President George Bush requested $4.1 billion for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). This amount is more than $100 million short of what is needed to fund everyone who qualifies for the program, which is overwhelmingly working people.

Recent figures show that more than 7 million people participate every month in the program, which provides milk, infant formula, and other foods and nutrition counseling to pregnant women, mothers of infants, infants, and children up to five years old. WIC also provides screening and referrals to other health, welfare, and social services.

One in four new mothers, 45 percent of all infants, and nearly 25 percent of all children under five years of age participate in the program.

WIC is not an entitlement program--one in which Congress guarantees to set aside funds to make it possible for every eligible person to receive the aid--but rather a federal grant program for which Congress votes to authorize a certain amount of funding each year. If the funds don't cover all those qualified to receive the benefits, then some of them don't receive it.

In early discussions on the White House budget proposal, Bush said it would provide funds to maintain the "current program level" for the fiscal year. When the figures came out, however, the president's request was $110 million short of what is necessary to maintain the current demand for nutritional aid.

The WIC program was founded in 1974, during the first worldwide recession in decades. Its passage was part of the expansion of the social wage won by working people through two previous decades of civil rights struggle by Blacks, which smashed Jim Crow segregation and wrested social and economic concessions benefitting the entire working class.

The first food supplement program was the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, established in 1934 during the Great Depression, when hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers had difficulty buying food and when many farmers produced food for which they could not find buyers.

That year, three major labor battles rocked the country--the Teamsters organizing drive in Minneapolis, the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, and the West Coast longshore strike. Within five years 13 million people were eating federally provided surplus foods.

The first national school lunch program was established by Congress in 1946, during the post–World War II labor upsurge. Congress passed the first permanent food stamp program in 1964.  
 
 
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