HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO BAN UNIVERSAL FREE SCHOOL LUNCHES
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.
So let’s review.
Fuck women: national 15 week abortion ban.
Fuck children: ban on feeding hungry children
Fuck the elderly: cuts to social security
Fuck the sick: plans to fully privatize Medicare and Medicaid
Fuck the poor: cuts to food stamps.
But tax cuts for the wealthy and state money to churches.
That’s the modern GOP.
US pass an $800B+ annual defense budget with barely a discussion but this is the hill Republicans choose to make their stand on when it comes to spending.
THE REPUBLICAN STUDY Committee is the largest ideological caucus in Congress, and for the past 51 years, it has served as a principle priority-setter for the party. The committee was chaired as recently as three years ago by House Speaker Mike Johnson. He and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise still sit on the Executive Committee, while Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern serves as chair. 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 the environment — amid the hottest year recorded on Earth — the word “climate” appears 110 times and the word “environment” 53 times in the budget. Not one of those instances has anything to do with a positive Republican vision to address climate change or protect the environment. The RSC instead opposes the creation of a carbon tax and wants to give oil and gas companies deductions on costs like labor and safety, ramp up oil and gas projects on federal lands, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Republicans also throw their weight behind bills like Virginia Rep. Bob Good’s “No American Climate Corps Act,” to stop federal funds from being used for the American Climate Corps — a revolutionary clean energy jobs program whose applications open next month. While millions of Americans have been surrounded by throat-scratching smog, livelihood-destroying wildfires, and relentless flooding and heat waves, the Republicans call to prohibit the use of emergency disaster or public health emergency declarations “from being used to address purported climate change.”
On guns, Republicans call to undercut or block an array of gun regulations. For instance, the budget supports “defunding the constitutionally dubious red flag provisions in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.” That law allocates $750 million to support ongoing state implementation of red-flag laws that remove firearms from individuals who are deemed a threat to themselves or others; it doesn’t force any state to do anything.
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.
Like every good Republican fiscal document, the RSC budget threatens changes to Social Security, including by raising the retirement age. 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.
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.
“As in previous years,” the Republicans say about their master plan, “the RSC budget also celebrates the work of House conservatives who have fought for legislation that preserves American values, combats Biden’s woke and weaponized government, and protects the freedoms that should be enjoyed by every American.”
