GARY, INDIANA – Driving through Northwest Indiana feels a bit like going back in time. Winding roads, barns, and lush green fields in the rural farm communities give way to hulking steel mills, tall smokestacks, massive warehouses, and art deco movie palaces as you hit Gary. Look a little closer, though, and the ’50s ideal of country life leading into the big city becomes hazier. The movie palace, home of the 2002 Miss USA pageant (run by an impresario named Donald Trump), is boarded up, the windows broken. The jobs, or at least most of them, are gone, along with many of the people who worked at them.


Many of those in this region rely on government aid in some way, whether it be farm subsidies or social safety net benefits like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In Indiana, 1 out of every 11 residents receives SNAP benefits. The state’s staunchly Republican government has made a practice of canceling or defunding safety-net programs, but this year there was a twist. In April, Gov. Mike Braun allied himself with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, signing nine executive orders for the Make Indiana Healthy Again initiative.

One of those executive orders empowered the state to submit a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), asking for authorization to restrict what low-income Hoosiers who receive SNAP benefits can purchase. In May, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins approved the waiver. Starting in January, SNAP recipients in Indiana won’t be able to use SNAP to buy candy or sugary drinks like soda and some juices.

So far, Indiana is one of six states that have been approved by the USDA to ban sugary foods from SNAP, but experts say that they’re monitoring at least eight others that might follow suit. Earlier this year, eight House Republicans introduced a bill that would do the same thing.