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Trump and GOP Wage War on Children's Food Aid to Fund Tax Cuts for the Rich
The Republican Party's proposed cuts to nutrition assistance for children, said one analyst, "would be part of legislation that would give massive tax cuts to the wealthiest people and businesses."
Mar 13, 2025
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are waging a multi-front war on nutrition benefits for children, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture moving this week to end programs that provided over $1 billion in funding for schools and charity organizations to buy food from local farmers as GOP lawmakers simultaneously take aim at school meal programs as part of an effort to fund tax breaks for the wealthy.
Schools and farmers are "bracing for impact," as The Washington Postput it, after the USDA axed the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program as part of a purported effort to "return to long-term, fiscally responsible initiatives."
The Local Food for Schools Program, according to the USDA, "no longer effectuates agency priorities."
The decision to kill the programs could be disastrous for schools, childcare facilities, and other organizations that were expecting federal funding this year. Politicoobserved that "roughly $660 million that schools and childcare facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms" has been terminated by the Trump administration.
"Trump and Elon Musk have declared that feeding children and supporting local farmers are no longer 'priorities,'" Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement, noting that her state was set to receive $12.2 million "to provide local healthy food to childcare programs and schools, and to create new procurement relationships with local farmers and small businesses."
"Instead of strengthening our food supply chain and supporting students and food banks, the Trump White House wants cuts, chaos, and cruelty."
Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), vice ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, said that "the Trump administration is proving to be bad for farmers, bad for children, and bad for people in need."
Food insecurity rose for the second consecutive year in 2024, and roughly 14 million children in the U.S. are food insecure, according to the nonprofit Feeding America.
"Instead of strengthening our food supply chain and supporting students and food banks, the Trump White House wants cuts, chaos, and cruelty," said Brown. "These two programs were a win-win for farmers and communities, and it is incredibly short-sighted to abruptly end them."
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are pushing for deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid that "could make it harder for schools to operate meal programs and for families to obtain free or reduced-price school meals, Summer EBT, or benefits through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)."
That's according to an analysis published Wednesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which noted that "school meal programs and Summer EBT use SNAP and Medicaid data to automatically enroll children."
"If low-income families with children lose their SNAP and/or Medicaid benefits, they would have to complete a school meal application instead of being automatically enrolled," CBPP warned. "In addition to diminished access to meals during the school year, families who are unable to successfully navigate the application process would no longer be automatically enrolled in Summer EBT. Families with children who lose SNAP and/or Medicaid would also lose their adjunctive income eligibility for WIC."
Zoë Neuberger, a senior fellow at CBPP, said that "as families struggle to keep up with the rising cost of food, Republicans in Congress are looking at making it harder for millions of children in families with low incomes to get free meals at school."
"Worse yet, the proposed cuts would be part of legislation that would give massive tax cuts to the wealthiest people and businesses," said Neuberger. "Congress should instead focus on removing red tape for schools and families so parents can afford groceries and children can get the meals they need for healthy development."
The School Nutrition Association (SNA), a national nonprofit whose members help provide meals to schools across the U.S., is sounding the alarm about three specific proposals that Republicans are weighing as they craft their sprawling reconciliation package:
- Restricting the Community Eligibility Provision;
- Requiring income verification with every free and reduced-price school meal application; and
- Ending Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility
"These proposals would cause millions of children to lose access to free school meals at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs," SNA president Shannon Gleave warned in a statement earlier this week. "Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies."
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BBC Rebuked for Canceling Documentary 'Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone'
Hundreds of British artists and media personalities argue that the film "deserves recognition, not politically motivated censorship."
Feb 28, 2025
Hundreds of U.K. artists and media personalities have signed an open letter decrying the British Broadcasting Corporation's removal of a documentary film about the horrifying impacts of Israel's Gaza onslaught on children.
The BBC pulled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone—which was produced by Hoyo Films—after the broadcaster learned that its 14-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
Juliet Stevenson, Gary Lineker, Khalid Abdalla, Anita Rani, and Miriam Margolyes are among the more than 800 film, television, and media workers who, as of Friday, have signed the Artists for Palestineletter condemning what signers called the censorship and racism behind the BBC's cancellation.
"We are U.K.-based film and TV professionals and journalists writing in support of the BBC documentary Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, which aired on February 17 on BBC Two and was subsequently made available on iPlayer," states the letter, whose signatories include a dozen BBC employees.
"This film is an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinian children living in unimaginable circumstances, which amplifies voices so often silenced. It deserves recognition, not politically motivated censorship," the letter continues.
Why have the BBC apologised for & removed the documentary 'Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone'? Because it went some way to humanising Palestinians. Here some young children flee in terror from Israeli bullets.
[image or embed]
— Saul Staniforth (@saulstaniforth.bsky.social) February 28, 2025 at 3:24 AM
"Beneath this political football are children who are in the most dire circumstances of their young lives," the signers added. "This is what must remain at the heart of this discussion. As program-makers, we are extremely alarmed by the intervention of partisan political actors on this issue, and what this means for the future of broadcasting in this country."
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 17,000 Palestinian children have been killed and thousands more wounded by Israeli attacks on the coastal enclave, 10,000 of them in the first 100 days of the war, according to the charity Save the Children. The International Rescue Committee published a report last October revealing that as many as 50,000 children in Gaza have been orphaned or separated from their parents.
Hundreds of thousands more children have been forcibly displaced, with some dying from exposure to cold, windy, rainy conditions. Many other Gazan children have been sickened and starved, sometimes to death—their deaths partly attributed to the "complete siege" imposed on the strip by Israel, which is facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands.
The Israeli assault has wrought what Save the Children called the "complete psychological destruction" of Gaza's children, 96% of whom feared imminent death, according to a survey conducted last December by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management, and supported by War Child Alliance.
The international charity Doctors Without Borders has called Gaza "the most dangerous place in the world to be a child."
Another documentary about Palestine, No Other Land, has been nominated for an Academy Award but is unavailable to stream in the United States because no distributor was willing to take it.
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At Least 6 Gaza Babies Die From Hypothermia Amid Israeli Blockade
"Newborns should not be dying of hypothermia in Gaza," said one campaigner. "This is not a tragedy of nature but a man-made crisis."
Feb 25, 2025
Local medical professionals said Tuesday that at least half a dozen babies have died this week in Gaza amid winter weather and Israel's ongoing blockade of the obliterated Palestinian enclave, where hundreds of thousands of people are living in tent encampments and other unheated makeshift structures.
Dr. Saeed Salah, the medical director at Patients' Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in Gaza City, told reporters that three infants died on Monday and three more on Tuesday from complications due to exposure to the cold.
"In the past two weeks, we admitted eight newborns suffering from severe cold injuries," Salah said. "Three of them died within hours of arrival. They were only a day or two old, weighing between 1.7 and 2 kilograms (3.7-4.4 lbs.)."
"All of these children arrived with low temperatures, shortness of breath, and cold extremities that reached the point of freezing," Salah toldThe Washington Post by phone Tuesday. "These children live with their families in tents and destroyed homes and suffer from a lack of supplies that help provide them with the necessary warmth, especially with the Israeli intransigence in bringing in the necessary fuel."
Gaza experiences cold, wet, and windy winters, with temperatures often dipping well below 50°F (10°C) at night. Hypothermia can be deadly at temperatures over 60°F (15°C) in overexposed conditions such as those existing in Gaza, where the overwhelming majority of the strip's 2.3 million residents have been forcibly displaced, most homes have been destroyed or damaged, and bodies have been weakened from more than 500 days of an Israeli siege for which the country is facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.
The sixth reported infant death of the week was of 2-month-old Sham Yousef al-Shanbari, who died in her family's tent in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
"Her body turned into a piece of ice... and her heartbeat stopped," uncle-in-law Obaida al-Shanbari told the Post by phone Tuesday.
Yusuf al-Shanbari, Sham's father, toldThe Associated Press: "Yesterday, I was playing with her. I was happy with her. She was a beautiful child, like the moon."
(Warning: The following video contains images of death.)
Dr. Ahmed al-Farah, the head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told the AP that al-Shanbari did not have any illness but died from exposure because she lived in a tent. Al-Farah also said the hospital has treated two other infants for frostbite.
At least three Palestinian infants died from exposure to cold conditions earlier this winter, when Israeli forces were still carrying out their assault on Gaza that left more than 170,000 people dead, wounded, or missing.
Hamas, whose political wing rules the Gaza Strip, has accused Israel of violating the terms of a fragile monthlong cease-fire, not only by killing and wounding Palestinian civilians and postponing a scheduled prisoner release, but also by delaying the delivery of mobile homes, tents, and other lifesaving humanitarian aid. Israeli officials deny the allegations.
"If adequate aid, including shelter supplies, were allowed to reach civilians and hospitals, these deaths would be entirely preventable."
"Newborns should not be dying of hypothermia in Gaza. This is not a tragedy of nature but a man-made crisis," Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director for the London-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, told the Post.
"If adequate aid, including shelter supplies, were allowed to reach civilians and hospitals, these deaths would be entirely preventable," Shalltoot added. "This suffering is the direct result of Israel's restrictions on essential humanitarian aid."
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director at the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement Tuesday: "The Israeli government's genocidal campaign in Gaza has left most of its population homeless. To block the entry of temporary housing so that returning Palestinians, including infants, die of exposure is entirely unconscionable."
"The Trump administration and the international community must take immediate action to force the Israeli government to allow desperately needed housing supplies to enter Gaza," Mitchell added.
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