| ||||||
President's Vetoes Could Cause Half a Million Low-Income Pregnant Women, Infants, and Children to be Denied Nutritional Benefits in One of Nation's Most Effective Programs |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: WIC is widely regarded as one of the most effective programs at any level of government, and there has long been a bipartisan commitment --- adhered to by previous congresses and by both the Clinton and Bush administrations until now --- to provide sufficient funding to serve all eligible, women, infants, and children who apply. Now, however, the Bush Administration's insistence on limiting overall funding for domestic discretionary programs to the level proposed in the President's budget --- and the President's vow to veto the agriculture appropriations bill because it exceeds the level his budget proposed for that bill --- is raising the specter of substantial cuts in the program. If funding for WIC, along with other domestic discretionary programs, is reduced to the level the President has proposed, the number of low-income women, infants, and children served by the program will have to be cut by more than 500,000 below the current level. The President proposed a fiscal year 2008 funding level for WIC of $5.387 billion, which was intended to serve an average monthly caseload of 8.28 million participants. Given the level of funding being provided for the defense, homeland security, and international appropriations bills, the amount of funding left within the President's $933 limit for the eight domestic appropriations bills is $16.4 billion below the level provided those bills for 2007, adjusted for inflation. In other words, the President is planning to veto the domestic appropriations bills unless they contain $16.4 billion in cuts. In contrast, the domestic appropriations bills that Congress has developed contain increases of about $5 billion.
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
