End Federal School Food Programs

The department, however, is not the only way that the federal government intervenes in the nation’s schools. The government also spends $35 billion a year on school food programs through the Department of Agriculture (USDA). The school lunch program was enacted in 1946, and it morphed into an array of breakfast, lunch, after-school, and summer food programs that now cover 30 million children.

There are no simple metrics such as falling test scores to point to, but here are four reasons to axe federal school food programs and allow the states to adopt their own policies.

Congress created the school food programs to help poor children, but increasingly the programs subsidize children from higher-income households. The share of school lunches provided free or at a reduced price rose from 15 percent in 1969 to 72 percent in 2024.

Policymakers on the left have continually pushed to expand free meal provision, and federal deficit financing makes that seem costless. The states pay for a portion of the free school meals, but the federal funding formula incentivizes schools to expand coverage to all students.

The Left tries to hook everyone on handouts, not just those in need. But expanding school food programs to cover higher-income households makes no fiscal sense. State governments, given their requirement to balance their budgets, are more likely to run lean and efficient programs, and so school food programs should be devolved to them. Some states may decide on much smaller self-funded programs than the current federal program, but that should be up to them.

The original goal of the school food programs was to tackle hunger, but the main nutrition problem for children today is excessive consumption of unhealthy foods, which is causing obesity to soar. The obesity rate for U.S. children has risen from 5 percent in the 1970s to 21 percent in 2023.

The obesity rate for poor children is particularly high. In households below 135 percent of the poverty level, 26 percent of children are obese, compared with just 12 percent of those in households above 350 percent of the poverty level. A USDA study using 2015 data found that 21.8 percent of students in the school lunch program were obese, compared with 13.4 percent not in the program.

Do school food programs contribute to obesity? The Congressional Budget Office found that studies “have often reached conflicting or inconclusive results” regarding the nutrition and obesity outcomes of the programs. Food quality in the federal program has improved somewhat over time, but kids throw a large share of the healthy items they receive in the trash. Getting children to eat nutritious food is a complex issue, more likely to be solved by innovative state approaches than the one-size-fits-all federal program.

Programs administered by the states but funded by “free” money from Washington are inherently inefficient. School food benefits have long suffered from error and fraud. Local administrators have little incentive to reduce cheating and do not verify eligibility to any great extent. To sign up for free school meals does not even require proof of one’s household income.

Numerous school food systems have been mismanaged. In 2023, a contractor for the USDA’s summer food program in Dallas scammed taxpayers out of $2.3 million by inflating meal counts. In Los Angeles, the school district’s “massive food services program is riddled with mismanagement, inappropriate spending and ethical breaches,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 2015.

In New York City, bid-rigging for school food contracts has a long history. As reported by City Limits in 2024, “a federal judge sentenced a former New York City school food official to two years in prison for taking bribes from a contractor — an arrangement that resulted in kids eating tainted chicken.” This scandal was not an aberration. “For nearly 30 years, the city’s school food program has been periodically tainted by quality concerns, management lapses and criminal convictions,” as noted in the City Limits report.

In Minnesota, massive fraud was uncovered in 2021. A group called Feeding Our Future spearheaded the theft of $250 million in federal school food aid administered by the state. Prosecutors have secured 45 convictions in the scheme, in which millions of meals were falsely claimed to have been served.

The federal and state governments blamed each other for the Minnesota scandal, and neither took responsibility. Removing federal involvement from school food programs would at least make it clear to citizens who is to blame for failures.

Imposing school meal policies from Washington is out of step with broader trends in the schools. For one thing, more children in U.S. schools are from cultural backgrounds with diverse food traditions, which makes them less interested in standardized and processed government meals.

Furthermore, innovations in school food are coming from local communities, not the federal government. Farm-to-school efforts, for example, are bringing fresh local foods into the schools. These efforts are often funded privately and use volunteers but can be stymied by school bureaucracies, labor unions, and federal regulations.

Finally, school choice reforms have spread across the nation in recent years, with millions of children moving into private schools. Relatively few private schools participate in the federal school food programs, so as choice expands federal food programs become less relevant.

Given today’s huge federal deficits, Congress should end programs, including school food programs, that would be better handled by the states. State and local governments and families should tackle child-nutrition challenges within the evolving landscape of school choice reforms.