Sponsors
Introduced April 10, 2025 by John Karl Fetterman · Last progress April 10, 2025
The bill makes it much easier for many children to receive free school meals (via broad automatic certification, retroactive reimbursements, and targeted funding), improving nutrition and reducing administrative burden, but it increases federal and local costs, requires significant data‑sharing and implementation work, and risks uneven rollout and privacy concerns.
Low-income children and students: far more kids will get automatically certified for free school meals (via SSI, Medicaid, foster/kinship/adoption, housing assistance, transfers, and direct-certification expansions), reducing hunger and ensuring steady access to school meals.
Families and local school officials: reduced paperwork and simpler eligibility verification because of expanded data-matching and direct certification, lowering application burden and stigma for households and streamlining school administrative work.
Students' health and nutrition: greater meal access and higher participation (including universal-meal demos and more free-meal eligibility) should improve child nutrition and reduce food insecurity, with possible positive effects on attendance and learning.
Taxpayers and federal budgets: substantially higher federal costs from expanded automatic eligibility, retroactive reimbursements, a higher special-assistance multiplier, and demonstration reimbursements will increase federal outlays.
State and local governments, LEAs, and schools: significant administrative, IT, and implementation costs (data-sharing agreements, system upgrades, staffing) and potential need for non‑federal funding for demonstrations will strain budgets and capacity.
Medicaid/SSI recipients and children: sharing sensitive enrollment data across agencies for certification raises privacy and data-security risks if safeguards or agreements are inadequate.
Based on analysis of 10 sections of legislative text.
Expands and automates direct certification for free school meals (Medicaid and SSI), funds grants/technical assistance, adds retroactive reimbursements, and authorizes up to five statewide universal free meal demos.
Expands automatic and direct certification so more children get free school meals without family applications, requires State agreements to share Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income data with schools, and creates grants, technical assistance, and demonstration projects to boost direct certification and test universal free meals in up to five States. It also adds retroactive reimbursement for certain children, changes how special assistance payments are calculated, and provides a one-time transfer of $28 million to support direct-certification improvements and Tribal programs. The law affects schools, local and State education agencies, Medicaid offices, the Social Security Administration, Tribal organizations, and families by changing data-sharing duties, certification rules, funding formulas, and program reporting and evaluation requirements beginning mainly in the 2025–2026 school year and with demonstration projects starting by July 1, 2026.