Mr. President, I remember being a new mom and then a new grandma, and all you want to do is hold your baby close and savor every single moment. Instead, parents across the country right now are in a…
Mr. President, I remember being a new mom and then a new grandma, and all you want to do is hold your baby close and savor every single moment. Instead, parents across the country right now are in a panic--forced to search high and low to find baby formula, the safe baby formula that they need, any safe baby formula.
Almost half of all of our babies born in the United States receive their baby formula through a really important program called WIC--the Women, Infants, and Children program--that we are so proud of, and it is something that has made sure that safe baby formula and healthy food is available for pregnant moms and for babies throughout the first years of a baby's life. So, as all of this has happened now with this emergency--and it is a huge emergency, a huge crisis--there are no options here when children--you know, when babies need to eat. When babies are born, they need safe baby formula.
This has been an ``all hands on deck'' moment for all of us. That is why, as chair of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee--and I am so proud the Presiding Officer is a member of our committee, is a very valued member of our committee--I am joined with our ranking member, John Boozman, to introduce legislation today to make sure that the USDA can be as flexible as possible in getting our moms and dads and, most importantly, babies the critical baby formula that they need right now.
We are doing this in conjunction with the House, which also has bipartisan legislation. It is my understanding that they will be voting on that soon, and I am hopeful that we can do the same thing. This should be something that brings us all together as quickly as possible.
As an example, the reason we need the bill dealing with WIC--and there is a lot and so much positive that comes from this program. But right now, we make sure that there are safety standards, high-quality safety standards, and that we negotiate, through a competitive process, the best price for moms and babies, but we now need to have flexibility so when a family--for instance, maybe, in Traverse City, MI, or in Lansing or in Detroit--goes to a grocery store and there is only one brand on the shelf and it is not the brand under the WIC contract, that they can buy it. If that is the only thing available, they need to be able to use their WIC support to be able to purchase that.
That is something that our USDA Secretary has jumped into gear to be able to make that happen, but we have got to make sure that that can continue, or we have got to make sure if a parent, again, goes to the store and there are different sizes of formula cans or different prescriptions that normally would not fit under the WIC contract, that they can waive those because we have to be able to get whatever is safe baby formula to families as quickly as possible.
These may sound like small things, but they are the difference right now between whether or not our families on WIC are able to actually get the formula that they need.
In order to make sure that that continues, we have introduced legislation that will guarantee that the flexibilities the USDA needs will continue beyond the public health pandemic flexibilities that they are currently operating under. They have short-term flexibilities because of the public health pandemic. We want to make sure this is permanent and that whether it is a recall, a safety recall, a supply chain breakdown--whatever it is--that, with all hands on deck, the USDA has the capacity--the authority, the tools--to be able to move forward and make sure that they can respond as quickly as possible.
We also want to guarantee that formula manufacturers that want to compete for these WIC contracts have a plan in place to respond to any kind of shortage so we don't have this situation happen again. There is just no excuse, frankly, for what happened here.
I want to thank Secretary Vilsack and the USDA for moving quickly once they were notified about the Abbott plant shutdown.
I am deeply concerned that they were not given a heads-up earlier. The FDA was working for months, evidently--for a few months--with Abbott around concerns as it related to the safety standards and so on at the plant, and the USDA needed to know sooner so that they could prepare sooner. They understand how serious this is, what an emergency it is. So, when they found out, they went immediately into gear to make sure that our moms and babies, if at all possible, in any way possible, could get what they need. That has to be a top priority, not just for the moms and babies on WIC; all moms, all parents, all babies need to make sure that it is an ``all hands on deck'' and that we are moving as fast as possible.
That is why I also want to thank President Biden and the FDA for working with other baby formula manufacturers to increase supplies.
Supplies are going up. I am very anxious to see more manufacturers of baby formula. I think we, as in every area, it seems, of our economy, have too much consolidation--that is certainly true here--and we need more competition, and we need more baby formula manufacturers competing for our contracts. We need to have a contract that gives the best price to WIC's moms and dads and babies, but we need to make sure that we have as many large and small companies that are competing for that to be able to make sure that we have the formula available and that we are getting the very best price.
I also want to thank them for carefully and thoughtfully opening up imports from the European Union. We certainly have other countries that have the same very high safety standards that we do. We have got to make sure that anything that comes in is of the very highest safety standard.
We know that, right now, we have got to make sure that baby formula is on the shelf. Children--babies--need this every day, not ``let's wait a month or 2 months.'' This is like today that this needs to be happening. Again, there needs to be a sense of urgency to do whatever we can related to this issue and look at all aspects of it to make sure that this does not happen again, if at all possible. This should not be happening again.
Within our WIC bill, we are focused on what we can do to support the USDA to have the maximum flexibilities to support moms and babies and on what we can do to make sure the manufacturers are prepared if something
like this were to happen--some shortage--down the road. We need to make sure that we are looking at every aspect of this and acting now, as fast as possible, and then preparing for the future.
I want to thank, again, Senator Boozman and welcome all of our Members on both sides of the aisle to join us in what, I hope, will be legislation that moves very, very quickly.
The Access to Baby Formula Act is something that every single Member of the U.S. Senate should be supporting so that we can move this legislation out as quickly as possible, working with the House, and getting this done.
