Mitch McConnell is reportedly opposing free school lunches: 'Kids are going to have less on their plates,' Biden's agriculture secretary says

• The Washington Post reported Mitch McConnell is opposing a free school lunch program extension.
• This comes as Congress is deciding what to include in the upcoming government funding package.

Congress is once again racing against the clock to fund the government, and it's looking like meals for children at school could get axed from the budget.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that some Republican lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are opposing the inclusion of a pandemic-era free school lunch measure in the government funding package, according to sources familiar. Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass a package to keep the government funded and avoid a federal shutdown, and while Democrats support extending some pandemic-related federal programs in the package, a Republican leadership aide told the Post further extensions of expiring programs would be too costly.

"This weekend, I've made a request to speak to Leader McConnell and Leader McCarthy," US Department of Agriculture Sec. Tom Vilsack told the Post. "Now, I realize that they've got a lot on their plate. But the failure of Republicans to respond to this means that kids are going to have less on their plates. And there's no reason for this. There's no reason for this."

Politico's Helena Bottemiller Evich first reported on the issue on Tuesday and noted that the School Nutrition Association has sent 73,000 emails to Congress urging an extension of the universal school lunch program, along with lobbying in-person on Capitol Hill.

—SchoolLunch (@SchoolLunch) March 7, 2022

A federally funded US Department of Agriculture program that was launched in April gives free meals to all K-12 students, regardless of income, through the end of June, which the department said would reach an estimated 12 million kids who are food-insecure. But if the program is not extended, the department estimated 40% in decreased funding for school lunches, cutting vital resources for many families and children.

Sources told the Post that the government funding package is not yet final, so the lack of a free school meal extension is not certain. But should Congress fail to extend the program, it will follow the lapse of the monthly child tax credits — a pandemic-era benefit that gave checks to families with kids but expired in December, causing 3.7 million children to slip back into poverty in January.

Still, some Democratic lawmakers want more than an extension of free schools meals — they want the program to be permanent. In May, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar introduced legislation to make universal school meals permanent, saying that 30 million children in the country rely on free or reduced-price school lunches, and if the pandemic waivers expire, many students from houses with incomes just 130% above the poverty line will not be able to receive free school meals.

"In the richest country in the world, it is an outrage that millions of children struggle with hunger every day," Sanders said in a statement. "Every child deserves a quality education free of hunger. What we've seen during this pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works. We cannot go backwards."