ABSTRACT
The child nutrition programs provide free and subsidized meals and snacks to children in schools, day care centers, and summer programs. Child nutrition programs are funded through a complicated mixture of several types of subsidies. The summer food program provides free meals to children in summer programs and uses a uniform subsidy schedule. Subsidies for the child care food program followed the same guidelines as those of the school lunch and breakfast programs. The reconciliation act made major reductions in child nutrition programs. The child nutrition program is an appropriated entitlement. The child nutrition programs were a major target of administration cost-cutters in 1981. The summer food service program would be eliminated, and funding would be decreased for the school breakfast and child care food programs. Furthermore, the administration has suggested child nutrition could be one of the programs turned back to the states as part of the "new federalism.".
