask the federal government to allow them to remove candy and soda from the list of eligible products that can be purchased with food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to the feds in December asking them to bar junk food items from SNAP, which is a federal program administered by the states.
In Wyoming, Wasserburger sponsored a bill that would prevent people in SNAP from using their benefits to purchase candy and soda.
“I’m all in favor of people having food choice and freedoms, but if taxpayers are going to be funding the cost of that food with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the funding should be going to what it says: nutrition,” Wasserburger told Stateline.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the soda and candy bars. Anybody can go buy that with their own money.”
The bill recently passed the Wyoming House and is headed to the Senate.
Proponents of the SNAP bills argue candy and sugary drinks harm the health of recipients, many of whom are children. And taxpayers, they say, shouldn’t have to pay for unhealthy foods that can lead to obesity and other issues.
Critics of the bills argue that the fundamental problem for SNAP recipients is that healthy food is more expensive and can be harder to find in low-income neighborhoods. Lobbyists contend that identifying foods as “good” or “bad” amounts to government overreach.
And even some Republicans say the definitions in the bills are too vague. Arizona’s bill, for example, could have prevented SNAP participants from buying granola bars and some cereals, while allowing them to buy potato chips. The Kansas bill defines prohibited candy in such a way that Kit Kat and Twix bars, which contain flour, wouldn’t be restricted.
Many of the state bills follow on the heels of a federal version, the Healthy SNAP Act, which Republicans reintroduced in Congress last month.