Walz pick highlights partisan divisions on free school lunches

Should all school kids get free meals — regardless of income?

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's (D) selection as Vice President Harris's running mate has brought that once-peripheral policy issue — and the long-running partisan divide over it — to the center of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Walz's administration last year instituted free meals for all public school children in Minnesota, making it one of eight states — all of them headed by Democrats — to do so. 

The Biden administration also last September expanded access to universal free school meals across the country.

Those moves drew on a national experiment by the Trump administration, which created a universal school lunch program early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

But that drive — which briefly made a longtime progressive policy dream a national reality — marked a departure from Republicans' broader opposition to such programs.

In contrast with the 2020 experiment, which then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue described as a temporary example of government “flexibility,” over the three previous years the Trump administration sought to remove nearly 1 million children’s access to free school meals — and roll back Obama-era rules making such meals healthier.

Since the pandemic's early months, partisan divisions on the issue have deepened.

As universal school meal proposals have spread across the country and been adopted by several Democratic governors and legislatures, they have been largely opposed by state Republicans. GOP governors have turned down federal funds to feed school children during the summer.

The Republican Study Committee, a caucus that makes up about three-fourths of the House GOP, in March published a draft budget that sought to drastically cut back on districts feeding meals to all students — specifically by ending the Community Eligibility Provision, the free meals program the Biden Department of Agriculture (USDA) just expanded.

And Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a future Republican administration, argues that a GOP president must “reject efforts to create universal free school meals” and roll back the steps the federal government has already taken in that direction.

Trump has sought to distance himself from the Project 2025 plan, telling journalists that “It will not end well” for those who conflate the project with his campaign. 

But much of the plan was written by his former staffers, and many of its proposals echo those from his advisers and those his administration followed.

Now, with Walz on the Democratic ticket and Harris surging, the interparty split on school lunches is coming into the spotlight. 

A 2023 photo of Walz signing the school meals bill has gone viral, and the governor himself highlighted the divide in the CNN interview that rocketed him — and the framing of Republicans as “weird” — to national prominence.

When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Walz if his policy moves in Minnesota would leave him open to GOP attacks as a “big government liberal,” school lunches were the first item the governor listed on his resume.

Walz — a former high school teacher and football coach — signed the school meal bill in March 2023, making Minnesota the fourth state to pass universal school meals.

“What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn,” Walz said, laughing, before going on to tout state Democratic policies to foster reproductive rights and business development.

A long, Democrat-backed push for free meals

The fight over school meals had been a matter of contention for more than a decade by the time Walz signed the bill to give all Minnesota public schoolchildren free access.

Universal free meal advocates point to studies finding that the policy promotes higher academic achievement and decreases the food insecurity that hampers children’s social, physical and intellectual development. 

While the current federal School Lunch Program offers free meals to children from low-income families — which in Minnesota before the Walz bill only included students whose families earned less than $47,500 for a family of four — free meal advocates worry that leaves a lot of kids out.

“A lot of kids in need of free meals are not currently eligible because the threshold for accessing free meals is so low,” Alexis Bylander, who studies the issue for the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), told The Hill.

Districts are left with a choice of either feeding kids who may be hungry but don’t technically qualify, and eating the cost themselves — or denying them food. A 2014 report from the Department of Agriculture found that nearly half of schools shamed students who were unable to pay, generally by denying them a hot meal — one Providence, R.I., school offered a cold sandwich, for instance — but also in some cases by throwing the food away entirely, as one Utah school did.

The Rhode Island school argued it had little choice. Giving kids cold sandwiches was necessary because of “a serious debt that we’re incurring by people who are not paying for their lunches,” a Providence official told reporters. 

But for children, the denial could be crushing. “It’s really weird being denied food in front of everyone,” Pennsylvania teen Caitlin Dolan told The New York Times. "They all talk about you.”

Even when students do qualify for free meals, they often pass them up to avoid being bullied. More than a third of low-income New York children were estimated to do so before the city implemented universal free meals. 

Research suggests that when schools go to universal free meals, far more kids in need participate — a dynamic that has fueled a gradual and largely Democrat-backed push over the past decade to extend universal meals.

A key step along that path came in 2010, when a Democratic-majority Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFA) along largely partisan lines in the House, where all but 17 House Republicans voted against the legislation, and all but four Democrats supported it. (The bill passed the Senate unanimously.)

That program contained language that gave certain schools universal free meals: If 40 percent of kids in a school were to qualify, it directed the USDA, then all kids would.

Since the Obama administration, the USDA has interpreted that to mean if a cluster of schools across a district averages out to 40 percent qualifying, then every kid in that district gets free meals. 

Pushback from the Trump administration

Conservatives, in contrast, argue that universal school meals are a colossal waste of money, saying that the program provides food to middle- and upper-income children whose families can afford to feed them.

Many of the arguments that feeding all kids reduces the shame or stigma faced by lower-income ones come down to sad anecdotes about kids being denied food, Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation told The Hill. 

“Those stories are terrible — that shouldn’t have happened,” Butcher said. “But that's on the school for not telling the parents to square their accounts, ‘because we’re not going to throw this kid's food away in front of all their friends.’” 

Butcher pointed to federal findings that USDA programs “may be vulnerable to fraud” and that the USDA overpaid by nearly $2 billion in 2017 for school meals — largely due to inadvertently giving food to children who weren't enrolled in the program. 

Heritage has contended that the real problem to address regarding school meals is properly targeting aid to those who most need it. And giving all kids food, Butcher argued, doesn't help with that.

He compared reducing fraud in school meals through offering universal access to making U.S. tax fraud disappear by legalizing it.

Under Agriculture Secretary Perdue, the Trump administration sought to roll back Obama-era nutrition reforms, which large food companies opposed. Perdue argued that kids were throwing away the healthier food, and in 2017 issued rules seeking to bring fatty, sugary, nonwhole grain and high-sodium foods back to the cafeterias of schools that receive federal funding.

Perdue said he "was not reducing the nutritional standards whatsoever." PolitiFact marked that claim as “mostly false.”

The Trump administration also sought changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s principal food aid program, that would have removed nearly 1 million students’ access to free meals.

Federal courts struck down both the nutrition reforms and the SNAP restrictions in 2020 — just as the Trump administration faced the early onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That crisis led to an abrupt shift in policy. Throughout 2020, Perdue’s USDA released waivers allowing schools to extend a program of free summer meals throughout the year — effectively presiding over the nation’s first experiment with universal school meals.

The fight's shift to the states

To many conservatives, the yearlong foray into free lunch was an example of an emergency measure: a program, as Heritage’s Butcher said, that “should be specific, temporary and gone.” 

White papers from right-wing think tanks decried President Biden’s extension of aspects of the program, with the American Enterprise Institute casting the campaign against universal meals in terms of “morality.”

But in many liberal-leaning states that experienced free meals, watching what happened when schools could offer food to all people regardless of income served as a wake-up call, FRAC’s Bylander told The Hill.

Once the program was implemented, many states “didn’t want to go back to charging  different prices to different kids for the same meal,” she said.

During COVID-19, the lunchroom briefly felt “like an equal playing field” for students, Leah Gardner of Hunger Solutions Minnesota told Minnesota Public Radio. 

In one survey of large districts, 88 percent reported the policy had decreased hunger, and about 80 percent said it had cut their administrative burdens.

“It made all the stigma go away,” Gardner said. Conversely, when the policy ended, student use of school meals — free or paid — dropped as well.

California and Maine passed legislation within days of each other in 2022 requiring the state to cover the difference between the total cost of universal meals and what the federal government contributes.

In each state, the measure passed with overwhelming support. The Maine bill passed the state Senate unanimously and received only 17 nay votes in the House.

But while more than half of the Maine GOP caucus voted for it, every nay vote came from a Republican — a pattern that would strengthen as proposals spread around the country.

In Minnesota, the free school meal bill that passed under Walz in 2022 did so along strict party lines in both the state House and Senate, with all Democrats and only a handful of Republicans voting for it. And virtually all Republicans voted against or abstained from similar legislation that put universal school lunches on the ballot in Colorado.

In some states, that opposition has been enough to stop legislation from passing. New Jersey’s proposal — sponsored entirely by Democrats — died in committee, though Gov. Phil Murphy (D) did sign legislation in January extending eligibility to 60,000 more families.

Then there’s the case of Nevada, which passed a universal school meal plan in 2023, despite the entire GOP House delegation, and five out of eight Republican senators, voting against it.

But Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) vetoed the school meal bill passed by the state's Democratic-majority Legislature, telling The Nevada Independent, “I’m not going to throw good money after bad money.”

In some cases, GOP governors' opposition has extended to existing programs. Thirteen Republican governors have refused to accept matching funds from the federal government that would give families on food aid — who are automatically eligible for free lunches during the school year — extra money in the summer to buy food for kids who would usually be in school. In explaining his rejection of the funds, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) decried "attempts to expand the welfare state."

But outside of these rare examples, and a flurry of position papers from right-wing think tanks, conservatives have rarely publicized their opposition to free school lunches — and some have accused Democrats of being the programs’ true opponents. 

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — one of the governors who turned down summer food aid — repeated an accusation he has made against the Biden administration for years, saying it has tried “to strip [money] for school lunches for poor kids from schools who don’t embrace gender ideology.”

A USDA ruling issued under the Biden administration ties a district's funding from federal programs, including SNAP, to whether it follows Title IX protections regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. The USDA has thus far not threatened to revoke such funds, however.

Walz and other Democrats have in turn hit Republican state lawmakers over their opposition to free meals — and touted Democratic efforts to extend them.

"You see the contrast in this when you get a Democratic versus a Republican governor," Walz said in June, before Harris's search for a running mate brought him to national prominence. "Look, we don't have the Ten Commandments posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch."

"Those are policies that the Biden-Harris administration are talking about going nationally," he added. "It makes a huge difference."