No American Should Go Hungry

y Washington standards, Shirley Watkins, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, should be one of the biggest political stars of the Clinton administration.

Watkins shares the hometown of Hope, Ark., with the President, and in an administration that stresses diversity, is the first African-American to hold her position. In budgetary terms, Watkins is the third most powerful official at USDA, overseeing two-thirds of the money Congress puts under its control-about $37.2 billion in fiscal 1998. Watkins directs 1,600 employees (615 in Washington and almost 1,000 in seven regional offices) and provides the money and commodities for the work of hundreds of thousands of others in state and local governments, schools and civic organizations that run soup kitchens and food banks. The beneficiaries of the programs Watkins supervises include about 20 million food stamp recipients; 26.7 million children who eat school lunches; and 7 million mothers and their babies who get food and medical assistance through the Women's, Infants' and Children's program (WIC), one of the government's most successful social welfare programs.

Watkins' impact on American nutrition goes far beyond providing food to the poor. She also is one of the Agriculture Department officials responsible for publishing the nation's dietary guidelines and telling Americans how healthy, or unhealthy, their eating habits are. Watkins plays a role in farm policy as well, because other USDA divisions charged with reducing surpluses and raising U.S. farm prices purchase most of the commodities she distributes.

Watkins, like most of her predecessors in charge of federal nutrition programs, has toiled in obscurity. Members of Congress and reporters pay more attention to officials who oversee agriculture programs, even though their budgets are much smaller. Among anti-poverty advocates, the Agriculture Department's role in welfare sometimes gets lost because people assume that the Health and Human Services Department administers the food stamp and women's and children's nutrition programs and that the Education Department is in charge of school lunches.

Over the next few years, Watkins may become more visible. The 1996 welfare reform law turned the nation's cash welfare programs into block grants to the states. But the nutrition programs remained a federal responsibility, in large part because they are supported not only by farm state legislators, but by urban House members who favor reauthorizing food stamps. Watkins says she is determined to strengthen the rural-urban bond that has protected both farm and nutrition programs since the late 1960s. The Clinton administration won a major victory in the spring when the Republican Congress agreed to restore food stamps to some legal immigrants as part of a bill to reauthorize agricultural research programs and fund crop insurance. Watkins wants to study the impact of welfare reform on other segments of the nation's poor and restore benefits to those she determines have fallen through cracks in the safety net.

Watkins says her overall goal is to create "a seamless federal nutrition safety net so that no American should go hungry."

Deep Understanding

It would be hard to find any federal official with a more personal understanding of the people federal nutrition programs are supposed to help or with deeper roots in the Agriculture Department. Watkins grew up in relatively privileged circumstances as the adopted only child of a Hope, Ark., railroad worker and his wife. Throughout her high school years, she was a cheerleader and to this day she says that some of her enthusiasm for her work came from that experience. "I loved cheering our team on to victory. And that's something I refuse to grow out of," she says. "The child in me won't let me change."

But the reality of rural Arkansas was never far away, says Watkins, who was born to a 14-year-old girl who had left her in a shoebox on the steps of her adoptive parents' house. "I have seen firsthand the cruelty of poverty and hunger," she said in a 1997 speech announcing a pilot program for North Carolina farmers to sell their produce to schools. "I learned it is not enough to feed the hungry, if you do not treat the poverty that leads to it."

The Hope schools and other public institutions still were officially segregated, she recalls, but she says the town's small size meant that blacks and whites were not that far apart.

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Arkansas in Pine Bluff, Watkins went to work in 1960 as a home demonstration agent in the University of Arkansas Extension Service. Watkins' work, which was funded by the Agriculture Department, was to help black farm women cook more nutritious meals and run their households more efficiently. She recalls with a smile that she was called a "Negro assistant home demonstration agent," because all black agents were "assistant" agents. After marrying and moving to Memphis, Watkins became a teacher and later directed nutrition services for the Memphis schools for 17 years.

In the late 1980s, she became president of the American School Food Service Association and moved the employee organization's headquarters from Denver to Washington, where its political voice could be heard. Watkins got a taste of Washington policy-making when she served on a committee that considered a Reagan administration proposal to break the link between Agriculture's commodity distribution programs and the government's purchase of commodities to stabilize farm prices. Partly at Watkins' urging, the committee decided not to break the linkage.

Watkins did not come to Washington as part of Clinton's Arkansas entourage. She had no personal ties to Clinton, who moved from Hope to Hot Springs, Ark., as a small child. Watkins came to the administration's attention through Marshall Matz, a high-powered Washington agricultural lawyer who is general counsel to the food service association. Watkins was appointed deputy assistant secretary for food and consumer services in 1993 and became deputy assistant secretary for marketing and regulatory programs in 1995. The job, which ranged from overseeing agricultural marketing orders for fruits and vegetables to grain inspection, further strengthened Watkins' ties to the agriculture community. In 1997, Watkins was appointed to the top nutrition position, which had been elevated and renamed undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services.

"No one program that I am responsible for is more important than the others," Watkins says. But managing and integrating programs that were set up at different times for different purposes, both political and nutritional, is a big challenge. While the school lunch program serves 26 million children, half of whom get free or reduced price lunches, only 2 million children are served through summer food programs. "Children don't stop being hungry just because the school doors are closed," she says, appealing to local civic groups throughout the country to set up summer feeding programs.

Watkins calls commodity distribution programs "the backbone of school meals programs" because they stretch the schools' purchasing power by providing foods bought by the government when prices are the lowest. But antiquated and intricate rules surrounding agricultural commodity distribution programs, whose original goal was reducing farm surpluses, present another challenge. Last year, Watkins started a pilot project for Indian reservations to buy different foods, including chopped bison meat, but is careful to note that these changes do not cost more or compromise nutrition.

But by far Watkins' biggest challenge is reducing fraud and abuse in the nutrition programs, particularly food stamps, which has been the subject of numerous Agriculture Department and congressional probes. In one recent report, the General Accounting Office found that the government was wasting billions of dollars because households were still receiving food stamps for deceased individuals and family members who had gone to prison. The welfare reform act included a requirement that all states convert from food stamp coupons to electronic benefit transfer (EBT) systems by 2002. Various studies have shown that EBT systems, which work like bank cards and allow the government to keep better track of food purchases, reduce the illegal resale of food stamp coupons. Twenty-three states already use EBT, and Watkins has promised Congress that all states will meet the goal of converting by 2002.

Watkins and her deputy, Julia Paradis, say that their top priority is providing food to the needy, but that accountability to Congress and the taxpayers is a close second. Paradis, a longtime USDA lawyer and former House Agriculture Committee Democratic staff aide, says few people recognize that the food stamp program has done more good for more people than any other nutrition program. "Hundreds of millions of children have had food in their tummies when they go to school," Paradis says.

Paradis says she is trying to pull together all the studies of food stamps done by academics, but that there is nothing as definitive as the 1990 USDA study of Agriculture's supplemental food program for women, infants and children. The WIC program, which provides infant formula to 45 percent of the babies born in the United States, is the most popular nutrition program with politicians, because the study showed that every dollar spent on WIC prenatal benefits saves $1.77 to $3.13 in Medicaid dollars.

Watkins' goal of figuring out which Americans need food will also require more research. The Agriculture Department has long collaborated with the Health and Human Services Department to try to create an integrated picture of the nation's poor. Welfare reform and the new role of the states will make figuring out the needs of the poor more complicated. Watkins and Paradis are, for example, trying to determine why food stamp participation has dropped faster than stiffer eligibility requirements or the declining unemployment rate would indicate, while the number of people showing up at food banks and soup kitchens has risen.

Some antipoverty advocates have speculated that social workers in some states may be telling people incorrectly that when they leave cash welfare programs they also lose their eligibility for food stamps. Others say the working poor may go to soup kitchens because it takes less time than applying for food stamps and preparing their own food.

A Tough Message

In her tenure as undersecretary, Watkins says she hopes both to fend off any renewed attacks on the nutrition programs and get the White House to support her in urging Congress to restore nutrition benefits to those she determines need them. Watkins has already learned that the Clinton White House is a hard place to find support for new programs. After research by the state of Minnesota and Harvard University showed that children who eat school breakfasts have better attendance, are less tardy, fight less in the classroom and get better grades, Watkins and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman urged President Clinton to sponsor an initiative to provide free breakfasts at school to all American children from kindergarten through the sixth grade. The Office of Management and Budget rejected the proposal as too expensive because Clinton had already promised to restore food stamp benefits for legal immigrants.

Watkins did prepare a budget-neutral child nutrition reauthorization bill, which makes minor changes such as requiring schools to provide long enough lunch hours for children to get a proper lunch. The Clinton administration's child nutrition bill is, however, the first that any president has sent to Congress in 20 years. This bill, which appears to be headed for easy passage, and Watkins' speeches, in which she tells food providers that she wants to work with them to improve food service delivery rather than tell them what to do, has won her plaudits among nutrition advocates.

Among Watkins' biggest admirers is Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington anti-poverty group that has sometimes sued USDA to force it to provide benefits to people. Weill says Watkins already has "some solid accomplishments" in the child nutrition bill and "in overhauling the rules for the summer food program to reduce red tape for sponsors and their families."

Weill says that "the way Watkins exudes energy and commitment to the children and her sense of the history of these programs" may be her biggest asset. Watkins' legacy, he says, "will be determined by how well she makes Americans, Congress and others in the government recognize widespread hunger in the midst of a booming economy."