WIC Must be Modernized to Serve More Families and Address the National Crisis in Food Security

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Families with small children are facing an unprecedented food crisis as the United States confronts a serious infant formula shortage. For those using the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the formula crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed troubling questions about the access and availability of food benefits in the program. This is a critical moment for WIC to assess how it delivers food and other services to ensure that barriers are lowered for the most vulnerable communities in our country.

Technology is a key part of the solution — and today, a coalition of experts is releasing the Wiring WIC Report, which outlines numerous recommendations for leveraging technology to strengthen WIC, an essential safety net program that enrolls nearly 50% of infants born in America. Leading voices in public health, technology, and nutrition policy will discuss the recommendations at a virtual symposium this afternoon; featured speakers include Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and Stacy Dean, the Deputy Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For more details about the symposium, visit www.wiringwic.org.

The report grows out of the WIC Health and Technology Initiative — a collaborative project of New America, the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the MIT Media Lab, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Aetna Foundation. In 2017, the initiative convened experts in public health, nutrition, design, and technology at the MIT Media Lab engaging in “out of the box” thinking to identify interventions for “wiring” WIC with the best available technology, exploring a range of opportunities to leverage mobile phones, apps, the internet, social media, texting, video-conferencing, and other platforms to boost enrollment and increase retention in the program.

In the intervening years, as insights from the 2017 conference were refined into pragmatic recommendations, it has become ever more apparent that WIC must be modernized. Despite WIC’s track record of accomplishments, the program is not reaching or meeting the needs of all eligible families. In 2019, only 57 percent of eligible people participated in WIC. Alarmingly, as children grow older, fewer participate in the program, with a sharp decline after infancy. While 98% of eligible infants are enrolled in WIC, only 25% of eligible 4-year-olds participate in the program

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of nearly every sector of society, from business to education to healthcare. Yet WIC struggled to make its benefits accessible to all who qualified. Participants had trouble getting the nutritious food they needed when essential components of the program — such as shopping for WIC-eligible foods or attending in-person recertification appointments to maintain eligibility — became increasingly difficult due to lockdowns, food supply shortages, and clinic shut-downs. The ongoing formula crisis has further underscored the urgent need to expand access to WIC to all low-income families who qualify.

“As we’ve seen over the past few weeks of watching the infant formula crisis unfold, families who depend on WIC are especially vulnerable to shortages of essential foods, especially during a supply chain crisis and what occurred during the pandemic,” said Dr. Susan Blumenthal, Director of the Health Innovations Lab at New America and former U.S. Assistant Surgeon General. “Our research identifying new ways to ‘wire’ WIC holds tremendous promise. We believe that modernizing the program through technology in combination with in-person services will expand WIC’s reach and impact, increasing participation and retention and importantly helping to reduce food insecurity and obesity in America. We believe that implementing these recommendations will help millions more young children get a healthy start in life. Dr. Blumenthal underscored that “modernizing WIC as a technology-enhanced, human-centered program is an opportunity to improve the nutrition, health, and economic security of millions of people in the U.S., and as a result, strengthen America’s future now and in the years ahead.”

“Our responses to the unrelenting pandemic of obesity and diabetes must begin during pregnancy and infancy, so enhancing the WIC experience for participants and maximizing its effectiveness should be a high national priority,” said Dr. Walter C. Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“The Wiring WIC Health and Technology Initiative presents strategies to help reduce food insecurity and obesity for millions of Americans by leveraging cutting-edge technologies in the service of society,” said Dr. Dava Newman, Director of the MIT Media Lab. “Our team works to create experiences, concepts, and innovative technologies and tools that might seem impossible, but that serve as enablers for people to transform their lives and communities. The recommendations from the Wiring WIC Initiative open the door to transformations that could help families and children across the nation have a healthier future.”

This virtual symposium precedes the upcoming White House Conference on hunger, nutrition, and health to be held this September, an important opportunity to further explore how to strengthen WIC and expand access to the program now and in the years ahead.

About the WIC Health and Technology Initiative

Members

Rear Admiral Susan J. Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.A. (ret,) directs the Health Innovations Lab and is a senior fellow in Health Policy at New America. For more than two decades, Dr. Blumenthal provided distinguished service as a leading federal government medical expert, as an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, and as a spokesperson in the administrations of four U.S. Presidents. She served as assistant surgeon general of the United States, the first-ever deputy assistant secretary for women's health, and was senior global and e-health advisor in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Dr. Blumenthal was also a White House health advisor, the medical advisor to the Secretary, USDA, chief of the Behavioral Medicine and Basic Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, and chair of the Health and Behavior Coordinating Committee at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Blumenthal serves as the Co-Founder and Public Health Director of Beat the Virus, a social media campaign and COVID-19 resource hub. She has received numerous awards, honorary doctorates and medals for her contributions to advancing health.

Walter C. Willett, M.D., Dr. P. H., is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Willett studied food science at Michigan State University, and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School before obtaining a Master and Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Willett has focused much of his work over the last 40 years on the development and evaluation of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases. Dr. Willett has published over 2,000 original research papers and reviews, and is the most cited nutritionist internationally.

Dava Newman, Ph.D. is the director of the MIT Media Lab. She holds the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is a Harvard–MIT Health, Sciences, and Technology faculty member in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow (a chair for making significant contributions to undergraduate education); and was the former Director of the Technology and Policy Program at MIT (2003–2015) and Director of the MIT–Portugal Program (2011–2015, 2017-2021). As the Director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP), she led this unique multidisciplinary graduate program with over 1,300 alums and faculty advisors from all 5 Schools across the Institute. She has been a faculty leader in Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT’s School of Engineering for 28 years. Dr. Newman holds a top-secret clearance and was unanimously confirmed to the post of NASA Deputy Administrator in 2015, after being nominated by President Barack Obama.

About WIC

For nearly 50 years, WIC has served as an indispensable resource for low-income families, helping safeguard the health of low-income pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age 5 who are at nutritional risk by providing nutritious foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating including breastfeeding promotion and support, and referrals to health care. In 2020, the program served 6.2 million people with a budget of $4.9 billion. WIC is administered at the federal level by the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is administered at the state and local level by 89 WIC state agencies.