This article is part of First Focus on Children’s analysis of Project 2025, the granular policy agenda intended to serve as the “playbook” for a Republican presidential administration. This extremist agenda, along with the Republican candidate’s own words and platform, proposes measures that would leave America’s children poorer, sicker, and less likely to become productive citizens. Our series explores some of the most harmful proposals.
Project 2025, which calls itself a “Presidential Transition Project,” has a simple goal for the next Republican presidency: Slash the so-called “federal catering programs” that keep food on children’s plates. The proposal outlines aggressive new restrictions, additional work requirements and other constraints on food assistance programs that would significantly increase hunger for millions of children, spike nutrition-related diseases, and eliminate the safety regulations on baby formula. Many of Project 2025’s radical elements overlap with the words and platforms of the Republican nominees for president and vice president.
First Focus on Children consistently advocates for strengthening the programs that keep our nation’s children fed and healthy. Food insecurity afflicts more than 7 million U.S. children, often causing long-term damage to their health and academic achievement, and exacerbating the problems associated with child poverty. Federal food assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and school meal programs, offer evidence-based nutrition to the nation’s infants, toddlers and children and help address the long-term problem of child hunger, especially for children of color, who are twice as likely as their white peers to be food insecure. The solution to this problem is to increase eligibility for SNAP, reduce the consistent threats to WIC and ensure that the program receives sufficient funding, expand access to free and reduced-price school meals, and ensure year-round food security for children through summer and after-school meal programs.
Project 2025 seems to deliberately propose the opposite.
Project 2025 recommends eliminating healthy meals for 20 million children
The authors would end the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), which allows schools or school districts with high rates of poverty to offer meals to all students without having to qualify each student individually. Project 2025 would take this power from schools and school administrators who understand what their communities need. Moreover, CEP is a proven success — schools that participate experience increased attendance rates, improved academic outcomes, and reduced suspension rates. Access to these healthy foods can help ease health disparities experienced by children from low-income families and decrease incidences of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Nearly 20 million children attend schools that participate in CEP and eliminating the program would put their access to healthy, nutritious food at risk.
Students who eat meals provided by schools also consume less saturated fat and sugar and more fiber and fresh produce than those who bring meals from home. School meals help shape children’s eating patterns and preferences, which in turn helps them create lifelong habits that support their health. Nutrient-dense meals should not be accessible only to children whose families can afford them — every child attending school should be given the same chance to develop academically and lead a healthy life.
Project 2025 would increase summertime hunger and academic backsliding
The blueprint for a Republican administration would end all summer meal assistance for K-12 students. Research shows that 75% of food-insecure households worry about how they will put food on the table for their children during the summer. Summer meal programs, like Summer EBT, help narrow the “summer food gap” that many families who rely on free or reduced-price school meals experience annually. Data has demonstrated time and again the proven success of these programs: Pandemic EBT programs that preceded Summer EBT reduced extreme food insecurity by one-third.
Stripping children of their summer meal benefits also exacerbates “summer slide,” resulting in poor academic performance in the beginning of the next school year, increased rates of mental and physical health issues, and behavioral health challenges. Nutrition benefits also help families reinvest in communities by allowing them to make more purchases, and analysts estimate Summer EBT programs alone could generate as much as $5.25 billion in economic activity. Eliminating summer assistance programs would harm children in both the long and short term.
Project 2025 recommends deregulating the baby formula industry
The authors aim to eliminate regulations that “unnecessarily delay the manufacture and sale” of baby formula, claiming that safety and labeling regulations were partially responsible for the formula shortage in 2021. Current regulations involve standards around quality control, recordkeeping, recall, nutrient quality, and other issues. These regulations are not without purpose — they exist to ensure that no manufacturer can distribute formulas that could potentially damage infants’ health or mislead parents.
Improperly handled infant formula can harm or even kill babies. A Michigan-based formula manufacturer that failed to meet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, was linked to two infant deaths and multiple hospitalizations in 2022. Recall protocols, which could be at risk under this plan, prevented many other infants from becoming sick. Deregulating the baby formula industry would be yet another assault on low-income families, who are more likely to rely on formula.
First Focus on Children remains dedicated to ensuring that all children have enough nutritious food to eat, at all times of the year. Solving child hunger in the U.S. will require long-term investment, not draconian cuts to our most vital programs. The next administration can and should strengthen and expand these programs to fight child food insecurity and ensure better child nutrition.