FY 2026 WIC Infrastructure Grant: $24M USDA NOFO Opens a Four-Week Partnership Window

Nonprofit executive directors running WIC-adjacent nutrition, outreach, or food-access programs have a four-week window to position themselves as named subrecipients on the $24 million FY 2026 WIC Infrastructure Grant (USDA-FNA-WIC-INFR-2026) — the federal NOFO USDA posted to Grants.gov on June 10 with a July 13 deadline.

A $24 million pool with a July 13 deadline

The Food and Nutrition Administration — the rebranded successor to the Food and Nutrition Service as of June 1, 2026 — published opportunity number USDA-FNA-WIC-INFR-2026 on June 10, 2026. The notice obligates up to $24,000,000 across roughly 30 awards, with an award ceiling of $3,000,000, an award floor of $1, and no cost-share requirement. Applications close at midnight Eastern on July 13, 2026, and the listing archives on August 12. CFDA 10.578 (WIC Grants To States) is the funding vehicle; Anna J. Arrowsmith is the grants officer of record.

Direct eligibility is narrow. The RFA limits applicants to the 88 State agencies that currently administer the WIC program. A state agency may file one solo application and lead — or be named in — one consortium application. Consortia, however, may only pursue Objective 3 (technology modernization). This eligibility ceiling is the whole reason this NOFO matters for community-based nonprofits: the work being procured is operational, outreach-heavy, and farmer-facing, but the only legal recipient is a state department. That structural mismatch is where partnership budgets get written.

The three objectives shaping FY 2026 proposals

The notice frames the entire $24 million around three objectives, and proposals may contain more than one objective. Read them as three different procurement signals, each with its own subrecipient profile.

Objective 1 — Promoting Program Integrity to Minimize Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. USDA writes that state agencies will implement "policy, process, and/or technology improvements in the WIC Program that ensure taxpayer dollars are used for their intended purpose and serve as many eligible women, infants, and children as possible." Practically, that opens budget lines for caseload-recovery outreach, churn analysis, certification-process redesign, and data-quality audits — all work states routinely sub to community health organizations, federally qualified health centers, and managed-care coordinators with existing Medicaid touchpoints.

Objective 2 — Creating Opportunities to Connect America's Farmers to WIC. The notice scopes this tightly: "State agencies will make technological improvements necessary to allow WIC Cash Value Benefit to be redeemed at farmers markets." The notice expressly carves out the parallel Farmers Market Nutrition Program: "FMNP activities and costs are not allowed to be paid for with WIC funds, including this funding opportunity." If your nonprofit runs market manager networks, EBT terminal deployment, or vendor onboarding, the work itself is allowable — it just has to be invoiced against WIC infrastructure, not FMNP. Expect reviewers to scrutinize the cost-allocation methodology between the two funding streams.

Objective 3 — Developing and Implementing Modernized Technology. State agencies will "update WIC MIS and/or WIC Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) systems to ensure data accuracy and system compliance and/or implement digital services." This is the only objective open to consortia, which makes it the natural home for multi-state nonprofit technology partners — call-center vendors, appointment-scheduling platforms, multilingual outreach tooling, and SMS reminder systems that have already cleared one state's procurement review.

Why eligibility lists "state agencies" but writes nonprofits into the budget

The structural read of this NOFO is that USDA is buying outcomes the states cannot deliver alone. Eighty-eight state agencies — including Indian Tribal Organizations and territories — administer WIC, but most caseload-recovery, farmer-onboarding, and EBT-pilot work happens at the county or clinic level via subrecipients. A state agency that submits a $3 million Objective 1 proposal without named community partners is, in plain terms, telling reviewers it has no plan for the last mile. WIC participation has been declining or flat in roughly 30 states since the post-pandemic eligibility expansion; reviewers know which agencies are losing eligible families and which are not, and they will read partnership rosters as a proxy for ground-truth delivery capacity.

That is the leverage point. Nonprofit EDs who can credibly write a paragraph into a state's application — we will run six community-based certification clinics in counties X, Y, Z; we will deliver Spanish, Somali, Vietnamese outreach; we will report monthly retention deltas back to the state — get budgeted as line-item subrecipients. The four-week clock starts now.

What a four-week scramble actually looks like

Thirty-three days between posting and deadline is not a lot. State agencies typically need at least two weeks to build the application package, which means nonprofit partnership commitments are practically due by June 26. A realistic compressed timeline:

• Week of June 16. Identify which state WIC agency or agencies you have existing MOUs, data-sharing agreements, or grant history with. Email the WIC director — not the deputy — with a one-page concept that names the objective, the counties or populations served, the deliverables, and a not-to-exceed budget. Attach one piece of evidence: a retention chart, a vendor list, a finished IRB protocol — something a state grants writer can paste into the narrative without rewording.
• Week of June 23. Lock the partnership memo with the state's grants officer. Get language inserted into the state's narrative and a corresponding budget line in their SF-424A. Confirm whether the state needs a signed Letter of Commitment, a Memorandum of Understanding, or both.
• Week of June 30 through July 10. Provide letters of commitment, project management plans, indirect-cost rate documentation, and any sub-budget detail the state needs for the upload package.
• July 13. State submits. Your obligation is to be responsive during state revisions, not to file anything yourself.

If you do not already have an in with a state WIC office, this cycle is probably not the one. Use the window to introduce yourself, ask to be put on the bidders list for the FY 2027 cycle, and watch for the typical December and January modernization re-opens.

Where the dollars are likeliest to land

A $24 million ceiling over roughly 30 awards averages $800,000 per award — well below the $3,000,000 ceiling. The smart reading: USDA expects most awards to land between $400K and $1.2M, with a handful of Objective 3 multi-state consortia consuming the high end. That favors small, focused, single-objective proposals from mid-sized state agencies — exactly the proposals where a single named nonprofit partner can move the scoring needle.

Objective 2 is the under-the-radar opportunity. The CVB-at-farmers-markets pipe has been technically possible since the 2022 modernization rule but is unevenly deployed; states with weak market-vendor coverage have a clean story to tell reviewers, and almost all of them need a market-network partner to tell it. Nonprofits running market manager associations, regional food hubs, or SNAP-EBT terminal cooperatives are the obvious fit, and there are roughly a dozen states where no incumbent network exists yet.

How to identify the right state agency this week

If your organization works in nutrition, food security, refugee health, or maternal and child outreach, your three immediate next steps are: pull the contact for your state's WIC director from the FNA agency directory, draft the one-page concept above, and surface other active federal nutrition NOFOs your board can chase in parallel. For the last, search active USDA nutrition and WIC solicitations on Granted — the result set will surface companion opportunities (Farm-to-School FY 2026, FMNP modernization, and the SNAP-Ed administrative pool) that are eligible to nonprofits directly and can backstop the work if the WIC subaward doesn't land.

For broader funding strategy reading, the Granted blog tracks federal NOFO patterns across nutrition, health, and community-services portfolios — useful background for executive directors who haven't yet built a state-partnership playbook.

The opportunity is narrow, the calendar is tight, and the eligibility list keeps most nonprofits off the cover page. But the $24 million is being procured to do work nonprofits routinely deliver. Four weeks is enough to get named in a state's budget. It is not enough to start from scratch.