After the U.S. Dept. of Education announced in June it is “rooting out discrimination in any form,” including gender identify, numerous state governments realized the federal government was brazenly tying biology-denying ideology to tens of millions of hungry children in the name of what the USDA called “equity and fairness.”
Under the Food and Nutrition Service, an agency within the USDA, federal dollars trickle down to U.S. states that provide free or low-cost meals for approximately 30 million schoolchildren in their school cafeterias. That annual cost is $14 billion, the USDA website states, which means the federal government is holding billions of dollars ransom if states refuse, for example, to allow a biological male to join the girls’ volleyball team and change in their locker room.
The American public knows the Biden administration is pushing an “extreme left-wing agenda” on the nation, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement, “but they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the left’s bidding.”
Rokita, a Republican serving his first term, is now leading a 22-state coalition that is suing the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. That federal lawsuit was filed July 26 and named Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack and other federal officials as defendants.
The last U.S. president to allow children to go hungry was Barack Obama, when school children were forced to eat whole grains and bland vegetables after Michelle Obama demanded healthy meals with skim milk, limited carbs, and strict calorie limits. Most of those meals got thrown away and kids went hungry instead.
Now numerous states are fighting the same names and faces in the White House.
Meg Kilgannon, a senior education analyst at the Family Research Council, tells AFN the “heavy-handed” edict is typical elitism from ideology-worshiping Democrats.
“It's an assault on poor children,” she says, “to address the agenda of a college-educated, wealthy minority of people in America."
