If the reasons being offered by House Republicans for tampering with the federal school lunch program sound lame and unconvincing, it’s because they are.
There is no evidence that this 48-year-old program has been anything but successful in improving the health and nutrition of American children, especially those poor children for whom lunch at school can be their only decent, reliable meal of the day.
The only possible reason to fiddle with it is blind, slavish and decidedly unconservative devotion to an ideology that holds that anything that comes out of Washington, D.C., must be bad. That’s as foolish in its way as the notion that if Washington hasn’t put its fingers on it, it can’t be any good.
The fact is that the school lunch program works, and the guiding principle in dealing with it ought to be: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Speaker Newt Gingrich, at his Thursday morning meeting with the press, gave the rationale for the GOP proposal, which would convert the federal school lunch and breakfast programs into a system of block grants to the states.
It would allow the states to devise nutrition programs of their own but would end the guarantee of free meals for poor children and also would do away with federal nutritional requirements. Crucially, from the House Republicans’ perspective, the expenditure would be less-$5 billion to $7 billion less over five years.
Gingrich offered the now-familiar explanations: Block grants put power into the hands of people closest to the problem and give states the ability to craft solutions appropriate to their unique situations; removing a layer of federal bureaucracy will let the states achieve the same results with less money, etc., etc.
But the fact is that there has been no evidence of outrageous waste, fraud or abuse in the school nutrition programs. There has been no credible assertion that federal authorities have attempted to micromanage it or forced gross inefficiencies on the states.
There has been no discernible clamor from the states-which someone seems to have decided are the repositories of all governmental wisdom and efficiency-for authority over the programs. And there is no reason to suppose that feeding children in the schools of Maine is an appreciably different problem than feeding children in the schools of Arizona.
School nutrition is not welfare, where there has been a history of wrongheaded federal rulemaking and some states have demonstrated a refreshing willingness to try different approaches.
School nutrition programs-lunch and breakfast, free to those who need them-are among the things that ought to make Americans proud. A wealthy and generous nation ought to do no less-particularly if it hopes to remain wealthy.
