CNN anchor Pamela Brown raised concerns to Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., Tuesday that Head Start, an early childhood educational program that also provides food to low-income children, could be affected by President Donald Trump’s attempt at a federal funding freeze. McCormick responded with the head-spinning suggestion that the country’s child labor laws are too restrictive and that plenty of kids are freeloaders who ought to work for their lunch.
There has been a lot of confusion and changing information surrounding Trump's attempted freeze and the potential impact on programs such as Head Start — I'll discuss more about that later. But McCormick’s remarks still matter, since they demonstrate how Trump's political strategies echo the old-school GOP playbook for abandoning the poor.
Right-wing "populism" seems to value children based on how useful of a cog in the capitalist machine they can be.
In the interview with Brown, the 56-year-old McCormick responded to the question of whether he supported getting rid of school lunch for vulnerable kids with a jaw-dropping rant:
“When you talk about school lunches, hey, I worked my way through high school. ... Before I was even 13 years old, I was picking berries in the field, before child labor laws that precluded that. 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, 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.”
When asked if all the kids in his district who get free lunch or breakfast should be cut off, McCormick said, “Of course not.” But he suggested that some of them should. “Who can actually go and actually produce their own income? Who can actually go out there and do something that makes them have value and work skills for the future?” McCormick queried. He added that getting kids to work for their lunch would induce them to think “about their future instead of thinking about how they’re going to sponge off the government when they don’t need to.”
The status of Trump’s order freezing huge amounts of federal funding is unclear. The freeze, which seems illegal, was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. And on Wednesday the Trump administration said it was rescinding the Office of Management and Budget memo initiating the freeze. But according to NBC News, after the announcement of the rescission, "White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that while the broad OMB memo was being pulled back, the administration’s other efforts to halt federal spending would remain." It's unclear what this means, but it suggests the Trump administration is trying to plow ahead in some fashion.
Complicating things further, initially it appeared that Head Start and other programs that provide children with cheaper or free meals could be affected, based on a document from the Trump administration obtained by NBC News. But subsequently, a senior Trump administration official told NBC News that Head Start is exempt from the freeze.
While it's hard to know who to believe or how things will unfold, Head Start is already reporting trouble. “While we understand that this is an evolving story, this disruption, at best, will slow down Head Start agencies’ ability to pay hundreds of thousands of staff, contractors, and small businesses who support Head Start operations in every corner of the country,” Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, said. “At worst, this means that hundreds of thousands of families will not be able to depend on the critical services and likely will not be able to work.”
Regardless of how all this shakes out, McCormick's language underscores right-wing rhetorical strategies for justifying moves that could jeopardize the well-being of some of the most vulnerable members of our society.
McCormick’s lament that not enough children work for their supper and his belief that children can prove their “worth” through labor makes him sound like a 19th-century factory owner. Sadly, he also sounds like other Republican lawmakers who in recent years have pushed back against labor laws that restrict what kinds of jobs children can take and how long they can work. McCormick is simply furnishing more rationales to permit the American right to leave children behind. Apparently, making children pay for their meals would build their character. Never mind that school does plenty of that, and that priorities for kids outside of school should be on being active, developing socially and emotionally, doing homework, and, you know, being children.
Reducing funding for programs to help children get access to meals wouldn’t result in children flocking to the labor market and competing with adults for minimum wage jobs. It would result in increased food insecurity, which in turn would not only cause them gratuitous suffering, but also reduce their academic performance. Right-wing “populism” seems to value children based on how useful a cog in the capitalist machine they can be.
The way that the GOP is pursuing this vision is telling. Regardless of what happens with Trump’s freeze, he has already made his political strategy evident: In his memo detailing the funding freeze, the Office of Management and Budget’s acting director, Matthew Vaeth, objected to using federal money “to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” and listed “DEI” and “woke gender ideology” as among the activities that should serve as a basis for retracting funding. This kind of language echoes the way the Republican Party used racist caricatures of Black people as parasitic and lazy to stigmatize the entire idea of assistance to poor people — and reduce funding for it. In this case, Trump is saying that the existence of equity measures and the idea of fighting “reverse racism” should serve as a basis to shrink the federal government’s offerings of social services.
Just days into his second term, Trump’s renewed "populist" vision is coming into view. And in many key respects it doesn’t look all that different from the old GOP.
