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.
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.
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.
These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things. I wish the worst for them. They’re evil.
I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it’s simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.
So this is especially evil to me.
Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.
A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn’t realize that most of these kids didn’t have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week… Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.
Means testing has always been the best way to destroy a public good.
This is actually the best argument against what they are doing. I fully support not paying for other kids food when they dont need it, but if we spend a trillion on military every year, they dont care about fiscal conservatism.