Republican Calls Kids Freeloaders for Wanting Free School Lunch

Representative Rich McCormick argued Tuesday against free school lunches because they give kids “incentives to stay at home and not work.”

During an interview on CNN, the Georgia Republican was asked whether he would support slashing programs that provide “school lunch for vulnerable kids,” such as Head Start, a federally funded program that provides free meals for hundreds of thousands of low-income children across the country. Head Start will likely be one of the many programs affected by Donald Trump’s decision to freeze all federal grants. 

In response, McCormick argued that offering students a free school lunch was rewarding teenagers for being lazy, and undermining their desperation to earn money.

“I don’t know about you, but I worked since I was, since before I was even 13 years old, I was picking berries in a field before they had child labor laws that precluded that,” McCormick said. “I was a paper boy! And when I was in high school, I worked my entire way through. 

“You’re telling me that kids who stay at home instead of going to work at Burger King, at McDonald’s during the summer should stay at home and get their free lunch instead of going to work? I think we need to have a top-down review. Think about where kids need to actually be.”

Where exactly does McCormick think kids need to be? Obviously not at school or at home with their families, but out earning their keep. Meanwhile, there are plenty of benefits to providing subsidized school lunches, which have been linked to improved academic performance, physical health, and lowered rates of out-of-school suspensions. 

CNN’s Pamela Brown hit back at McCormick’s inhumane tirade. 

“I think you’re painting a lot of these kids with a broad brush. I would say that’s not necessarily a fair assessment of all of the kids,” Brown said. “So you would say all the kids in your district who use the free lunch, for example, or breakfast, they’re all just staying home and not working?”

“Of course not,” McCormick said, smiling broadly. 

“Because that seems like what you were trying to insinuate—” Brown continued.

“No, this gives us a chance, though, to see where is the money really being spent,” McCormick said. “Who can actually go, and actually produce their own income? Who can actually go out there and do something, make something, and have value, and work skills for the future?

“I mean, how many people got their start in fast-food restaurants when they were kids? Versus just giving a blanket rule that gives all kids’ lunches in high school who are capable of going out and actually getting a job and doing something that makes them have value. Thinking about their future, instead of thinking about how they’re gonna expunge out the government when they don’t need to—”

As McCormick spoke, his worldview came into sharp relief: a world in which education is fundamentally unimportant, schools teach dangerous ideas, and only through work can someone create value and acquire skills. 

In reality, providing free school lunches is meant to allow students to focus on their schoolwork without creating an undue burden on families that are financially struggling. In Georgia, McCormick’s state, 64 percent of students were eligible for reduced-fee and free school lunches in the fiscal year 2024, according to the House Budget and Research Office.  

McCormick explained that it wasn’t just school lunches for children that he took issue with, but all government programs that alleviate financial despair. 

“We don’t give people value, we don’t give them the ability to dig themselves out when we penalize them for actually working, and actually keep them on welfare. That’s what’s been the inner-city problem for a very long time. We need to have a top-down review so we can get people out of poverty,” he said.

McCormick said that the U.S. had gone astray by creating programs that provide “incentives to stay at home and not work.”

Earlier this month, Republicans floated raising the threshold for approving school lunch subsidies as a possible way to slash federal spending. 

A torrent of lawsuits are challenging the Trump administration on the forty-seventh president’s forthcoming spending freeze on federal grants and loans.

Democratic attorneys general from New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Arizona, and Massachusetts announced their intentions to block the funding freeze before it’s scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. on Tuesday.

At a joint press conference held by the coalition of attorneys general, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha criticized the order as “barely understandable” and argued that the White House’s decision to enforce the unconstitutional order would break a 248-year-old compact with the nation’s states, which expect the funds that citizens dutifully pay in taxes to find their way back to them.

“Every American, every Rhode Islander, is impacted by this. If you drive on a road, you’re impacted. If you need health care, you’re impacted. If you are a man or a woman in blue, or a person protected by them, you are impacted by this blatantly unconstitutional action,” Neronha said.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin expressed optimism that the large coalition would be able to successfully block the unlawful directive.

Another coalition of nonprofits and small businesses also filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the decision, claiming that the Trump administration’s decision to excise money from national programs will “have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of grant recipients.”

The group, which consists of the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE, has asked a court to place a stay on the impending freeze on the basis that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget does not have the authority to unilaterally shutter funding to hundreds of agencies, which have already had their spending approved by Congress.

“The actions taken yesterday are a callous disregard for the rule of law and a drastic abuse of power that will harm millions of Americans across the country,” Skye Perryman, the head of the group’s legal representation, Democracy Forward, told Reuters.

The spending suspension, directed by OMB, is expected to impact 2,600 accounts across the government and pause the distributions of tens of billions of dollars to programs across the nation, until Trump decides the agencies distributing the money fall in line with his agenda. Some of the programs dependent on the congressionally appropriated funds could include infrastructure initiatives, housing assistance, disaster relief, educational programs, grants for suicide prevention efforts including the suicide lifeline, money for rural hospitals, opioid prevention funding, and HIV/AIDS treatment.

The freeze will also implicate FEMA funding, and, by extension, funds to extinguish and control the raging wildfires around Los Angeles, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

“I think the ambiguity is by design,” Bonta said during the joint attorneys general press conference. “That confusing, that chilling effect, has swept in nearly all the programs that the federal government funds.”

Agencies will need to prove that their programs do not promote or support “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, or “woke gender ideology,” or provide services to “illegal aliens,” in order to resume the cash flow, according to the OMB memo.

The halted funds also extended to programs that senior administration officials insisted wouldn’t be hurt: By Tuesday at noon, multiple states reported that they had been locked out of their Medicaid portals amid the nationwide holdup, threatening health care access for some 72 million low-income Americans who rely on the joint federal and state health care program for comprehensive health care insurance.

The OMB directive was issued by Acting Director Matthew Vaeth. Former OMB associate director Topher Spiro, who claimed he knows Vaeth, wrote on X that the OMB memo in reality read more like a “hostage note written directly by [Trump’s OMB nominee, Russell] Vought, who is not confirmed.”

“In sum, Russ Vought is illegally carrying out his ideological agenda with greatest harm to the most vulnerable—including many in the working class and rural communities who voted for Trump,” wrote Spiro in a separate post. “A massive fraud.”

In a statement, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said that the freeze would have devastating implications for the “most vulnerable people in our country,” and described the Trump administration’s forceful disregard of Congress’s powers as a “dangerous move towards authoritarianism.”

This story has been updated.

The state of Kansas is experiencing a massive tuberculosis outbreak, just as the Trump administration has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to cease communications with the public.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the state is experiencing the worst TB outbreak in U.S. history, with 66 active cases and 79 latent infections in the Kansas City metro area since 2024. The outbreak has put a strain on the local public health department, which was already hurt by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The United States began documenting tuberculosis in the 1950s, and Kansas state officials say this is the worst outbreak since then.

Tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium that usually affects the lungs, and people with active infections feel the symptoms and are contagious, while people with a latent infection don’t feel sick and can’t spread it. Symptoms include chest pain, coughing up blood, weight loss, and chills, and if untreated, the disease can be fatal. The Kansas Department of Health said that there were 51 active cases in 2023, but that increased to 109 in 2024.

The state says it is following guidance from the CDC and working with local agencies, but with the myriad of executive orders relating to public health from the White House, attempts to respond to the outbreak could be limited, and the Department of Health and Human Services has halted new communications to the public right now.

Trump’s choice to run HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has expressed skepticism of public health efforts, which doesn’t bode well for the future of this or any other potential outbreaks if he is confirmed. On Monday, the U.S. reported its first outbreak of H5N9 bird flu in poultry, creating a danger of the deadly disease spreading to humans.

With the CDC currently hampered, and further damage to U.S. health agencies looming on the horizon, this tuberculosis outbreak could spread further, and other diseases might follow. Trump does not have a good record of responding to epidemics, and right now, Republicans in Congress aren’t likely to overrule him either.

The Trump administration’s budget freeze on federal grants and loans will affect more than 2,600 accounts across the government. Beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, tens of billions of dollars directed to the likes of the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, FEMA, and thousands of other agencies will be put on pause until the government falls in line with Trump’s agenda.

In a memo issued Monday, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Matthew Vaeth said that the funds—which Congress appropriates—would be frozen until the White House could ensure that each agency was aligned with Trump’s recent executive orders and had ended operations related to foreign aid, DEI initiatives, “woke gender ideology,” and the Green New Deal.

“This temporary pause will provide the Administration time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the President’s priorities,” Vaeth wrote.

Agencies will be required to answer specific questions and submit their responses to OMB in order to regain their funding. Some of those questions include prompts about whether the programs promote or support “environmental justice,” abortion, or “gender ideology,” or provide services to “illegal aliens,” according to a spreadsheet obtained by RollCall.

Essential services across the nation will, more or less, be paralyzed by the probe. Among the several thousand funding programs that Trump’s White House is investigating are funding through the Department of Health and Human Services for rural and teaching hospitals; grants for veteran suicide prevention efforts; NASA’s space operations; Justice Department funding for victims of mass violence and terrorist attacks; and Pentagon research into chemical, biological, and radiological warfare. Subsidies for housing assistance, disaster relief, and educational programs are also threatened.

But the spontaneous mass spending pause has also left organizations and programs dependent on federal funding confused about whether they’re implicated.

By Tuesday at noon, multiple states reported that they had been locked out of their Medicaid portals amid the nationwide holdup, according to Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz. And money intended to feed the elderly and infirm also appears jeopardized, leaving groups such as Meals on Wheels unsure about when they’ll be able to deliver food again.

“The uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today,” a Meals on Wheels America spokesperson told HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney. “Which unfortunately means seniors will panic not knowing where their next meals will come from.”

And the chaos seemingly extends to people within Trump’s immediate orbit. In response to concerns about Meals on Wheels, senior administration officials told Delaney that “no benefits to individuals are affected by this—funding specifically that violates the president’s EOs.” The meal program isn’t a direct benefit, though, but rather a string of grants disseminated through states and local nonprofits.

“They don’t think they’re OK,” Delaney reported.

Trump’s spokespeople have insisted that direct services to people would not be affected, but Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy implored his state’s residents to not believe any such statements. He wrote on X that “the Head Start reimbursement system IS shut down” across the Constitution State.

“Preschools cannot pay staff and will need to start laying off staff very soon and sending little kids home,” Murphy said in response to an updated OMB memo specifying that Pell Grants, Head Start, SNAP, and similar programs weren’t nixed by the directive.

Legal experts and lawmakers alike clamored that the agency’s move to freeze spending from hundreds of agencies overnight—and Trump’s ongoing attempt to forcibly reshape the government—wasn’t just a dangerous and unprecedented attack on the rights of millions of Americans, but one that is blatantly illegal.

“On day one, Trump made crystal clear he has every intention of ignoring federal law—and our Constitution—to block investments that Congress has delivered for communities across the country,” Senator Patty Murray, vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement last week following Trump’s executive order foreshadowing the funding freeze. “What’s happening here should be alarming to anyone who cares about the separation of powers clearly laid out in our Constitution. Congress—not the president—has the power of the purse.”

In a statement late Monday, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer similarly pressed that the executive branch does not have the authority to withhold funding that the legislature had already allocated for the American public.

“Donald Trump’s administration is jeopardizing billions upon billions of community grants and financial support that help millions of people across the country,” Schumer wrote on X. “It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities, state disaster assistance, local law enforcement, aid to the elderly, and food for those in need.”

A coalition of nonprofits and small businesses filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the suspension.

This story has been updated.

Newly appointed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is in New York City cosplaying as an ICE agent.

“Here in New York City this morning, we are gettin’ the dirtbags off these streets,” said Noem, wearing an official ICE bulletproof vest over her jacket in a video captioned “7 AM in NYC. Getting the dirt bags off the streets.” (An earlier version of the post with a misspelling of dirt bags was deleted.)

The post came as the Department of Homeland Security began conducting ICE raids in New York City Tuesday morning as part of President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

“Just now. Enforcement operation in NYC. Criminal alien with kidnapping, assault & burglary charges is now in custody—thanks to ICE,” Noem wrote in a different post that same morning. “Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.” The video attached to the post showed ICE agents leading a man away in cuffs at around 6 a.m.

ICE, DHS, and other federal agencies have been posting pictures of arrests and keeping daily tallies of those arrested. A similar process occurred in Chicago two days ago, and the Trump administration is looking to do the same in every major city.

“My goal is to arrest as many public safety and national security threats as possible and move on to the other priorities,” Immigration czar Tom Homan told CNN on Sunday.

Noem will be leading the “counterterrorism” part of DHS’s efforts. A longtime Trump advocate, Noem even sent her state’s national guard all the way to the southern border while she was governor of South Dakota last year, ignoring her state while it was flooding.

Idaho’s House of Representatives is asking the Supreme Court to undo its decision on same-sex marriage.

The state legislature chamber voted 46–24 Monday in favor of passing House Joint Memorial 1, calling on the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges “and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”

State Representative Heather Scott, a Republican who sponsored the memorial, provided flimsy reasoning behind the measure, saying that the power to define marriage belonged to the states.

“I would ask you to substitute any other issue and ask yourself, ‘Do I want the federal government creating rights for us, for Idahoans?’” Scott said during debate on the floor of the state legislature, according to the Idaho Capitol Sun.

“So, what if the federal government redefined property rights or nationalized water rights?” Scott said. “What does that look like if they came up with some new fair use policy or came up with different ways to define property rights? That is not a decision for the judges; it is a decision for the states.”

But the memorial specifically urged the Supreme Court to define marriage, not what the states control.

Scott also claimed that Obergefell undermined religious freedoms and that Christians were being “targeted.”

Monday’s measure was developed by MassResistance, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that is sowing trans panic in state legislatures across the country.

Despite opposition on both sides of the aisle, including 15 Republicans who joined every House Democrat, the GOP was still able to pass the measure because it holds a supermajority in the legislature. The memorial will now head to the Republican-controlled state Senate, and, if it passes, it will become law without needing the governor’s signature.

But a memorial is more of a formal letter than a law, and it carries no enforcement power.

If the measure becomes law, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court would even be compelled to take up Idaho’s question—but it would certainly send a message to the LGBTQ residents of that state.

In 2006, Idaho voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that said that “marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” That law was ruled unconstitutional in 2014, the year before Obergefell effectively legalized same-sex marriage by ruling that it was discriminatory to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses.

While the Respect for Marriage Act requires all states to recognize same-sex marriage performed in other states, the right to same-sex marriage was never formally legalized on the federal level. So if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, gay marriage rights would go with it.

Donald Trump’s administration has been hit with a lawsuit over allegedly collecting federal employee information and directing it to an employee of Elon Musk.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Monday, alleges that employee data is going to Amanda Scales, who, according to LinkedIn, works for xAI, a private corporation of which Musk is the CEO. This would violate federal laws on transparency and put the sensitive information of federal employees into the hands of a private corporation.

The lawsuit states that Trump administration officials created an email address, hr-at-opm-.gov, and directed federal employees, through the Office of Personnel Management, to treat it as legitimate. OPM is the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce and could be described as Human Resources for federal employees.

A Reddit post to r/fednews, a subreddit dedicated to the federal workforce, alleged on Monday that the address is based at an email server that was recently set up at the OPM offices. The post was later deleted, but a copy of its contents were cited in the lawsuit.

Last week, the new OPM email address sent out test emails to every single federal employee, catching many workers off-guard, some of whom even flagged the emails and address as spam.

The lawyer behind the lawsuit is Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors, which also brought legal challenges against Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last week. He told CNN that OPM has been hacked in recent years and a new email server without proper oversight would put employees’ personal data at risk.

“Plugging in a new email server for the sole purpose of sending messages directly to every federal employee is an invitation to be hacked, and every employee out there needs to know how much of their data is at risk,” McClanahan said. He added that it should be shut down “until OPM treats this data with the security it warrants.”

Nineteen Republican attorneys general have decided that now is the perfect time to declare war on Costco to convince the bulk retailer to abandon its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird are spearheading the effort. They wrote a letter Monday to Costco chief executive Ron Vachris, essentially accusing Costco of reverse racism and giving the company 30 days to repeal its DEI policies or explain why it hasn’t. The letter claims that Costco’s policies go against the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling repealing affirmative action.

Other major retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, and Target, have capitulated to the right-wing culture war on DEI. But even after Trump’s victory, a whopping 98 percent of Costco shareholders rejected an anti-DEI measure last week.

Donald Trump’s new names for Alaska’s Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico will soon be realized in Google Maps.

The massive, multinational corporation announced Monday that it would bend to an executive order, signed by Trump on his first day back in office, renaming the highest peak in the United States “Mount McKinley” and branding the ocean basin the “Gulf of America.”

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company wrote in a statement on X. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

That means the intra-app change will be made whenever the United States Geological Survey, an agency within the Department of the Interior, officially reclasses the pair of landmarks in its geographic names information system, or GNIS.

“When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America,” Google wrote in a separate post.

The updated names will only be reflected for Google Maps users within the United States, according to the company. Users in Mexico will see their own local name for the gulf, while everyone in the rest of the world will see both names.

The continent’s highest mountain was called Denali—“the high one” or “the great one”—for centuries by the Koyukon Athabaskans, the original inhabitants of Alaska. The mountain’s native name existed centuries before a gold prospector unofficially named the peak after William McKinley during the Ohio politician’s 1896 run for president.

The federal government made “Mount McKinley” official in 1917, 16 years after McKinley’s assassination, but it hasn’t always been the preferred option for Alaskan locals. In 1975, the Alaskan legislature officially petitioned the federal government to have the mountain’s name reverted back to Denali, only to have the effort blocked by Ohio.

President Barack Obama pushed past that in 2015 during a sweep of landmark renamings intended to better reflect the names used by America’s Indigenous tribes, officially classing the mountain as “Denali” in federal documents.

In December, Trump suddenly revived the debate, telling a crowd of supporters in Arizona that he would “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it”—but the news was not received well by Alaska’s leadership.

“There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Donald Trump is claiming that he sent the U.S. military to turn on the water in California, even though it never happened.

Trump posted on Truth Social Monday night to receive credit for his supposed good deed.

“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” Trump wrote. “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”

But despite what Trump says, he is not a river to his people. Within a few hours, California’s Department of Water Resources published a fact-check on the president’s false claim that the U.S. military had forcibly turned on the water.

“The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful,” California’s DWR posted on X early Tuesday.

Mike McGuire, a state senator from California’s Northern coast, pulled apart the president’s post, baseless claim by baseless claim.

“BS Alert,” McGuire wrote in a post on X. “First off, shocker, water from the Pacific Northwest doesn’t flow to the Central Valley. Second, federal water pumps were down for repair and are now back on. Third, rest assured, the military has not invaded the delta. Facts are hard.”

Over the weekend, Trump signed an executive order in response to the wildfires affecting Los Angeles County directing federal officials to “immediately take actions to override existing activities that unduly burden efforts to maximize water deliveries” in an effort to fix California’s “disastrous” water policies.

In the order, Trump also threatened to cut off funding from the state’s land and water management and disaster response, thereby ending “the subsidization of California’s mismanagement.” California Governor Gavin Newsom told NBC News that the premise of this executive order was “false.”

Last week, Newsom torched Trump’s limp criticism of California’s water policies after he falsely claimed that “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the valve.”

“Maybe the president doesn’t know that there’s not a spigot that can be turned that can solve all the water problems that he alleges exist, that don’t exist when it comes to the state water project here in California,” Newsom said.