The Hidden Hunger Bill: Downstream Impacts of H.R. 1 On School Meals

Raniya Fisher, a student at Ridgeland High School in Mississippi, knows how important school meals are. “If you don’t eat at lunch you are just starving, and little things like that are a distraction.”

For nearly 80 years, federally subsidized school meals have ensured that children from lower-income families have access to nutritious meals at school. School meals are a core investment in children’s nutrition and a lifeline for millions of children.

Bread for the World has long advocated for inclusive policies and sufficient funding for school meals programs, most recently through our Nourish Our Future campaign. Some provisions in H.R. 1, the 2025 reconciliation bill, will make access to school meals more difficult.

Most spending on child nutrition programs goes to the National School Lunch (NSLP) and School Breakfast Programs (SBP). More children have access to these meals because of two key policy changes, one implemented in the late 1980s and the other in 2010. They are direct certification and the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), respectively.

Direct certification, introduced in the late 1980s, enables school districts and state departments of education to use existing data from programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – SNAP (household food assistance), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – TANF (cash assistance), and more recently, Medicaid (federally-funded health insurance) to determine eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals. Direct certification has expanded school meals to millions of children. During the 2018-2019 school year, for example, 98 percent of children who participated in SNAP were directly certified for school meals.

School meals became even more accessible in 2010 with the introduction of the CEP, part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. This provision enables schools with a high population of students participating in safety net programs, like SNAP and Medicaid, to serve free meals to all students without collecting individual school meal applications.

To be eligible to participate in CEP, a school must show that 25 percent of its identified student population is eligible for free meals through direct certification. Schools that participate in CEP are reimbursed by the federal government for the meals they provide. CEP helps create a school environment where students who cannot afford meals are not stigmatized. More than 54,000 schools serving more than 27 million children participated in CEP in the 2024-2025 school year. Research from North Carolina public schools also suggests that CEP helps to improve attendance, reduce the number of suspensions, and raise test scores in some subjects.

H.R. 1, which made unprecedented cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, will jeopardize access to free and reduced-price school meals for children who are directly certified as eligible for these meals through SNAP and Medicaid. This potential loss of meal access for low-income school children will be harmful to them, their families, and their entire school community.

The roughly 20 percent cut to SNAP in H.R. 1 is estimated to reduce or eliminate SNAP benefits for nearly 4 million Americans, including 1 million children. As a result, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that in an average month, 96,000 children will lose access to school meals.  

Millions of families who participate in Medicaid will face additional barriers to accessing school meals, especially in the 44 states that use Medicaid to certify students directly for free or reduced-price school meals. The CBO estimates that 7.8 million people will become uninsured under the changes made by H.R. 1.

Fewer students participating in SNAP and/or Medicaid also makes it more difficult for schools and school districts to meet the requirement for CEP: 25 percent of students must be eligible for free meals through direct certification.

Elected officials at every level have denounced cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in H.R. 1, but fewer have responded to the follow-on impacts on school meal participation. These cuts will threaten infrastructure that expanded school meal access. Decades of progress towards healthier, more accessible school meals could be reversed. In turn, fewer children will enjoy the health and learning benefits of better nutrition.

Yet, the effort to restore and protect expanded school meal access is fully underway. Groups like the School Nutrition Association (SNA) and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) have historically supported CEP and direct certification, and they have sounded the alarm on the impacts of H.R. 1 on child nutrition programs. Bread and other advocacy organizations will continue to press our elected leaders to undo the harm done by H.R. 1 and demonstrate by their actions that our country still cares about making sure no child goes hungry.

Taylor Johnson is a domestic policy advisor, Policy and Research Institute, with Bread for the World.