The strange story of a 17-year $41-million food stamp research agenda, developed under the influence of OMB's "Expect More" campaign

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) recently published a contractor's astonishing design (.pdf) for a 17-year $41-million agenda of research to evaluate the Food Stamp Program's impact on hunger and dietary quality.

After the first 12 years and $31-million investment in developing the nonexperimental research methodology, the contractor reported blandly, the project could not "guarantee that a reliable nonexperimental evaluation will be possible." So, at that point, all of the effort so far might have been fruitless.

When I heard the contractor present this proposal at a USDA meeting this month, I expected the officials at FNS to sputter and guffaw at the implausible time line and budget (several times the total annual food assistance research budget at USDA). Instead, the FNS officials smiled and nodded and struck a pose of reasonable and deliberative skepticism.

There had to be a backstory.

Under the new banner "Expect More", the federal government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) publishes controversial evaluations of federal government programs. These evaluations, which are sometimes ridiculed even by leading experts within OMB, are widely perceived as a political exercise to justify imminent White House proposals for program cuts.

In the world of food assistance programs, the National School Lunch Program received the dreaded classification, "results not demonstrated." The larger Food Stamp Program fared much better, earning a classification from OMB of "moderately effective" -- this rating despite the fact that the program's goal is to reduce food insecurity and hunger, and federal statistics show the prevalence of these social ills have been increasing during every year of the current administration.

When I first read the favorable rating of the Food Stamp Program on OMB's predecessor to the "Expect More" website a couple years ago, it occurred to me that the political folks in OMB may have been too cowardly to state the obvious: the current food assistance programs are not sufficient to halt the increase of hunger in America. Far from justifying program cuts to the popular Food Stamp Program, the confession of failure implied by an OMB rating of "results not demonstrated" might have convinced the American political establishment to strengthen these programs.

Or worse (from the administration's perspective), if food stamps were declared officially ineffective, somebody might eventually have asked whether any program that merely distributes food benefits would suffice to stop the rise of hunger in an economic and political environment where increasing wealth for the few and deteriorating welfare for the many are accepted with complacency. Maybe hunger simply follows hopelessness as naturally in real life as it does in the dictionary.

But back to my story.... I had missed reading the important small print in OMB's assessment of the Food Stamp Program. Cognizant of the statistical ironies in its evaluation, OMB instructed USDA's Food and Nutriton Service (FNS), which oversees federal food assistance programs, to develop new studies "to demonstrate the impact of program participation on hunger and dietary status."

One imagines that OMB staff expected FNS to propose a scientific evaluation, perhaps with random assignment of program participants to several variants of the program, so that one could be sure the program parameters -- rather than confounding variables -- were responsible for the observed outcomes. However, it is almost a matter of religion at FNS that random assignment research designs are illegal or unethical (I doubt both points, while admitting that some such designs are illegal or unethical, and will continue to post on this topic in the future. I know that the same contractor has in the past articulated the logic in favor of serious random assignment research designs for such programs).

FNS gave the task of developing a research agenda in response to a contractor, Abt Associates, with a long history of competent research on food assistance programs. FNS and a committee of outside experts both gave the contractor the self-contradictory instructions that it could not rely on random assignment research design, and yet it had to take the problem of confounding variables in nonexperimental research very seriously. Only in this light can you see how the contractor could see its resulting proposal as reasonable. If random assignment is off the table, and yet the nonexperimental research design must solve the tough challenge that random assignment solves, one would have to first spend an immense effort -- 12 years and $31 million, as it turns out -- just to make sure the nonexperimental approach works properly. See the figure below for an illustration of the research plan's many individual studies.

So, that explains the contractor's astonishing proposal, but what explains the cheerful response from the FNS officials who requested the report? None of the FNS officials said it explicitly, but I doubt a single one of them believes this research plan will be implemented.

There may have been two reasons they liked the report. First, everybody praised the report for laying out the research issues clearly and honestly.

Second, the report may have served a rhetorical purpose in FNS' dealings with OMB. By publishing the report on the FNS website, they are saying to OMB: "You want a study of the impact of food stamps? Here you go. Let us spend $41 million chasing this one down, and we'll give you the answer in 17 years. Then, if the results are unfavorable, we can start discussing program cuts at that time."

More food policy children's music

In response to earlier posts on children's music with nutrition themes, the comments have some fine additions. Barbara from Tigers and Strawberries and the new Paper Palate (part of the Well Fed network) suggests "On Top of Spaghetti" and, from the old Schoolhouse Rock, "Hanker for a Hunk of Cheese." Devont, the children's music weblogger (yes there does exist a specialist children's music weblogger) offers his favorite quote from Timer, the wedge of cheese in the Schoolhouse Rock piece.

A student writes to recommend Dr. Carl Winter's food safety music site. The web page claims he is a "serious toxicologist," but we suspect he actually has a bit of a silly streak.

Food assistance programs reach record spending levels

According to the March 2006 Food Assistance Landscape from USDA's Economic Research Service:

National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness

The National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness is holding its East Coast Summit this weekend, at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. I will be speaking in a panel at 10:15 am Saturday about food assistance programs and federal anti-hunger policy.

Columnist Michelle Holmes: Put some strings on food stamp entitlement

The Post-Tribune's Michelle Holmes writes:

In modern-day America, it’s obesity, not starvation, that is harming kids and killing people who should be in their prime.

But food stamps are still buying soda pop, potato chips and deep-fried frozen dinners — and according to cashiers, buying them in droves (the U.S. government can’t be bothered to track purchases).

It’s the all-American irony: Our land of riches is killing us, especially our poorest and most vulnerable.

That’s why it’s time to put some strings on this entitlement, which, in Indiana, has shot up 85 percent in the last five years alone.

In the most interesting sections of the column, however, Holmes gives her main thesis a second thought.

It’s a taboo topic. Politicians and decent folk duck it like the plague. There’s an ugly tone about the question, that conjures up the sentiment: I can have my cake, but you can’t eat yours, too.

Yet what’s wrong with limiting junk food to 10 percent of benefits? Why not reserve 15 percent for fresh fruits and vegetables? Why not say we want our billions to go to building healthy bodies and strong brains, not diabetes, cancer and heart disease?

My friend Aletha, who often uses food stamps to get by, argues it’s cruel and un-American to single out the poor for the nutritional police.

“Nobody ever listens to that darn food pyramid,” she argues. She’s making efforts — weaning herself from the cheap, empty calories so appealing in the freezer case when her benefits come in. But that’s her choice to make, not mine, she argues.

“If you let the government intrude into food choices, where are they going to draw the line?”

I understand her sentiments.

I fear I may be one of the "polititians and decent folk" Holmes has in mind. What bad company those decent folk keep!

Food stamps and risk of obesity

While previous research suggested an association between Food Stamp Program participation and obesity for women, more recent data suggest this association may be weakening for some women, USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) reported this month.

Unfortunately, the reason for the narrowing gap is that the risk of obesity has been worsening for low-income nonparticipant women, while it has been holding steady at a high level for women who participate in the Food Stamp Program.

In the February issue of the agency's Amber Waves magazine, Michele Ver Ploeg, Lisa Mancino, and Biing-Hwan Lin wrote:

Among women, food stamp participants are not getting relatively heavier over time. Rather, BMI has grown more among eligible nonparticipants -- and even among women with higher incomes -- than for food stamp recipients. This is especially true for non-Hispanic White women. In 1976-80 and 1988-94, White women who participated in food stamps had greater BMI and were more likely to be overweight and obese than eligible nonparticipants and those with higher incomes. By 1999-2002, these differences had largely disappeared; the only exception was that White women in the moderate/high income group were still less likely to be obese than food stamp recipients. The closing of the BMI gap is due to changes in weight status by nonparticipatingng women -- the average BMI of food stamp recipients remained steady. For non-Hispanic Black women and Mexican-American women, the trends are not as striking, but the general picture is the same.

Among Non-Hispanic White women, body mass index (BMI) has held steady for Food Stamp Program participants while continuing to increase for nonparticipants.


Source: USDA Economic Research Service

Boston Globe on candy in school

Tracy Jan writes about candy in school in today's Boston Globe. The article (in the news section) makes the case against banning candy sales in schools, on grounds that kids will bring their own candy in.

The headline is: "A sweet tooth is tough to pull -- Even when schools ban candy machines, pupils indulge."

Rhetorically, the article sets the candy sales bans up for failure by comparing them to an unrealistic goal -- the ability to "control" all of what students eat.

Like Mildred Avenue in Dorchester, dozens of schools across the Bay State -- including some in Natick, Framingham, Billerica, and Marlborough -- offer vending machines stocked exclusively with healthy choices.

But a lunchtime visit to Mildred Avenue yesterday showed that school officials and lawmakers cannot control what students eat by changing what is sold in vending machines. Children bring candy and other snacks from home or buy them on their way to school. And they don't think the proposed law would change their eating habits.

I think any sensible advocate for candy sales bans would say the goals are to reduce the ubiquitous presence of candy sales, and to end the hypocrisy of having adults in school preach good nutrition and at the same time make money selling candy to the kids, all during an epidemic of childhood obesity. The candy sales bans look to me like great policy, by those more realistic standards.

Jan's next paragraph makes things worse by quoting, without rebuttal, a student's justification for preferring to keep candy sales in school.

'Sometimes, we have headaches and we need sugar in our heads," said Yarmisha Cofield, a Mildred Avenue seventh-grader who ate the $1.29 tube of sour candy and only picked at her school lunch of fried chicken.

In terms of policy, the article makes a fairly toothless "compromise" bill under consideration today in the Massachusetts Senate look good by comparison to the stronger bill under consideration in the House. Most nutritionists would consider the sports drinks that are permitted under the Senate bill to be little better than the caloric sodas the bill prohibits.