“We don’t have a food shortage problem,” then-candidate Joe Biden said just months after the COVID pandemic began in May 2020. “We have a leadership problem.”
Now that he is president, however, Biden is singing a different tune. Asked if he should have taken steps to address the nation’s baby formula shortages sooner, Biden replied, “If we had been better mind readers, I guess we could have.”
But the Biden administration never had to read minds. It had been informed of problems at a Michigan baby formula plant eight months ago, and in fact, the Food and Drug Administration issued a recall of formula from that same plant three months ago. Yet Biden never spoke of or acted to address the formula shortage until last Friday.
And yes, there is plenty he could have done.
For decades, American parents have bought baby formula from Europe and other developed countries for a number of reasons, including because foreign formulas are more natural and more nutritious than the highly synthetic domestic brands. The FDA, however, has recently clamped down on this illicit trade in baby formula, even creating a “red list” of brands for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to block in international trade.
It is not that the FDA has studied these formulas and determined that they are a danger to infants — quite the opposite. These are European Medicines Agency-inspected and approved brands that feed millions of babies in Europe. The problem the FDA has with foreign formula is the labeling. Many of the brands do not have English labels, and even when they do, they do not always list the exact nutrients that are required by FDA regulations.
Whatever sense these government regulations may have in regular times, they don’t make any sense in a time of domestic scarcity. Biden should have suspended these rules back in September when his administration was first informed of problems at the Michigan plant. At the very least, he could have acted in February after the recall. But now it is May, and parents desperate to feed their children still are not allowed to buy perfectly safe formula that is widely used throughout the developed world.
Looking ahead, there is also a lot Biden could do to make sure such a shortage does not happen again. Unfortunately, our nation does not have a free market for baby formula. Just three companies control 90% of the national market, but in each state, just one of these companies dominates that state’s market.
The formula company with the monopoly in each state is determined by whichever company makes the best bid for that state’s Women, Infants, and Children Program. Instead of getting cash, WIC recipients are given vouchers for formula but only for the brand that won the contracts for that state. Since up to two-thirds of all formula purchases in each state are made through the WIC program, this one program gives the company winning the contract a huge head start on monopolizing the market. One study found that after states switched WIC providers, the new provider’s market share increased by an average 84 percentage points.
Instead of blaming baby formula manufacturers, who are only responding to the bad incentives created by misguided government policy, Biden should work with Republicans to end these WIC-created formula monopolies.
To paraphrase Biden himself: “We don’t have a baby formula problem. We have a President Biden problem.”
Voters can start fixing that problem this November.
