Sponsors (2)
Introduced February 13, 2026 by Rick Crawford · Last progress February 13, 2026
The bill injects durable federal funding and program structure to expand produce incentives and improve access for low-income Americans—bolstering evidence and targeting persistent-poverty areas—but attaches restrictive funding rules, eligibility criteria, and recipient limits that could reduce local flexibility, exclude new partners, and shift costs to state and local actors.
Low-income SNAP participants will get expanded fruit-and-vegetable incentive programs scaled statewide through grants and cooperative agreements, increasing access to healthy food.
The GusNIP program receives a substantial, multi-year federal funding increase ($57.5M/year for FY2027–2031 and ongoing), providing continuity and capacity to expand incentives and related programs.
Prioritizing diverse retail settings (including independent retailers and farmers markets) will improve geographic and retail access to fresh produce in underserved urban and rural communities.
A 50% federal share cap (with narrow waiver criteria) could force more program costs onto state and local partners and retailers, limiting how much programs can scale or be sustained locally.
Requiring 90% of cooperative agreement funds to be spent on redeemed incentives sharply reduces funding flexibility for necessary administrative, evaluation, technology, and infrastructure costs to run and improve programs.
Limiting cooperative agreements to prior grant recipients risks excluding new community groups and small innovators, narrowing who can scale programs and potentially suppressing novel local approaches.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Limits federal share of nutrition-incentive grants to 50% (with a narrow waiver for persistently poor areas), adds four-year cooperative agreements to scale statewide programs, and revises produce-prescription language.
Changes to the federal nutrition-incentive program tighten and clarify how much federal funding can pay for projects, create a new multi-year cooperative-agreement option to scale statewide incentive programs, and rewrite parts of the produce-prescription program language. The bill generally caps the federal share of grant activities at 50%, but lets the Secretary waive that cap for areas shown to have persistent poverty over a 30-year lookback using specified Census data. The bill also requires four-year cooperative agreements between federal agencies (FNS or NIFA) and eligible entities working with State SNAP agencies or qualified local partners; those agreements must focus spending on redeemed incentives at eligible retailers and prioritize projects that reach varied retail settings (including independent retailers and farmers markets).