The Trump administration violated the law when it rolled back nutrition standards for school meals, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court.
The violations occurred when the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a final rule that weakens nutrition standards on the amount of whole grains and sodium served in school meals, the lawsuit contends. The weakened standards put about 30 million children, including about 22 million low-income children, at greater risk of health issues associated with diets high in sodium and low in whole grains.
The plaintiffs, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Healthy School Food Maryland, represented by Democracy Forward, are asking the court to set aside the rule lowering the nutrition standards and require the agency to follow Congress’s requirement to set school nutrition standards based on nutrition science as reflected in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
A coalition of states, led by New York, filed a challenge to the same rule Wednesday.
“American children are fed too much sodium – raising their risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke,” said Margo G. Wootan, vice president for nutrition for the center. “Kids are also getting too much white refined flour and not enough whole grains.”
After working for over a decade to improve school nutrition and seeing the tremendous progress that schools are making, it’s heartbreaking to see the Trump administration reverse course, Wootan said. “The Trump rollbacks are recklessly putting kids’ health in jeopardy.”
In 2012, the USDA issued a rule requiring schools taking part in programs to phase in three sodium-reduction targets and requiring that all grain-based foods be at least half whole grain. The rule, issued at the direction of Congress in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, also increased the amount of fruits and vegetables on kids’ lunch trays and set limits on saturated and trans fats – changes required to meet basic nutrition standards in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans with which the programs are required to comply.
Because school-age children consume one-third to one-half of their daily calories during the school day, the nutrition standards required by the HHFKA are “one of the most important national obesity prevention policy achievements in recent decades,” Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health said. Chan estimates that the improvements would prevent more than two million cases of childhood obesity and save up to $792 million in healthcare costs over 10 years.
In December 2018, the Trump administration published a new rule delaying the compliance date for the second sodium-reduction target and eliminating the third target. That rule also cut the whole-grain standard, requiring that only half of the grain-based foods served in school meals be whole-grain-rich. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, signed the revised rule in his first week in office, to “make school meals great again.”
“The effects of the rollbacks will reverberate throughout all levels of policymaking, down to the local schools in our area,” said Fania Yangarber, executive director of Healthy School Food Maryland. “Our organization has been equipping parents with tools based on nutrition and wellness standards that were undergirded by the solid foundation of the hard-won victories of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act; the rollbacks amount to a fracturing of that foundation, which all our work is based on, and will hurt our kids.”
“The effects of the rollbacks will reverberate throughout all levels of policymaking, down to the local schools in our area,” Yangarber said.
The USDA violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a reasoned explanation for rolling back the standards and for taking actions about which it hadn’t sought feedback, she said. And the USDA didn’t adequately respond to the more than 85,000 public comments, most of which favored keeping the original 2012 standards for sodium, 96 percent, and whole grains, 97 percent. USDA’s data shows that nearly all schools, 99 percent, taking part in the National School Lunch Program are making progress toward serving healthier meals and are meeting the sodium and whole-grain requirements, Yangarber said.
“The law requires USDA to make sure school kids are served healthy meals by basing nutrition standards on science, so ignoring science and putting kids’ health at risk like this is not just wrong, it’s illegal,” said Anne Harkavy, executive director for Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization.
