Republicans Reveal Dark Plan to Let Kids Go Hungry to Fund Tax Cuts

Republicans are looking to gut and slash federal programs in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan.

The extension, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit, would arrive at the expense of dozens of popular federal programs. But perhaps most egregious among the penny-pinching proposals is a plan to literally take food away from hungry children by nixing free school meal plans made available to some of the poorest families in the country.

Raising the threshold of eligibility for schools to receive the Community Eligibility Provision could save the government $3 billion over a span of 10 years, according to a menu-like list released by the House Ways and Means Committee intended to serve as cutting options for the House reconciliation package.

“The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows the nation’s highest-poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications,” the proposal reads. “Instead, schools that adopt CEP are reimbursed using a formula based on participation in other specific means-tested programs, such as SNAP and TANF. Currently, schools can qualify if 40 percent of students receive these programs. This proposal would lift that to 60 percent.”

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It shouldn’t take much to argue that taking food away from children is a bad thing. But data shows that food insecurity has been on the rise in the U.S. for the last several decades, and it has seen a considerable spike since the pandemic, according to the USDA. It affects roughly one in seven American households, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center, affecting an estimated 47.4 million people across the country.

A 2013 survey of K-8 public school teachers by No Kid Hungry found that six in 10 teachers across the nation knew that their students were regularly coming to school hungry. Teachers in the same study reported that 80 percent of students were coming to school hungry one or more times per week and that “most or a lot of their students” relied on school meals as their “primary source of nutrition.”

And there are immediate educational benefits to supplying children with meals: A 2018 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that students who received the subsidized lunches were far less likely to need disciplinary action, such as school suspensions. Other studies have suggested that more breakfasts and lunches could improve academic performance or their health.