The Health Divide: If MAHA wants kids to eat healthier, why cut the school food programs that support that?

Children’s nutrition is becoming the latest casualty of the White House war on DEI and government spending that supports families.

After canceling funding for research on health care disparities and higher-ed programs aimed at diversity, the administration is cutting initiatives known to improve nutrition in kids — especially low-income children, who have the highest risk of obesity and other chronic conditions.

First came the termination of several popular USDA initiatives that brought farm-fresh food and nutrition education to schools, child care centers and community-based organizations across the country. Then came USDA’s “reinvigorated” farms-to-schools grants program, which changed the competitive application process in ways that disadvantage small rural districts and marginalized communities.

And as SNAP budget cuts and expanded work requirements kick in, millions of children may lose access to free school meals. While these are a lifeline for poor students, government funding formulas have extended their reach far beyond low-income families until now.

Earlier this month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins unveiled a new version of the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grants Program, which she’d canceled in March. She presented the revamped program in support of the MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — strategy to address chronic disease in children. The competitive grants program, established by the Obama administration in 2013, funds projects such as edible gardens, youth-run farms and the development of local food procurement systems.

Under the old rules, most grants were under $100,000 and many were half that amount or less. Prioritizing equity, the scoring system for awarding grants gave bonus points to applicants that work with emerging, veteran and socially disadvantaged farmers and serve racially diverse and low-income student populations, many in remote areas.

For example, the School District of Bayfield in northern Wisconsin, which has just over 400 students — 83% of them members of the Red Cliff Ojibwa Nation — received a $75,000 grant to teach middle- and high-schoolers about Native agriculture, food sovereignty and wellness. 

USDA’s revamped grants program has dropped the equity focus. In the name of streamlining, it will award larger grants — $100,000 to $500,000 — and likely fewer ones. “Not many schools are going to get those grants,” said Donna Martin, a school nutrition consultant and retired school district nutrition director in Georgia. 

On the plus side, Rollins committed $18 million for the grants in the 2026 fiscal year, the largest one-year investment in the program’s history. But that doesn’t begin to make up for USDA’s termination of a $660 million program for schools to buy local food. It was a vital source of support for schools eager to get more fruits and vegetables into the lunchroom.

“I’ve talked to school nutrition directors all over the country,” Martin said. “It has decimated their farm-to-school programs.”

The Biden administration created this purchasing program in 2021 to help school districts deal with the supply disruptions of the pandemic and help small and mid-size farmers and food producers survive the upheavals. The program emphasized “purchasing from historically underserved producers and processors.” Many food service directors suspect that emphasis sealed the program’s fate under the current administration. 

The sweeping changes to farm-to-school initiatives appear to undermine the MAHA’s stated commitment to make American children healthier. But the cuts fit squarely with President Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order eliminating “‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

And these changes are just the start.

Federal budget cuts have killed SNAP-Ed, the nutrition education arm of the food stamp program. In 2024, nearly 1.3 million people, including more than 900,000 children, took part in SNAP-Ed classes, workshops and other events aimed at helping low-income families make healthy food choices on a tight budget. Evaluations have shown that students who participated in SNAP-Ed classes ate more fruits and vegetables, were more physically active and gained knowledge about nutrition. 

SNAP’s expanded work requirements, which are just beginning to be implemented, and the broader budget cuts to the program will be an even bigger blow to child nutrition.

Children from families that receive federal benefits such as SNAP automatically qualify for free school breakfast and lunch. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 96,000 children in a given month will lose this easy access after their families are dropped from SNAP as a result of new work requirements for parents with children ages 14 and older. 

That may not seem like a huge decline in a nation with some 55 million K-12 students. But it’s a double whammy for a lot of families. 

“It’s not just that the family is getting off SNAP,” said Riona Corr, deputy director of the nonprofit New Hampshire Hunger Solutions. "Now the child is not getting fed two meals a day, and the family is going to have to figure out how to get that food to the child.”

And that loss will ripple broadly.

That’s because a USDA program makes it possible for high-poverty schools and districts to provide free school meals to all students. In the 2024-2025 school year, 54,234 schools, serving 27.2 million students, took part.

For schools to qualify, at least 25% of students must live in households that get SNAP or other safety-net benefits. The federal government reimburses generously for the meals for these children, so if a school or district has a lot of these kids — at least 60% of the student population — the subsidies cover the cost of feeding everyone. 

As families lose SNAP, causing children to lose automatic eligibility for free meals, these subsidies will decline. Cash-strapped districts will have to cover the shortfall or return to separating “free lunch” kids from those who pay.

“What we will potentially see is a tsunami of school districts not being able to offer as many free meals,” said Dr. Jennifer Cadenhead, an assistant professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. 

Supporters say universal access to school meals erases the stigma of being tagged as a “free lunch” kid, and it encourages all students to eat a meal instead of grabbing a bag of chips for lunch. It also eliminates burdensome bureaucracy for schools, including tracking lunch debt and hounding children for payment.

And without federal reimbursement, food quality is likely to suffer.

“School meal programs really do operate on razor-thin margins,” Cadenhead said. “They’re probably going to have to rely on more processed packaged foods, which tend to be less expensive.”

Journalists can start tracking the impact on school food offerings and student participation now. They can also follow what happens in the nine states — California, Colorado Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Vermont — that make free school meals available to all students, whether or not their school qualifies for the USDA’s free meal program.

 As federal reimbursements decline, these states will have to pick up a greater share of the costs of universal access even as they scramble to deal with the full force of federal budget cuts. How many will still be able to afford feeding all students at no charge?

The MAHA movement and its leader, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have assailed the quality of school menus. They’re demanding fresher ingredients and curbs on processed foods. Nobody would argue with those goals. But any such gains will be hollow if children struggling with poverty and chronic illness cannot access these new, improved meals.