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Besides spending tens of billions of dollars on fraud-infested programs to feed the poor, the U.S. government wastes an additional $907 million to give recipients useless “nutrition education” courses with rates of effectiveness that cannot be assessed. It marks the latest scandal to rock the government’s famously bloated and corrupt food stamp program as well as a multi-billion-dollar sister project that feeds millions of low-income women and their children.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) operates and funds both programs and spends a fortune on them annually. The grand master is food stamps, renamed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by the Obama administration to eliminate the welfare stigma. Under Obama the food stamp tab reached a ghastly $80.4 billion in one year to provide a record 46 million people with the welfare benefit. The Trump administration has reduced it a bit, but not by much. The latest USDA figures reveal the food stamp budget is hovering north of $60 billion annually to feed around 44 million people. That’s still a chunk of change. Uncle Sam spends $5.3 billion a year on the other program, which is known as Women Infants and Children (WIC). It serves around 7 million recipients and claims to “safeguard the health of low-income women, infants, and children younger than 5 who are at nutritional risk.”
Besides doling out huge sums of taxpayer dollars to feed this large demographic, the USDA dedicates extra money to school the beneficiaries about nutritional matters. The classes and counseling are conducted in daycares, grocery stores, public housing, health clinics, food banks, recreation centers and other public facilities throughout the country. In fiscal year 2017 this cost $907 million, according to a federal audit that concludes the effectiveness of the so-called “SNAPEd” cannot be aggregated or reviewed. States, which are responsible for distributing food stamps, also provide information about the educational programs in a way that “hinders the USDA’s ability to assess the effectiveness” and “determine whether SNAPEd is achieving its goals,” according to the audit, which was conducted by the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). That’s diplomatic, sugar coating for it’s a waste. The congressional watchdog further reveals that it already reviewed the USDA’s dubious nutrition education efforts a decade and a half ago and found “challenges” across the agency.
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