Stewart Whitson, a senior director at the Foundation for Government Accountability, testified before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s DOGE subcommittee in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12. The hearing was titled “The War on Waste.”
Al Drago/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Al Drago/Getty Images
PHOENIX — As an Arizona bill to block people from using government aid to buy soda headed to the governor’s desk in April, the nation’s top health official joined Arizona lawmakers in the state Capitol to celebrate its passage.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said to applause that the legislation was just the start and that he wanted to prevent federal funding from paying for other unhealthy foods.
“We’re not going to do that overnight,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to do that in the next four years.”
Those words of caution proved prescient when Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed the bill a week later. Nevertheless, state legislation to restrict what low-income people can buy using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits is gaining momentum, boosted by Kennedy’s touting it as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” platform. At least 14 states have considered bills this year with similar SNAP restrictions on specific unhealthy foods such as candy, with Idaho and Utah passing such legislation as of mid-April.
Healthy food itself isn’t largely a partisan issue, and those who study nutrition tend to agree that reducing the amount of sugary food people eat is a good idea to avoid health consequences such as heart disease. But the question over the government’s role in deciding who can buy what has become political.
The organization largely behind SNAP restriction legislation is the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative policy think tank in Florida, and its affiliated lobbying arm, which has used the name Opportunity Solutions Project.
FGA has worked for more than a decade to reshape the nation’s public assistance programs. That includes SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, which federal data shows helps an average of 42 million people afford food each month. It also advocates for ways to cut Medicaid, the federal-state program that connects 71 million people to subsidized health care, including efforts in Idaho and Montana this year.
FGA’s proposals often seek to limit who taps into that aid and the help they receive. Those backing the group’s mission say the goal is to save tax dollars and help people lift themselves out of poverty. Critics argue that FGA’s proposals are a backdoor way to cut off aid to people who need it and that making healthy food and health care more affordable is a better fix.
Now, FGA sees more room for change under the Trump administration and the Kennedy-led health department, calling 2025 a “window of opportunity for major reform,” according to its latest annual report.
As the Arizona veto shows, opportunity isn’t a guarantee of success, reflecting the FGA’s history of policy hits and misses.
A vision for limiting government benefits
Tarren Bragdon, a former Maine legislator, founded FGA in 2011 to promote policies to “free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream,” he said in a statement on FGA’s website. The main foundation started out as a staff of three with about $60,000 in the bank. As of 2023, it had a budget of more than $15 million and a team of roughly 64, according to the latest available tax documents, and that’s not counting the lobbying arm.
The foundation got early funding from a grant from the State Policy Network, which has long backed right-leaning think tanks with ties to conservative activists including brothers Charles and David Koch.
FGA declined several interview requests for this article.
In recent years, the nonprofit helped draft a 2017 Mississippi law, the Jackson Free Press found, which intensified eligibility checks for public aid that made it more difficult for some applicants to qualify. It successfully pushed a 2023 effort in Idaho to impose work requirements for food benefits that health care advocates said led some recipients to lose access.
The same year, the group helped pass SNAP restrictions affecting eligibility in Iowa. Since those restrictions have taken effect, the Food Bank of Iowa has seen a record number of people show up at its pantries amid rising grocery prices and a scaling back of COVID pandemic-era federal support, said Annette Hacker, a vice
