At the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed cutting $17 billion in research funding at the National Institutes of Health, $400 million from the Food and Drug Administration, and $550 million from the Centers for Disease Control. In addition to eliminating thousands of jobs, the budget proposal says the agency is “terminating, de-scoping or non-renewing over 5,000 contracts, resulting in significant savings.” It proposes allocating $500 million to a new “MAHA Initiative,” which will now also house programs dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease and childhood lead poisoning prevention that were formerly run by the CDC.

Given the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) broad reach, its proposed cuts would likely have the biggest immediate impact on farmers and eaters. The agency is proposing a $6.7 billion cut in discretionary spending across the board, including a whopping $784 million from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), where funds would drop from $896 million to $112 million. The savings mainly come from eliminating discretionary funds for conservation technical assistance, a term for USDA employees who help farmers do things like plant cover crops and install fencing. In the document, the agency says the NRCS will fund technical assistance through other sources and operate “with efficiencies that reflect greater reliance on state and local conservation districts.”

The USDA’s budget also zeros out future funding for the popular McGovern-Dole international food aid program which buys food from American farms for school meals in low-income countries. It cuts $600 million in research funding for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and proposes rolling back a pandemic-era change to the Supplemental Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that allowed families to buy more fruits and vegetables.

In an emailed statement, National WIC Association president Georgia Machell said the change would lead to a drop in average monthly benefits from $54 to $13 for breastfeeding mothers and $27 to $10 for young children. “Reducing the [benefit] significantly hinders access to fruits and vegetables for low-income mothers and young children at nutritional risk, the very populations this program was designed to protect,” she said. (Link to this post.)