20 Health Organizations Join in Urging Congress to Protect Investments in Nutrition Security

Direct certification with Medicaid  and SNAP streamlines access to free or reduced-priced school meals by automatically enrolling children from participating families without additional applications. This system effectively ensures vulnerable students get the nutrition they need while easing administrative burdens for schools.

For example:

• 40% of SNAP-Ed participants increased fruit and vegetable intake and reduced consumption sugar-sweetened beverages in 2022.
• 35% of SNAP-Ed participants became more physically active in 2022.

For nearly 30 years, every President has requested — and Congress has provided — full funding for WIC, ensuring all eligible families can access its evidence-based food packages tailored to their needs, nutrition education and breastfeeding support. The current proposal puts children at risk by taking healthy food off their plates.

The CDC’s Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity Prevention programs  have been responsible for monitoring the health of the U.S. population. Without that we will not be able to track our progress over time.

According to the CDC, between 2018 and 2023, CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity programs improved food access for more than 9 million people and increased opportunities for physical activity for more than 28 million people.

In 2022 and 2023, 5% of the entire NIH budget was spent on nutrition research. Cuts to this already small budget would prevent vital translational nutrition and health research from occurring.

The Institute of Child Nutrition (ICN) is the only federally funded national center dedicated to supporting applied research, education and training, and technical assistance for child nutrition programs. Eliminating ICN would dismantle technical assistance infrastructure and capacity at a time when child nutrition programs face unprecedented challenges.

USAID has consistently been, and is recognized as, the global bilateral leader in advancing policies and programs throughout the lower income world toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal to eliminate hunger by 2030.