With the Sept. 30 federal fiscal year deadline fast approaching, the House Appropriations Committee has begun advancing its fiscal year 2025 spending bills for each of the federal government’s departments and agencies.
The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee on June 11 approved its 2025 spending bill, including important dairy priorities in next year’s funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
The measure’s full spending details will become available when the full committee takes it up later this month, but it includes NMPF-supported language to reverse the reduction in the maximum monthly milk allowance in USDA’s final foods package rule for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which helps mothers and young children have access to key nutrients they otherwise may lack. NMPF is concerned that the final rule will decrease that access via a lower milk maximum.
Outside of the annual spending process, Representatives Elise Stefanik, R-NY, Josh Harder, D-CA, and Derrick Van Orden, R-WI, introduced the bipartisan Protecting Mothers and Infants’ Access to Milk Act on June 26. This bill would reverse the reduction in the WIC maximum monthly milk allowance for the long term, without modifying any other portion of USDA’s final WIC foods package rule. NMPF will work with the bill’s sponsors to advance this bipartisan effort.
