Trump administration grants waiver for Nebraska to restrict sugary drinks from SNAP

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is congratulating herself and President Trump for hastily granting a first-of-its-kind waiver to the state of Nebraska to make sugary drinks and energy drinks ineligible for purchase through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The waiver for this pilot program has to be understood in the context of everything Rollins, Kennedy, Trump, Musk, DOGE, and House Republicans are doing to undermine nutrition, food safety, and health, hitting people with limited budgets the hardest. They’ve cut programs that provide fresh produce to food banks and schools. They’re raising the price of groceries with erratic tariffs. They’ve worked to make our food less safe from Salmonella. They have upended the entire biomedical research enterprise in this country, potentially delaying cures for disease. They’ve eliminated childhood lead poisoning prevention.  They now want to slash SNAP, proposing cutting benefits and restricting purchases, while taking away healthcare from millions of Americans with cuts to Medicaid.  

We agree that it is crucial that SNAP improves the health of its participants. However, data is lacking on what would happen to SNAP households under sugary drink restrictions because they have never been piloted among SNAP participants, and the potential benefits to participants could be outweighed by potential harms, such as increased stigma that would lead participants to stop using the SNAP program altogether.  

What is certain is that the many assaults on the safety of our food supply and the drastic cuts in access to the SNAP program will have an adverse effect upon Americans’ health. If these SNAP restrictions are merely a way to reach budget-cutting goals, the hollowness of the administration’s purported commitment to the health of poorer Americans will be fully exposed.

We’re not big fans of soda or other sugary drinks, and they do promote disease in children and adults. But given everything the administration is doing to make Americans sicker, hungrier, and less safe, the granting of this waiver seems like more gratuitous cruelty toward the most vulnerable people in the country.