(The Center Square) – The Tennessee House of Representatives voted to ask the federal government to allow the state to remove candy and sodas from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s list of approved foods and beverages.
The bill passed 69-23 without debate late Monday.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has discussed removing the items from the program.
“It’s nonsensical for U.S. taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing junk that harms the health of low-income Americans,” Kennedy said in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in November.
The bill raised questions during a committee debate on why the focus was just on sodas.
“If you want to talk about substances that have high fructose corn syrup, that is another conversation we need to have and probably a conversation for this committee to have moving forward,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Zachary Taylor, R-Knoxville, said during a meeting of the Health Committee.
Congress will have to hammer out definitions of “soda” and “candy” according to the bill. There is also no mechanism in place to ask for the waiver.
The bill does not affect eligibility requirements for the program. More than 702,000 Tennesseans received more than $1.7 billion from the federal program in fiscal year 2023-24, according to the bill’s fiscal note.
The Senate version of the bill is in the Health and Welfare Committee.
