The government is giving away too many meals in the school-lunch program, according to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller in a McClatchy story. An aspirant for U.S. agriculture secretary, Miller said he discussed with President-elect Donald Trump’s team a plan to save “several billion dollars” by reforming the lunch program, which was created in 1946 “as a measure of national security, to safeguard the the health and well-being of the nation’s children.”
More than 30 million kids at nearly 100,000 schools eat hot meals daily through the school lunch program. Two-thirds of the meals are free to poor children and 7 percent are served at reduced price, according to USDA data. In the past decade, the portion of children paying full price for meals has plunged while the share of meals provided for free has climbed steadily.
“The free and reduced lunch program needs an overhaul,” Miller told McClatchy. “We’re just giving them away and I’ve got a plan to address that. We can probably save several billion dollars and I discussed that with the transition team.” The USDA, which operates the major public nutrition programs, estimates the school-lunch program cost $12.2 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2016. The school breakfast program cost $4 billion and the school milk program $9 million. When donated foods are counted, the school-food programs cost $17.7 billion in fiscal 2016.
There was no description of Miller’s plan for savings. Lawmakers and USDA have said that error rates for school lunch, at 15.8 percent, and school breakfast, at 23.1 percent, are too high. The errors equaled $2.7 billion in the 2012-13 school year but they include over- and under-payments. In a 2015 report, USDA said 70 percent of the errors resulted in over-payment and 30 percent in under-payment. The child-nutrition bills written last year by the Senate Agriculture and House Education committees included provisions to improve accuracy. The House bill included a three-state test of a block grant to let states run school-food programs as they liked.