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‘Heartless’: Trump’s $660 Million School Food Cut Is Latest GOP Attack on Nutrition Aid
The Trump administration is cutting over $600 million from a program designed to help schools and child care facilities buy healthy food from local farmers, the GOP’s latest attack on poor families. The administration is also cutting a similar program that helps local food banks and other organizations feed people. In total, Politico reported, the cuts come to over $1 billion.
“Roughly $660 million that schools and child care facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program in 2025 has been canceled, according to the School Nutrition Association,” Politico reported. “State officials were notified Friday of USDA’s decision to end the LFS program for this year.”
Coincidentally, last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) celebrated National School Breakfast Week:
The decision by the USDA to eliminate funding for healthy food from local farmers also comes as congressional Republicans target programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for cuts.
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“Late last month,” Axios reported on Saturday, “House Republicans voted to pass a budget resolution that sets the stage for $230 billion or more in cuts to agriculture programs, with a large chunk expected to come from SNAP.”
The move to ax funding for programs that help children eat healthy foods appears to conflict with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim to want to “Make America Healthy Again.”
That slogan has led RFK Jr. to announce he wants to curtail the types of foods families can buy through SNAP, which could especially affect Americans living in rural areas or “food deserts,” as Axios also reported last month.
According to The Guardian, “more than one in eight households say they have difficulty getting enough food.” SNAP, “formerly known as food stamps, helps more than 42 million people fill those gaps, and is considered the country’s most effective tool to fight hunger. But now, the USDA-run program is facing attacks from House Republicans who see deep cuts as a way to pay for an extension of the 2017 tax bill that benefits the very wealthy.”
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Critics are blasting the cuts.
“Taking $230 billion out of the food economy hurts the farmers who grow our food, the truckers who move it, the processors who package it and the grocery stores that sell it,” House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (D-MN) said in a statement in February. “Cutting farm bill nutrition programs does not make life affordable for everyday people. Instead of cutting SNAP to pay for handouts to wealthy donors, Republicans should prioritize helping working people and rural economies.”
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health remarked, “Trump is cutting $660M meant for local farmers to provide healthy food for kids in schools. Big win for the giant processed food corporations who poured millions into Donald Trump’s campaign. How does hurting farmers and kids make America great again?”
Zach Rodvold, director of public affairs at Second Harvest Heartland, a hunger-relief organization, wrote: “With hunger rates soaring and the farm economy under threat, now is not the time to cut funding for local farm-to-school and food bank programs. (In fact, we should be doing just the opposite.)”
“This is absolutely unacceptable. They’re literally taking kids’ lunch money and farmers’ incomes so they can give tax cuts to billionaires,” observed U.S. Rep. Josh Riley (D-NY).
“Cutting food aid hurts kids, farmers and struggling folks,” noted U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). “Why is Trump doing it? To help pay for his tax cut for the rich. Heartless.”
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Image via Reuters
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
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