One of the least heralded but potentially consequential initiatives by the Obama administration has been its steady campaign against child hunger and obesity. The administration has set an ambitious goal of eliminating child hunger by 2015. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has spearheaded the Let’s Move! program, aimed at combating childhood obesity.
At an event at the National Press Club today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke in greater detail about the administration’s priorities as the Child Nutrition Act comes up for reauthorization. The centerpiece of the administration’s child nutrition push is an additional $10 billion over 10 years to improve school breakfast and lunch programs, increase child participation, and equip schools with the resources they need for student health.
One aspect of Vilsack’s presentation seemed familiar:
We cannot rest while so many of our children struggle with access to food, but the federal government will never solve this challenge alone. In the last year, educators have seen the difference that a national “race to the top” in education has made. I am pleased to announce my support for a new competition to eliminate hunger by 2015. We’ll provide competitive grants to Governors, working with stakeholders statewide, so that states can act as laboratories for successful strategies. We’ll let them be creative in experimenting with models that match program delivery with evaluation, so that we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Possible steps will include policy modifications to existing nutrition programs, enhanced outreach efforts, improved coordination between nutrition assistance programs and family supportive services, and work with community and non-profit organizations. Grants would be provided to States with prior accomplishments and commitments to reducing hunger, applications that target communities with higher prevalence of child hunger, and projects that reflect collaboration with a wide range of partners. It is only with these sorts of coordinated efforts that we will achieve our ambitious and important goals.
“Race to the Top” is, of course, the hugely successful program that the Obama administration has used to incentivize education reform across the country. By dangling the promise of federal funds, the White House has been able to push reforms in states and districts that for years had resisted change.
Vilsack’s proposal is especially familiar to us here at PPI. Our own Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, in a “Memo to the New President” last year, called for something like it:
State governments are often the testing ground for the nation’s most important policy experiments. Your administration could reward states for successful innovations in feeding the hungry and improving nutrition. For example, every three years, the USDA could finance bonuses to the five states that show the greatest reduction in the agency’s measures of food insecurity and hunger. These states could then use their winnings to expand and improve their anti-hunger programs. This would act as an incentive for other states to create truly effective hunger policies.
Vilsack’s proposal is another demonstration of the creativity with which the administration is tackling some of our pressing domestic problems. Initiatives like the one Vilsack announced today or Race to the Top may not get as much publicity on a day-to-day basis, but they may yet end up the most enduring of this administration’s accomplishments.
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