The Trump administration isn’t backtracking on its plan to take free school lunches from 500,000 kids while also taking food stamps from their families, ensuring that they’ll be hungry at home without relief at school. The change to school lunches would come with the administration’s plan to tighten eligibility rules for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, with kids whose eligibility for free school lunches comes automatically with their family’s SNAP benefits losing out twice.
The kids whose school lunch aid would be taken away or turned into reduced-price rather than free lunches come from families with income placing them slightly above the poverty line. And it would make a difference in their lives—many families wouldn’t be able to afford the lunches, or would be daunted by the paperwork involved, and we’re talking about these kids losing something “proven to support academic success, obesity prevention and overall student health,” according to the president of the School Nutrition Association.
Republicans say this is all a great idea that’s just closing a loophole, because one conservative douchebag with $1 million in his retirement accounts decided to “prove” that wealthy people could be scamming the system by exploiting the lack of an asset check in his state. So the idea here is that wealthy people are, en masse, going to the trouble of applying for SNAP and that cutting off the vast numbers of people doing this is worth cutting off 500,000 kids from families living in not-quite-poverty.
But the “loophole” the Trump administration wants to close, called Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility, is not leading to widespread abuse: “Three-quarters of all SNAP-receiving households in states with BBCE have less than $500 in liquid assets. Just under 7% have total assets valued above $10,000 that would be counted in non-BBCE states.” Meanwhile, BBCE eliminates a lot of paperwork and staff time for states, so ending it will raise administrative costs as well as stripping 3 million people of food stamps and 500,000 kids of free school lunches.
The cruelty is the point. It’s always the point.