Lawmakers Hashing Out What’s On The Menu For School Lunches

Of all the accusations flung back and forth in the new Congress, none infuriates Republicans more than the assertion that they are cutting the school lunch program.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich said recently that the fight over that program was “one of the most horrendously disgusting examples of demagogy I have ever seen.”

“What you had,” he said, “was a group of reactionary politicians and reactionary reporters colluding to deliberately misinform the people of the United States.”

Democrats say the Republicans are cutting the school lunch program and want to kill it, and they cite these efforts as a symbol of what is wrong with the Republican agenda. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said, “The Republicans know that children are not old enough to vote, so they have targeted the school lunch program.”

In truth, said Gingrich, the welfare bill passed by the House of Representatives “increased by 4.5 percent a year for five years the amount of money we allocate” for school lunches. The Democrats, he said, are spreading “factually false stories” to scare children into thinking they will go hungry.

But the Republicans have found it hard to explain exactly what they are doing with the child nutrition programs, and the complexity of their proposal has allowed the debate to catch fire.

In fact, there is no simple, straightforward way to compare the money that would be spent under their proposal with the amounts that would be spent under current law for the same types of food assistance.

The school lunch program, established in 1946, now feeds 25.3 million children a day, subsidizing more than 4 billion meals a year.

The Republicans would give each state a lump sum of money to help schools feed children. This block grant would replace the school lunch program, and the separate school breakfast program, and would absorb part of the money that now goes to schools from three other sources: the summer food-service program, the child-care food program for youngsters in day care and the milk program for schools that do not offer lunch or breakfast.

The amount of money earmarked for school lunch subsidies this year is clear: $5.2 billion, including cash and commodities. And the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the amounts that will be spent over the next five years if current law remains in place.

But it is not so easy to determine precisely how much would be spent on school lunches under the Republican proposal because there would no longer be a separate account for such meals. The lunch money would be lumped together with money for school breakfasts, day-care meals and other programs merged in the block grant.

A state would have to use at least 80 percent of its grant to provide free or low-cost meals to “economically disadvantaged children.”

Each side in this debate has some evidence to support its argument. The amount of money in the block grant for 1996 is, as the Republicans say, more than the 1995 appropriations for the five programs that would be consolidated in the block grant, and the amount would increase in each of the next five years.

But the block grant provides less each year than would be spent in that year for those five programs under current law, and it would not keep pace with expected increases in food costs and school enrollment.

School lunch would no longer be an entitlement, available at little or no cost to any child with family income below a certain level. States could set their own eligibility criteria, and there is no guarantee that children entitled to free lunches today would continue to receive them.

Over five years, the block grant would provide states with $36.3 billion. That is at least $2 billion, or 5 percent, less than what they would receive under the existing programs in the same period. In 2000, the block grant would provide $7.8 billion, which is 8 percent less than states would receive if current law continued.

Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy group, said, “The block grant represents a decline in food purchasing power per student.” To deal with such a decline, he said, schools would have to reduce meal portions or quality, raise lunch prices or take other action to shave costs.

The school lunch provisions of the welfare bill were written by the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, headed by Rep. Bill Goodling, R-Pa.

Under the bill, he said, the school lunch program would grow by 4.5 percent a year, and to prove this, he listed what he said were “the bill’s authorizations for school lunch spending.”

But the bill does not set precise spending levels for the school lunch program, instead prescribing amounts for the whole grant.

The numbers cited by Goodling came from a work sheet used by the Republican staff of his committee to illustrate how money in the block grant might be divided among various types of food assistance. The block-grant money could be divided in many other ways, with state officials ultimately making those decisions.

The work sheet shows that in setting the amount of the block grant, Goodling assumed an annual increase of 4.5 percent in one part of the school lunch program, which provides cash reimbursements to schools.

But schools also receive commodities like meat, fruit and vegetables from the federal government, and under the block grant the federal money earmarked for such purchases in each of the next few years would be slightly less than the amount available this year.