USDA's proposed pivot away from climate and equity threatens school meal programs relied on by 30 million students
Project 2025's USDA chapter proposes removing references to climate change and equity from department policy and prioritizing food efficiency above all. This directly threatens the nutritional safety net for the roughly 30 million students who rely on school meals daily, including over 20 million receiving free or reduced-price lunches — a key support for public education that the Department of Education dismantlement makes more vulnerable.
If you've ever watched a child walk into a classroom hungry, you know that learning stops when a stomach is empty. Roughly 30 million students eat a school lunch every day, and more than 20 million of those meals are free or reduced-price. These meals are a core function of public schools — not a side program, not a welfare add-on, but part of what it means to educate a child in America. School lunch is the CDC's best tool for catching nutritional deficiencies of kids from districts whose property-tax bases can't compete. It is also funded overwhelmingly by the USDA.
Project 2025's USDA chapter does not explicitly mention 'climate resilience' or 'equity,' but its proposed mission statement strips away any reference to those concepts, replacing them with a single-minded focus on 'food productivity and efficiency' and 'service to all Americans.' That sounds like commonsense belt-tightening — unless you understand that frameworks like equity are the policy language that guides school districts to request extra food aid in communities where kids are already food-insecure. Without that framework, a struggling district has no lever to argue that its students need a higher subsidy than the district next door. Add to this the parallel push at the Department of Education to dismantle the agency that oversees Title I and IDEA enforcement, and the net effect is a one-two punch: students lose the meal funding they depend on, and the federal office that could intervene to correct the disparity is being wound down.
The alternative is not complicated: fully fund school meal programs through the USDA, maintain programming that allows aid to flow where need is greatest, and coordinate across the Department of Education to ensure that nutritional supports are part of every school's Title I plan. Strip out the frameworks for reaching vulnerable populations, and you do not make lunch cheaper — you make it invisible to the children who need it most.
The humanitarian alternative
Instead of dismantling the Department, Congress should pass the Strong Public Schools Act, which would: (1) fully fund Title I at the level authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act, ensuring high-poverty districts receive at least $20 billion in additional annual funding; (2) mandate that IDEA be funded at 40% of the average per-pupil expenditure, as originally promised in 1975; (3) increase the maximum Pell Grant to $13,000 and index it to inflation; (4) expand the Office for Civil Rights staff to ensure timely investigations; and (5) prohibit federal funds from flowing to private or religious schools through voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs. This approach preserves the federal role as a guarantor of equity while streamlining efficiency through evidence-based program consolidation and improved data systems.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 11: Department of Education (pp 324-326)"— 291 — Department of Agriculture about the importance of sound science to inform the USDA’s work and respect for personal freedom and individual dietary choices, private property rights, and the rule of law. Taking these factors into account, below is a model USDA mission statement: To develop and disseminate agricultural information and research, identify and address concrete public health and safety threats directly connected to food and agriculture, and remove both unjustified foreign trade barriers for U.S. goods and domestic government barriers that undermine access to safe and affordable food absent a compelling need—all based on the importance of sound science, personal freedom, private property, the rule of law, and service to all Americans. OVERVIEW In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the legislation that created the USDA.4 The department had a very narrow mission focused on the dissemi - nation of information connected to agriculture and “to procure, propagate and distribute among the people new valuable seeds and plants.”5 During the last 160 years, the scope of the USDA’s work has expanded well beyond that narrow mis- sion—and well beyond agr…"