The Fifth Risk(21)

Concannon viewed his job in Oregon simply: to make benefits more easily available to people who qualified for them. Minimize the red tape. Promote the programs. Change the culture that dispensed them from one of suspicion to one of sympathy. From Oregon, at the behest of yet another governor, he returned home to Maine, to run all of the public-health and nutrition programs. There he displayed yet again his unusual gift for finding and slaking need. For instance, he noticed that a lot of people without health insurance in the state were failing to fill their prescriptions, because they couldn’t afford the drugs. In northern Maine, people were crossing the border into Canada, where they could buy the same drugs from the same companies at a fraction of the cost. He thought the situation both outrageous and economically inefficient: help people prevent a stroke and you could avoid the far greater expense of caring for them after they had one. He created a program, Maine Rx, that extended the cheaper Medicaid prices of drugs to people who were well above the poverty line. Within three months, 100,000 people had signed up. (The drug companies challenged the program, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, which mandated some changes. It is now called Maine Rx Plus.)

In 2003, at the request of Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, he left Maine for Iowa. In his six years there, he raised the number of Iowans receiving food stamps by 68 percent.

There was more. But it was getting late.

“Are you cold?” I ask, hopefully.

“No,” he says, “but if you are . . .”

We move back inside, to his kitchen table. He locates a plate of freshly baked banana bread and puts it in front of me. I try not to stare at it. Dry banana bread I find inedible. Moist, sticky banana bread I find hard to resist. His banana bread glistens.

There are people who would seek to dismiss his entire enterprise with a single line: Why should my hard-earned dollars go to feed anyone else? They’d see Kevin Concannon as the King of Handouts. A promoter of sloth and indolence.

But the facts of the program he ran for eight years are innocent: its average benefit is just $1.40 cents a meal. Eighty-seven percent of that money goes to households with children, the disabled, and elderly. “The idea that we are going to put these people to work is nonsense.” Able-bodied adults on food stamps are required to work, or attend job training, for at least twenty hours a week. The nation’s private food banks dispense about $8 billion in food each year, while $70 billion in food is provided through food stamps: private charity alone will not feed everyone who needs feeding. The problem with the program is not that people are cheating it. The problem with the program is that people who should be on it are not.

Kevin Concannon had done a lot to fix it: He’d raised the participation rate of the poor people who qualified for it from 72 percent to 85 percent. And he’d reduced fraud rates to all-time lows. But the myths about the food-stamp program—that food stamps can be used in casinos, or to buy alcohol and tobacco, for instance—persisted.

I reach for a slice of banana bread. “Anything else you worried about?” I ask.

“School nutrition,” he says, without missing a beat.

One week after being sworn in, Sonny Perdue staged a public event at a school in Leesburg, Virginia. The Obama administration had pushed successfully to raise the nutritional requirements of school meals fed to thirty million American schoolchildren, for the first time in twenty years. To receive federal subsidies for the meals they serve, schools are now required to behave more like responsible parents than indifferent ones: more whole grains, more fruits and vegetables, less sodium, no artificially sweetened whole milk, and so on. Concannon expanded the breakfast programs for kids who did not get fed at home—and that meal, too, became more nutritious. “You can’t just serve them pancakes and hot dogs,” he says.

Big companies that provided the schools with meals fought back: it was more profitable for them to serve pancakes and hot dogs than fruits and vegetables. But by the end of 2016, America’s children were eating better than they had been in 2008. “Ninety-eight percent of the schools were meeting the new standards,” says Concannon, “and to those that weren’t, that had some problem, we’d say,” We’ll work with you!’”

At the school in Leesburg, Perdue announced that the USDA would no longer require schools to meet the whole-grain standard, or the new sodium standard, or ban fat in artificially sweetened milk. Those changes sound trivial, but the stakes are huge. This is a matter not just of what kind of milk America’s schoolchildren drink but also of the process by which we as a society decide which milk they will drink: will it be driven by the dairy industry and the snack-food industry, or by nutritionists?

Concannon was deeply disappointed in Perdue’s speech. He saw it as pure politics, not motivated by any concern for children’s welfare. “Look, you can have confidence in the career people,” he said. “Because most of them have migrated to where they are out of desire. They believe in what they are doing.” About the new political people who might replace him he wasn’t so sure. The problem was motive: Why would they come to work at the USDA? A person who worked inside Concannon’s little box, as long as they catered to the food industry, could make a lot more money outside of it.

Munching on a second slice of banana bread, I look around Concannon’s house. His career was over. He’d spent the better part of fifty years using public money to alleviate suffering. He’d controlled nearly a trillion dollars in government spending. Yet his home is modest. He drives a ten-year-old Volvo. He had gone from state to state, and each time he had been honored for his public service. The plaques were stacked up in his garage. He didn’t own enough wall space for them all.