[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 38 (Wednesday, March 1, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2473-H2474]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


          THE CASE FOR MAINTAINING NUTRITION FEEDING PROGRAMS

  (Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include 
extraneous material.)
  Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, it has been my privilege in recent 
years to listen and to observe some of the most lively and historical 
debates in this Chamber on issues that affect the lives and well-being 
of all the citizens of our great Nation.
  Certainly the 104th Congress is no exception, and we are again at the 
crossroads to deliberate fully--and hopefully--the merits of the 
important issues that are now before us.
  Mr. Speaker one of these issues is whether our national government 
should just eliminate the several social and nutritional programs 
currently in place, and just ``block grant'' the funding to States and 
let the State governors conduct the redistribution of the resources 
since they supposedly know better where the needs are.
  I want to share with my colleagues an article that appeared in 
yesterday's Washington Post, written by Dr. Louis Sullivan, former U.S. 
Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during the 
administration of President George Bush. Dr. Sullivan's statements are 
quite profound--in my humble opinion--as he clearly reminded all of us 
here in this Chamber to examine the merits of these programs, and let's 
not rush into a feeding frenzy by just cutting and slashing these 
programs without meaningful review and examination.
  In the WIC Program, for example, Dr. Sullivan states:

       . . . This prescriptive program has enjoyed bipartisan 
     support since it was established by such leaders as Senator 
     Bob Dole and the late Senator Hubert Humphrey. By providing 
     necessary nutrition to pregnant women, lactating mothers and 
     one-third of all children born in the United States, WIC--
     quite simply--works . . ..
       In the case of WIC, nutrition requirements guide the 
     program toward better health, and Medicaid savings, while 
     avoiding the potential confusion associated with creating a 
     complex web of 50 different State rules . . ..

  Mr. Speaker, someone once said that haste makes waste. As we 
deliberate on the fate of these social and nutritional programs that 
affect the lives of millions of families, women and children throughout 
America--let's tread carefully and let's not appeal to political 
expediency and convenience as the basis of how we make decisions in 
this important institution of our national government.
               [From the Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1995]

                          One for Our Children

                         (By Louis W. Sullivan)

       As the nation engages in debate over the future role and 
     direction of the federal government's activities in a host of 
     programs, there is much that can be learned about federal-
     state cooperation and cost effectiveness in the example of 
     one program that delivers tremendous benefits to some of the 
     most vulnerable in our society.
       The WIC Program--the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program 
     for Women, Infants and Children--has a 20-year track record 
     demonstrating how federal programs implemented by states can 
     achieve important national goals, while saving taxpayers 
     billions of dollars in preventable health care costs. In the 
     drive to streamline and improve government programs, the need 
     for WIC and WIC's success should not be obscured.
       This prescriptive program has enjoyed bipartisan support 
     since it was established by such leaders as Sen. Bob Dole and 
     the late Senator Hubert Humphrey. By providing necessary 
     nutrition to pregnant women, lactating mothers and one-third 
     of all children born in the United States, WIC--quite 
     simply--works. The program serves nearly 7 million mothers 
     and children each month at a cost of less than $1.50 a day 
     for each participating child. For that small amount, this 
     program results in significant Medicaid savings that far 
     outweigh the program's costs--by a ratio of 3-to-1, according 
     to several studies. That is clearly an overwhelming return on 
     a small national investment.
       WIC's well-documented success is founded in its rock-solid 
     nutrition standards. The foods offered must achieve 
     requirements for iron, calcium, Vitamin A, Vitamin C and 
     protein. Goals for these nutrients were selected based on 
     firmly documented scientific evidence that increasing the 
     intake of these nutrients at key junctures in fetal 
     development and in infants' lives would improve health, 
     reduce low birthweight and lower infant mortality.
       There is no question that the societal costs of 
     undernourished children are stunning. During my tenure as 
     secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human 
     Services, I recall visiting neonatal intensive care 
     facilities at hospitals in Fort Lauderdale and in Detroit. In 
     both facilities, I was saddened to observe low birthweight 
     infants who had been hospitalized for the first six months of 
     their lives. Hospital bills for these tender babies had 
     already exceeded hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've 
     always believed that the frequency of these perilous 
     beginnings of life could be reduced by proper nutrition at 
     critical stages in an infant's development.
       Those compelling experiences aided me in formulating one of 
     our major undertakings at HHS--development of the Healthy 
     people 2000 initiative. By establishing health promotion and 
     disease-prevention goals for the nation, we sought to achieve 
     realistic concrete results by the year 2000. These included 
     goals of reducing infant mortality, reducing the incidence of 
     low birthweight and increasing early prenatal care. Our 
     efforts were motivated by persuasive research documenting 
     savings of $14,000 to $30,000 for every infant born without 
     low birthweight.
       The results of WIC's short-term nutrition intervention are 
     compelling evidence that this type of preventive care works. 
     A USDA study of WIC children found a 33 percent reduction in 
     infant mortality and as much as a 23 percent reduction in 
     premature births. A 1992 GAO study found a reduction of as 
     much as 20 percent in low birthweights among WIC 
     participants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 
     documented a dramatic reduction in childhood anemia among WIC 
     participants. What's more, the GAO study found that WIC's 
     role in connecting participants to health care providers 
     produced an improvement in immunization rates among WIC 
     participants.
       Perhaps the wisest provision of WIC is that it is 
     administered by caring people at 9,000 clinics who teach 
     young mothers how to eat properly and how to feed their 
     children properly. With convenient, nutritious food, WIC 
     serves as an in-home laboratory for proper eating. For many 
     mothers, WIC is often their first course in nutrition.
       Among my concerns as we reform our welfare system is that 
     we may inadvertently strip programs of the national standards 
     and guidelines that make them work. In the case 
     [[Page H2474]] of WIC, nutrition requirements guide the 
     program toward better health, and Medicaid savings, while 
     avoiding the potential confusion associated with creating a 
     complex web of 50 different state rules. Our children's 
     health is not defined by state boundaries. Our nutritional 
     standards should not be either.
       As we come to grip with the changes voters demanded three 
     months ago, we must find ways to more effectively achieve 
     national policy goals with fewer dollars. WIC has been a real 
     success story, and it should be used as a model and not lost, 
     in the block grant debate.
                                                                    ____

               [From the Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1995]

                        Chewing on a Poor Image

                           (By Mary McGrory)

       Can Republicans blush? Now is the time if they can.
       White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta believes it is 
     possible and is embarked on a campaign to shame them for 
     their moves against the poor in the string of slash-and-burn 
     votes that made them look--as one of them said on 
     background--``more like the party of Herbert Hoover than 
     Abraham Lincoln.''
       Panetta is taking the cuts personally. He worked on many of 
     the nutrition programs himself during his 17 years in the 
     House. He worked with many Republicans who voted to dump them 
     and replace them with block grants to states.
       ``I wake up in the night and I say they can't be doing this 
     in the '90s. These are programs they have never criticized. 
     Why are they messing with programs that work? This is worse 
     than Reagan trying to call catsup a vegetable. They're saying 
     catsup is a meal, they're trying to get rid of the whole 
     meal.''
       Republicans protest that they have been misunderstood and 
     misrepresented by the Democrats. They admit they have a 
     perception problem, but say that just because a Republican-
     led House Appropriations subcommittee voted to repeal the 
     school lunch program and transferred money to the states to 
     feed children doesn't mean they don't care about hungry kids. 
     And they say booting the Women, Infants and Children feeding 
     program to the states doesn't mean heartlessness. They 
     increased funding--which critics say can be used for other 
     purposes at the discretion of the governors.
       While they were in the grip of this revolutionary fervor, 
     the Republicans also dumped the summer jobs program, which 
     Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich rightly says is an insurance 
     policy for urban peace, and have issued an eviction notice to 
     the National Service Corps, the new program that lets young 
     people be idealistic while earning money for college.
       But the tumbrels did not roll for the Food Stamps program. 
     Somehow, it escaped. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat 
     Roberts (R-Kan.) convinced House Republican leaders that food 
     stamps should be spared the guillotine, although the 
     ``Contract With America'' had prescribed it. This was the 
     first domestic setback for the November victors, who lost a 
     foreign policy round two weeks ago when balky freshmen 
     refused to finance a revival of a ``Star Wars'' antimissile 
     system.
       Panetta speaks dryly of the miraculous deliverance of food 
     stamps. While it is a good sign and shows some recognition of
      the need for the safety net, he says that ``farm 
     organizations may have had more to do with that than 
     concern for kids.''
       Unfortunately, the school lunch program has no lobby, no 
     PACs, no clout. But Panetta says that it isn't only liberal 
     Democrats who will stick up for the $11 billion program which 
     feeds breakfast and lunch to children who otherwise would 
     have to try to learn Latin on empty stomachs. Panetta has 
     sent out a call to the educational, religious and business 
     organizations that want to convince Republicans that America 
     did not vote to take bread out of children's mouths last 
     November.
       Panetta does not want to wait for the expected Senate 
     reversal of the House rampage. He thinks it has to be stopped 
     now, before the full House votes. The conventional wisdom is 
     that if the House is ``Hellzapoppin,'' the Senate is reason, 
     but Panetta wants to scotch right now the idea that it is 
     okay for ``a government to attack its own people.''
       He wants people to remember the '80s, when President Ronald 
     Reagan assaulted the school lunch program on the grounds that 
     he wanted to target the truly needy, of course. ``What 
     happened,'' says Panetta, is ``that 1,000 school cafeterias 
     shut down. The schools could not afford to keep them open, 
     and 1.2 million children did not get school lunch.''
       The fad of deifying governors and insisting that states can 
     do everything better is not new. Panetta remembers from his 
     days as a California congressman when LEAA (Law Enforcement 
     Assistance Administration) was the rage and sheriffs used 
     federal grants to buy hunting trucks instead of hiring new 
     deputies.
       He will try to rally his old House colleagues. He hopes 
     they will offer a stream of corrective amendments. Sample: 
     House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) should divert the 
     additional $600,000 he requested for office expenses to 
     school lunches.
       One governor entirely of the Panetta persuasion is Howard 
     Dean of Vermont, the Democrat who is chairman of the National 
     Governors' Association. He stormed through the Capitol, 
     holding news conferences, calling the cuts ludicrous and a 
     vote on them ``a test of decency.''
       ``You cut out school lunches, you cut down their chances to 
     learn and you increase the risk they'll end up in foster 
     homes or prison,'' says Dean, who was voted by the 
     conservative Cato Institute as the fourth most conservative 
     of the nation's governors.
     

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