Nancy Watzman, The Sunlight Foundation – You may have heard the old adage that “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” but money also has a lot to do with the politics of mother’s milk.

Last week Rep. Michele Bachmann, R., Minn., criticized Michelle Obama for announcing that she would work to encourage breastfeeding as part of her campaign against childhood obesity, accusing the First Lady of encouraging a “new definition” of a “nanny state.”

What was missing from the stories that followed, however, was that the powerful infant formula industry has tremendous influence in Washington, with PACs, employees and their family members of the three biggest producers donating $1 million to federal candidates and party committees in the 2010 election cycle and the companies themselves disclosing lobbying spending of $9 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That influence pays dividends. Late last year, the industry’s high powered lobbyists managed to keep a provision out of the child nutrition bill that would have required new additives to infant formula to undergo scientific review to determine whether they are actually beneficial to babies.

Taxpayers had a stake in the proposal—the federal government is the biggest national purchaser of infant formula through the federal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which provides it to low-income women who prefer to formula feed their babies. While the industry offers rebates to state governments that provide the formula, the program still costs taxpayers some $850 million a year.

A recent study by the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which operates the WIC program, pointed out that recent rising costs in the program were partly because the cost of formula has gone up—the estimate is $91 million—largely because manufacturers have started including additives such as the fatty acides docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA). As Ruth Marcusreported for the Washington Post last July, when Congress reauthorized WIC in 2004, not long after infant formula manufacturers started including these ingredients in formula, language was inserted telling states that when they solicited bids for infant formula, they could not require manufacturers to include or omit specific ingredients.

To read the full Sunlight Foundation article, click here.

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