House Republicans 'Fiscal Sanity' Plan Back To Interrogating Poor Kids' Lunch

Do they really need 180 pages to tell us how much they hate poor people?

In what one would assume must have been part of a celebration for Opposite Day or perhaps National Irony Day (just kidding, that’s not until October), the House Republicans’ Republican Study Committee dropped its 2025 budget proposal this week, titled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” (The 2024 budget is still happening now, today, and may get House Speaker Mike Johnson shitcanned, for a change. Who can ever say?)

As to the 2025 budget proposal, there is … a lot that is bad here. In fact, it is 180 pages of bad — much of it focused on eliminating funding for, well, pretty much everything except the military. Okay, it actually does eliminate some funding for the military, but only as it concerns things like diversity and abortion and, of course, critical race theory.

Oh! And it also eliminates some funding for protection from terrorism, on the grounds that it is used against domestic right-wing extremist groups if they do terrorism.

The Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Grant Program was created to provide funding for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments; nonprofits; and institutions of higher education with funds to establish or enhance capabilities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism. However, under the Biden administration grants have been awarded in recent years to fight domestic extremism—particularly “right wing extremism.” The FY 2023 Omnibus provided $20 million to this program. The House-passed FY 24 Homeland Security appropriations bill defunded this program. The RSC Budget would also eliminate this program.

There have been far more domestic right-wing extremist terrorist attacks since 9/11 than any other form of terrorism (although there has been a rise in left-wing attacks as of the last report, meaning there are now some). I’m sorry if this hurts the feelings of Republicans, but perhaps we wouldn’t have to spend $20 million on this program if they would stop riling their base up with blatantly racist nonsense like the Great Replacement or, godforbid, consider some light gun control.

Some might say the “fiscally sane” thing to do would be to pay attention to the groups most likely to actually harm someone instead of, say, drag queens reading story books, but those people would never vote Republican to begin with.

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There are pages and pages in the Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget about how they are upset about “woke indoctrination.” Like, the word “woke” is in there 37 times. “Children” are only mentioned one more time than that, just to give you an idea of where their priorities are.

Most of those mentions pop up in a section in which they whine about how not enough people are getting married. This, of course, leads up to their desired cuts to social welfare programs, as well as work requirements to participate in those programs.

You know what else they’re going after? School lunch! And this time it’s not that they want to classify ketchup as a vegetable. They’re going after universal lunch programs.

The RSC Budget would also institute reforms to school lunch subsidies to ensure that they go to needy families by eliminating the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) from the School Lunch Program. CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.

Universal school lunch has been a huge success — both when it was implemented nationwide during COVID times, and in states that decided to continue providing them afterwards. Since the US stopped providing universal school lunch, lunch participation rates have gone down by 6 percent, which means that a whole lot of kids are going without.

You will notice that they left out the fact that only the poorest schools in the nation get subsidized lunches through CEP. Part of the reason for this is that it means those families don’t have to file paperwork to qualify, which means that the state doesn’t have to pay people to go through the paperwork and ensure that they qualify. That kind of administrative work costs time and money … which could just as easily be spent on school lunches.

They are also concerned about another problem very easily solved by universal school lunches:

Additionally, the RSC Budget would limit spending in the program to truly needy households. Further, the “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse.” The lunch and breakfast programs made $5.718 billion and $2.609 billion ($8.327 billion total) in improper payments, respectively, from FY2016-FY 2023. States, in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, must take steps to address this problem.

How do you sit there and write about “fraud” in the school lunch program without making yourself physically ill? Really! Because that is “fraud” that simply takes the form of “children eating.”

Still, if you have universal school lunch, everyone gets food and Republicans won’t have to stay up at night worrying about anyone “undeserving” getting a pork pattie or some shepherd’s pie, or criminal children roaming the cafeterias pretending to be slightly more poor than they currently are.

As a bonus, people who are not actual monsters don’t have to worry that a kid whose parents didn’t get it together to fill out the paperwork or who hit a tight month because of a major bill or even a kid who just forgot their lunch money that day will go without food all day at school. What a compromise!

At least half of this budget, in fact, is dedicated to “preventing fraud” in social welfare programs. Truly, if poor people were half as good at fraud as Republicans seem to think they are, they would all be running Fortune 500 companies by now.

Or they’d be the frontrunner in the Republican primary.

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