Arkansas is set to implement a ban on using government food aid for candy and soda purchases starting Wednesday, despite a federal judge’s recent ruling that similar restrictions in other states violated federal law.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the plan on Monday, citing an urgent need to combat America’s "chronic disease epidemic," which includes high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Sanders highlighted a perceived contradiction within state operations, stating, "on one floor of the state’s Department of Human Services, our state has been approving food stamp purchases for soft drinks and candy, while on another floor, our state’s Medicaid program is paying to treat the chronic diseases those products can help create."
The program in question, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is federally funded and state-run, providing a monthly stipend for low-income families to buy groceries. It serves nearly 42 million Americans, approximately one in eight.
The governor’s office referenced Stanford University research suggesting that restricting sugary drink purchases with SNAP could reduce obesity and type-2 diabetes rates. However, overall research on whether SNAP purchase restrictions improve diet quality and health remains mixed.
Debates over eligible SNAP purchases are common among lawmakers. While benefits currently cannot be used for hot prepared foods, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has introduced a bill to allow SNAP to cover rotisserie chickens from grocery stores.
Arkansas is one of 23 states with a waiver to restrict some sugary food and drink purchases. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have advocated for the ban as part of the "Make America Healthy Again" campaign. The specific rules vary among states, with some aiming to ban both sugary drinks and candy, while others focus solely on beverages.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington vacated the USDA's approval of pilot projects that implemented new SNAP restrictions in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The judge clarified that her ruling was not a judgment on the program’s merits, but rather found that the projects were not permitted under the cited statute and that the USDA failed to follow its own regulations for implementing a pilot project.
Arkansas’s program is being implemented under the same regulations that the judge vacated. Georgetown University law professor David Super noted that federal district courts generally no longer issue nationwide injunctions after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year.
Still, he described Arkansas’s decision to proceed as "putting that to the extreme test." Governor Sanders acknowledged the ruling in her announcement but affirmed, "Arkansas is moving full speed ahead, because we won’t wait around while our people get less and less healthy and we spend more and more taxpayer dollars trying to fix the problem."
Implementing these changes presents challenges for retailers. Steve Goode, executive director of the Arkansas Grocers and Retail Merchants Association, expressed uncertainty about how prepared the state’s businesses are for the new rules, calling it a "big change" from years of consistent SNAP benefit procedures.
He noted that some members with stores in other states have successfully implemented similar restrictions. To assist, Arkansas has hired a third-party vendor to create a list of banned items for stores, a resource not always available in other states. Additionally, the state has developed an app for SNAP beneficiaries to help them determine which purchases are eligible.
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