Writing in National Review, Audrey Fahlberg describes efforts by Republican governors in a growing number of states to ban candy and soda from purchases paid for with federal SNAP benefits—the program formerly known as Food Stamps.
Hurrah for them, I say, aware that they must get waivers (from the federal Food Nutrition Act) to do this and that the food industry fights back fiercely, with heavy lobbying both in Washington and in their state capitals. The waiver part appears to be getting easier—four more states have requests getting reviewed—under RFK’s “MAHA” initiative, but the lobbying isn’t getting any less intense.
Why are governors (and Kennedy) doing this? Sure, it will help a bit on the margin to make the population healthier—a good thing—but GOP leaders tend to shun “nanny state” practices. At least as important, they’re saying, is to curb government subsidies of bad nutrition with taxpayer dollars.
As HHS Secretary Kennedy recently put it at a rally with Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, “If you want to drink a bottle of soda, you should be able to have that right….[But] the federal government should not be paying for it through taxpayer money.”
What I’m wondering is whether GOP leaders—governors, especially, but also Education Secretary Linda McMahon—will apply the same standard to awful schools and fraudulent providers that are supported by payments generated by federal tax credits (from the “Big Beautiful” new measure) and state-level voucher and ESA programs. (Because it’s a tax provision, Treasury Secretary Bessent will have more to say than McMahon—but he will likely seek her advice when writing the regulations.)
The libertarian wing of the school-choice world—including smart and earnest folks like Robert Enlow and Michael McShane—appears to be as opposed to quality-control regulation of such programs as Coca-Cola is to soda bans.
Whereas Food Stamps got underway in 1961 and (as with school lunches) there’s much history and debate about what does and doesn’t qualify, the explosion of private-school choice programs—which now sometime include subsidies for home schooling and sundry education “supplements”—is a recent development, the more so with Congress having just entangled Uncle Sam in a potentially very big way even as Texas lawmakers created a vast new program in the Lone Star State.
What does and doesn’t qualify is, today, a hodgepodge of differing state definitions and rules. That’s not wrong, for states generally do and should decide these things. They license schools to operate in the first place and they determine what satisfies their “compulsory attendance” laws. So governors should engage with this issue, with what gets put into kids’ heads as well as what goes into their mouths.
What’s to be done with fraudulent education operators? With schools in which almost nobody learns to read or cipher? With schools (and “supplements”) that ignore U.S. history and civics? With rules so lax that ski trips may be charged as field trips?
If, as every serious economist believes, K–12 education serves a public purpose—creating an educated society—as well as private purposes determined by parents and designed to benefit individuals, then states and their leaders have an obligation to ensure that that happens.
Every state has a constitutional provision assigning itself the responsibility of delivering education to its residents. The wording varies but the obligation is omnipresent.
I’m particularly taken with Indiana’s phrasing:
Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improvement; and to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.
Indiana governor Mike Braun is among those now pushing to block soda and candy from SNAP. Will he and his peers do the same for K–12 schooling purchased with state or federal assistance? How will Secretary McMahon—or Bessent—encourage them to?
How high should that bar be set? Governors working on SNAP aren’t saying that only organic products qualify or that bran flakes are the only breakfast cereal worthy of subsidy. They’re actually setting quite a low bar, just evicting the worst offenders.
When it comes to schooling, some of us would be thrilled to see states set the bar high, allowing only high-performing schools and providers to participate. But that edges into nanny state territory and may discourage the innovation and dynamism that K–12 education sorely needs.
Surely, though, there should be at least a low bar—and where exactly to set it should get serious discussion and gubernatorial attention. Should doughnuts qualify for SNAP? Should schools that fail to teach the basics qualify for tax credits? Even the much-more-heavily regulated charter sector continues to run into fraud problems. So let’s get these questions into high-level policy considerations, not just disputations among ed-wonks. A good place to begin is agreeing that it’s nuts to say there should be no bar at all!
