
Mississippi has received enough money to keep a federally funded nutrition program going through February despite a partial government shutdown that has paralyzed nearly a dozen federal agencies.
On Wednesday, the state Department of Health, which administers the Women, Infants and Children program, announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture had secured enough funding to keep the WIC program going for another month, even though the USDA is one of the agencies affected by the shutdown.
“Through the USDA’s flexibility with funding, our services to pregnant women and children will not be interrupted at this time, and for that we are grateful,” said Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer.
The WIC Program is a supplemental nutrition program for pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women as well as infants and children under five. 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 begun cutting services in February.
If the shutdown continues through February, services for March could be interrupted.
“Of course we will continue to monitor the situation and make plans for further delays in funding if necessary.”
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.