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.
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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.
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 “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.
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 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 being alive — 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.
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.
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