More bad news out of the federal government this week, and its only Tuesday: The Trump administration and its chaotic Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now turning their sights on kids’ school lunches, which are the latest casualty of this administration’s war on the federal government as it slashes budgets and fires Americans from their jobs in the name of fiscal responsibility.
According to a statement from the School Nutrition Association (SNA), “millions of children could lose free school meals” as a result of $1 billion in cuts to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). That means about $660 million of those funds will no longer go to feeding needy children in schools and child care facilities, set up through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. Also cut: federal funds to purchase healthy, local, and regional foods for those school meals through foods banks and organizations, supplied by local farmers and ranchers.
“These proposals [come] . . . at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs,” Shannon Gleave, president of the School Nutrition Association, said in a statement. “Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies.”
According to the SNA, one proposed cut to the Community Eligibility Provision would eliminate free meals available to some 12 million students in 24,000 schools nationwide, all with high poverty rates.
This is all bad news for our nation’s children and parents, as well as teachers and schools, which are also reeling from the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which Trump has attacked as a “big con job.”
It’s also another blow to American families, who are already reeling from the rising cost of food and increasingly turning to food banks, while Republicans push for more cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for those with the lowest incomes, according to The Guardian.
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