A federally funded program will continue providing food and nutrition assistance to nearly 100,000 Mississippi women and children through January despite the federal government shut down, according to the state Department of Health.
The United States Department of Agriculture, which funds the Women, Infants and Children program, worked with Mississippi’s Department of Health to guarantee funding for another month.
“This gives us a little breathing room,” said State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs.
The WIC Program is a supplemental nutrition program for pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women, infants and children under five years of age. WIC operates and maintains 95 distribution sites and serves 95,000 clients statewide each month. If the USDA had not worked out a deal to continue funding, the Department of Health would have had to suspend those services starting Jan. 1.
Other USDA nutritional programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and school lunch programs also have funding through January, according to the agency’s website. The Department of Agriculture will maintain meat, poultry and processed egg inspection services, and inspections of food imports and exports will also continue throughout the shutdown.
“There may be a lapse in funding for the federal government, but that will not relieve USDA of its responsibilities for safeguarding life and property through the critical services we provide,” said Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue in a statement last weekend. “…During a shutdown, we will leverage our existing resources as best we can to continue to provide the top-notch service people expect.”
According to the statement, 61 percent of USDA employees were expected to continue to work through the first week of the shutdown, but that number will decrease—and the agency will make additional program cuts—the longer the shutdown goes on.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.