House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.

Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.

The budget — co-signed by more than 170 House Republicans — calls to eliminate “the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) from the School Lunch Program.” The CEP, the Republicans note, “allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.” 

“Additionally,” the Republicans continue, “the RSC Budget would limit spending in the program to truly needy households.”

The CEP allows schools and districts in low-income areas to provide breakfast and lunch to all students, free of charge. The program thus relieves both schools and families from administrative paperwork, removing the inefficiencies and barriers of means-testing, all on the pathway to feeding more children and lifting all boats.

This year, the Biden administration further expanded the CEP, allowing another estimated 3,000 school districts to serve students breakfast and lunch at no cost.

Instead of universality, the RSC suggests sending block grants for child nutrition programs to states, to give them “needed flexibility” to “promote the efficient allocation of funds to those who need it most,” while avoiding “widespread fraud.” Such a proposal, which has been pitched before without gaining much traction, could theoretically eliminate the baseline standards for nutrition standards and basic access, said Crystal FitzSimons, the child nutrition programs and policy director at the Food Research & Action Center. 

“At this point, we have over 40,000 schools participating in community eligibility, and that allows them to offer breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge,” FitzSimons said about CEP. “There have been year after year increases in participation because the option is so popular to eligible schools across the country.”

Republicans have worked for years to undermine school lunch programs, but the staying focus on the goal, even in rhetoric, is notable given the warm reception some states have received in instituting universal school lunch. In Minnesota, for example, 70 percent of Minnesotans, including 57 percent of conservatives and 54 percent of senior citizens, were found to have approved of the policy change that took effect last summer — even after reports that the program was proving to be more costly than anticipated, due to greater-than-expected demand. Statewide polling in Pennsylvania last year found 82 percent of people supporting expanding their free school breakfast program to include lunch too, while 87 percent of Ohio K-12 parents were found in 2022 to support school meals for all, regardless of ability to pay.

Another seven states — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Vermont — have also passed universal school lunch programs, while at least 26 more states (including Washington, D.C.) are considering ways to achieve the policy too. Nevada, meanwhile, used leftover Covid-19 relief funding to offer one more year of free school meals to all students through this school year. The ambition is endorsed by an increasingly large coalition of groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, the American Heart Association, and the National Education Association.

Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.

“If the program is designed to offer free meals to all students,” FitzSimons said, “that question about fraud really disappears if you’re allowed to serve every single child.”

Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., center, and members of the Republican Study Committee, Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., left, and Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., meet with reporters to announce their response to President Joe Biden’s 2025 budget, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 21, 2024. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The Republican Study Committee is the largest ideological caucus in Congress, and for the past 51 years, it has served as a principle priority-setter for the party. The committee was chaired as recently as three years ago by House Speaker Mike Johnson. He and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise still sit on the Executive Committee, while Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern serves as chair. Its annual budget is not binding, but it does offer a useful window into conservatives’ policy priorities, which can best be summarized as accelerating the planet’s burning, an indifference to mass shootings, and actively threatening consumers and workers.

On the environment — amid the hottest year recorded on Earth — the word “climate” appears 110 times and the word “environment” 53 times in the budget. Not one of those instances has anything to do with a positive Republican vision to address climate change or protect the environment. The RSC instead opposes the creation of a carbon tax and wants to give oil and gas companies deductions on costs like labor and safety, ramp up oil and gas projects on federal lands, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The Republicans also throw their weight behind bills like Virginia Rep. Bob Good’s “No American Climate Corps Act,” to stop federal funds from being used for the American Climate Corps — a revolutionary clean energy jobs program whose applications open next month. While millions of Americans have been surrounded by throat-scratching smog, livelihood-destroying wildfires, and relentless flooding and heat waves, the Republicans call to prohibit the use of emergency disaster or public health emergency declarations “from being used to address purported climate change.” 

On guns, Republicans call to undercut or block an array of gun regulations. For instance, the budget supports “defunding the constitutionally dubious red flag provisions in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.” That law allocates $750 million to support ongoing state implementation of red-flag laws that remove firearms from individuals who are deemed a threat to themselves or others; it doesn’t force any state to do anything.

On reproductive rights, Republicans call for the passage of an array of anti-choice bills, like Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’s “Ending Chemical Abortions Act of 2023,” which would federally outlaw the use of abortion pills, and West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney’s “Life at Conception Act,” which would designate embryos made through in vitro fertilization as “children” — even as many of the same Republicans have scrambled to claim they support IVF in the aftermath of a similar Alabama Supreme Court ruling that led multiple clinics to halt IVF procedures.

Like every good Republican fiscal document, the RSC budget threatens changes to Social Security, including by raising the retirement age. Other Republican budget priorities include eliminating all future funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees; prohibiting federal subsidies for high-speed rail; getting rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; reducing funding for the famously under-supported Occupational Safety and Health Administration; and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, which, under President Joe Biden, has done much to protect workers’ right to organize.

Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.

“As in previous years,” the Republicans say about their master plan, “the RSC budget also celebrates the work of House conservatives who have fought for legislation that preserves American values, combats Biden’s woke and weaponized government, and protects the freedoms that should be enjoyed by every American.”

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