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Specifically, states will be able to grant exemptions to schools experiencing hardship in meeting the 100% whole-grain-rich standard although, even with the changes, at least half of the grains offered in schools must be whole grains. Schools will no longer need to hit the strictest target (PDF) for lowering sodium in foods offered to students. And meal programs will be able to serve students 1% flavored milk instead of fat-free flavored milk.

The National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program are federally assisted meal programs that provide nutritionally balanced lunches for children each school day. Both programs are administered by the Department of Agriculture, though local schools set the prices for meals, offering a sliding scale to students based on family income, as required by federal regulations.

Perdue said that when kids don't eat, they don't get the nutrition they need, and this undermines "the intent of the program."

"A perfect example is in the South, where the schools want to serve grits," said Perdue, who worked as a veterinarian before serving as a Georgia state senator and governor. "But the whole grain variety has little black flakes in it, and the kids won't eat it. The school is compliant with the whole grain requirements, but no one is eating the grits."

Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, said the argument that food is ending up in the trash "is not supported by the research. There have been studies, ours included, that have found plate waste has not increased."

"What I've studied is whether or not children are eating the lunches, and we found that they are," Schwartz said. "I think what people don't understand about plate waste is if kids are eating, let's say 70% of the fruits and vegetables that they're taking, that means 30% of those are getting thrown away."

Naturally, the volume of waste goes up when fruits and vegetables are added to every plate, she says, but consumption of this important food group has increased as well.

Perdue's proclamation, Schwartz believes, is "slowing down the progress but not completely undoing what's been done."

"My impression has been that the food companies and the school service professionals have been working extremely hard for the last five years to try and improve things and meet these standards," she said.

"The reformulations have been done, is my point. The companies that sell pizza crusts and buns or other grain products to schools, many of them have already reformulated, so they're whole-grain-rich."

Many changes are likely to continue. Although they might allow flexibility for local school districts, Perdue's adjustments to the nutritional requirements also take pressure off the food industry, Schwartz suggests.

"There's not that much that individual food service directors can do to change the sodium in the foods they serve, because they're getting them from companies," she said. "So I feel like this is more of a gift to companies to give them more time to make those changes."

Schwartz believes the impact on an individual child's diet will be small and amount to a slightly higher intake of saturated fat due to the higher fat content in flavored milk.

"But it's not a big jump. It's pretty small," she said. With regard to whole grains and sodium, she believes any gains made in the past will hold with no further improvements made.

"If this really helps, you know, food service directors have more flexibility and stay in the program and continue working towards improving the quality of the food they're serving, then that's OK with me," Schwartz said.

"So school lunch programs are critical for helping a child reach their nutrient goals throughout the day," she wrote in an email. "I'm fine with 1-percent (fat), flavored milk since all milk has important protein, calcium and (vitamin) D that growing kids need."

When it comes to loosening standards that regulate salt, which "has no nutrition benefit and can contribute to unhealthy diet as a whole," and those regulating grains, Altmann is a little less "fine."

"We already know that kids don't eat enough whole grains," she said. "Whole grains are important for growth and development, and I think that all of the grains kids eat should be whole grains whenever possible."

A new USDA report on the nutritional quality, cost and acceptability of school meals as well as student diets will become available by 2018.

"It will be important to assess how much difference these changes make," Schwartz said. "It could have been a whole lot worse from a nutrition standpoint."

See more here:
USDA shifts Obama-era school lunch guidelines - CNN

On April 12, 2017, former Boeing CEO Jim McNerney sat down in the West Wing with President Trump. Trump had, on the campaign trail, advocated abolishing the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that typically subsidizes $10 billion a year in Boeing exports.

On April 13, Trump announced he would fill out Ex-Im's board of directors, thus reviving the agency's ability to subsidize Boeing's overseas customers.

This was a replay from eight years earlier.

Candidate Barack Obama had called Ex-Im "little more than a slush fund for corporate welfare." Obama soon picked McNerney and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as his manufacturing czar and jobs czar, respectively. GE is arguably Ex-Im's No. 2 beneficiary. Obama quickly came around on the agency, and became Ex-Im's most important ally in Washington.

Access to the White House is extremely valuable for corporations, regardless of who the president is. Everyone in Washington knows this, and now two scholars have confirmed and quantified the profitability to companies of access to the White House.

In President Obama's most impressive act of transparency, he published, regularly throughout his tenure, his White House visitor logs. Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang of the University of Illinois studied those logs from Obama's first month through the end of 2015, and found 2,286 White House meetings between Obama officials and executives of the companies included in the S&P 1,500.

The researchers found two notable things about the companies that made up these 2,286 meetings: That money helped the executives get in the door, and getting in the door helped them make money.

The first finding could be put this way: Access could be bought through campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

"We find that firms that contributed more to Obama's presidential election campaigns are more likely to have access to the White House. We also find that firms that spend more on lobbying, firms that receive more government contracts, larger firms, and firms with a greater market share are more likely to have access to influential federal officials."

Second, they found that access was profitable.

"Corporate executives' meetings with White House officials are followed by significant positive cumulative abnormal returns." That term, "cumulative abnormal returns," in this case basically means how much the stock in question outperformed the S&P 1500 index over the 10 days before and the 30 days after the meeting. "We also find that the result is driven mainly by meetings with the President and his top aides. We find insignificant CARs for canceled visits, suggesting that the actual incidence of the meetings matters for firm value."

Why would a meeting drive up the stock of a company? The authors posit three mechanisms: A meeting could secure a government contract, it could help line up regulatory relief, or it could simply provide inside information that is valuable to a company.

I would add many more ways access to government is profitable. For instance, Boeing's access to the Obama and Trump White Houses seem to have secured support for a subsidy program that has nothing to do with government contracts.

Also, regulatory relief isn't always what companies seek. Google had amazing access to the Obama White House. Google "Internet Evangelist" (definitely not a lobbyist) Vint Cerf served on an Obama board. Google's former top lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin was a top White House official on tech policy, and he traded emails with current Google lobbyists who were supporting the White House's push to further regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality. Here, corporate access to Obama's White House advanced more regulation which would protect Google's current business model.

The researchers had another intriguing finding: "firms with access to the Obama administration experience significantly lower stock returns following the release of the election result than otherwise similar firms."

In other words, their investment in Democrats became a money loser when Trump took over.

For a cynic in Washington, or even just a close observer, there's no surprise in these conclusions. Of course money buys access, and of course access to politicians is valuable. But there's plenty to learn from this study.

First, some people actually believed that Obama had changed Washington and stopped the cash-for-influence game. This study doesn't compare Obama to other presidents, but it shows that the game was alive and well under Obama.

Second, it makes Obama's transparency in this one regard even more laudable. The visitor logs made this study possible and so it showed the country how Washington works. For this reason, especially since Trump has said he won't follow Obama's lead here, Congress should mandate regular and thorough reporting of White House Visitor Logs.

A final lesson: Since big business clearly has more access to government, then bigger government equals a bigger advantage for big business. If government played a smaller role in industry, access wouldn't be so valuable, and the playing field would be more level.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were both correct that the game is rigged in favor of the big guys. This new study helps us see how big government is the rigger.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

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Study documents how profitable access to Obama's White House was - Washington Examiner

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WASHINGTON Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is teaching a class at The George Washington University in D.C. this fall, and some members of the faculty are not pleased.

According to the GW Hatchet, Pauls class, called Dystopian Visions, will focus on dystopian novels and thought written about by authors like Ayn Rand. 33 students will be a part of a unique opportunity to learn from a sitting U.S. senator.

Rand Paul told Vice in a 2013 interview that he wanted to teach a class on the subject, saying, I think dystopian novels are a discussion of politics, and sort of what happens if you let a government accumulate too much power.

While the class quickly filled up with students, including many from the universitys Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) and College Republicans organizations, not everyone is thrilled about the class.

English professor Robert McRuer questioned the conservative senators qualifications, noting how professors in his department must have a Masters or Ph.D. in the subject to teach.

McRuer told the Hatchet: Were trained to do this, so the fact that a celebrity could potentially teach a course that was listed as a novel course is a bit troubling.

Other faculty including Elizabeth Anker, a professor of political science, agreed with McRuer.

Anker noted that the investment in having Rand Paul to brand the University really comes at the expense of the reputation of the school, in terms of the intellectual offerings and the type of education we provide to our students.

Anker also accused Paul of trying to hide a political ideology class by disguising it as a literature course. Another professor said that such a course requires an instructor trained in that aesthetic tradition.

The English department went so far as to release a statement about the class, making it clear that it does not count toward a degree in English. The university also put out a general press release regarding the course.

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Rand Paul To Teach Class At George Washington University | The ... - The Daily Caller

During a visit to Louisville on Friday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said he doesn't think President Donald Trump's administration wants a military confrontation with North Korea because "millions of people would die."

Trump recently said a "major, major conflict" with North Korea over its nuclear program is possible. In downtown Louisville Friday, Paul told reporters the American government wants a peaceful solution.

"There is no good outcome to a military confrontation. We, of course, have the most dominant military in the world and I think without question ... we would come out, you know, successful in a military campaign," Paul said. "But millions of people would die, so nobody wants that."

Nobody wants a country recklessly saying they plan to develop nuclear weapons and point them at the U.S. either, the Kentucky senator explained.

"(It would) be nice if North Korea understood that launching a nuclear weapon at us would be catastrophic," he said. "It would be the end of North Korea."

Paul discussed North Korea after he wrapped up a roundtable discussion on health care with representatives of Sterling G. Thompson Co., a locally based insurance business.

He suggested Kentucky could play a role in resolving the nation's health care challenges. Patrick O'Connor of the state Department of Insurance attended Friday's discussion and said all options are on the table.

"The end goal is to try to make health insurance more affordable for Kentuckians," O'Connor said.

Regarding the Republican proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Paul said he still dislikes provisions that would give insurance companies "hundreds of billions of dollars."

"Look, I believe in capitalism," he said. "But I don't think the taxpayers should be subsidizing the losses of insurance companies."

On a lighter note, Paul discussed his plans for a "dystopian visions" class that he'll teach at George Washington University this fall.

Paul said his students will tackle "Notes From Underground" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky as well as George Orwell's "1984."

Ayn Rand's "Anthem" will make the booklist for Paul's class, but he indicated that Margaret Atwood's feminist novel "The Handmaid's Tale" which was adapted into a TV show that debuted this week probably won't.

See the rest here:
Rand Paul: Nobody wants war with North Korea - The Messenger (subscription)

Republicans touted their own victories in a bipartisan spending agreement Tuesday amid concerns that negotiators had given up too much to Democrats.

Many Republicans argued that $21 billion in military funding, $1.5 billion in new money for border security and several unrelated policy provisions are major steps toward fulfilling President Trumps agenda.

The positive framing comes as Democrats have tried to declare victory over obtaining $5 billion in domestic spending increases and blocking other measures, such as funding to begin construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump touted the spending deal Tuesday at a ceremony honoring the Air Force Academy Football team. After years of partisan bickering and gridlock, this bill is a clear win for the American people, he said.

Turning to the team members, who were standing behind him, Trump said, This is what winning looks like, something that you folks really know a lot about.

Democrats boasted Tuesday they had bested Republicans in the negotiations by blocking many GOP policy provisions and securing $5 billion in new domestic spending. Republicans leaders argued that some of their members supported and benefited from that money, including additional resources to help fight wildfires in the West and provide health care for coal miners.

Republicans argued that their wins were most evident in trims and changes to more than 150 government programs and defense spending increases secured from an off-budget war fund without an equal bump for domestic programs that Democrats traditionally request. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) argued this spending measure marks the first time in years that Republicans garnered those increased funds.

This forced parity that we lived under the Obama years really constrained our ability to rebuild our military for this century, Ryan told reporters Tuesday. No longer are the needs of our military going to be held hostage for increases in domestic spending.

But some top Republicans on defense issues argued that parity between domestic and military spending was not truly achieved because $15 billion of the defense money came from an off-budget war fund.

The money from the war fund would not be automatically renewed if Congress decides to simply extend spending levels in upcoming budget fights. The funds would also not be included in calculating the starting point for future negotiations over defense spending.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said he believes the war fund has been abused and said he plans to vote against the measure as a result.

It has become nothing but a fancy slush fund, Corker said. That type of spending doesnt give the military a view into the future.

Democrats argued they have always been willing to approve extra defense money from the war fund, pointing to a 2015 budget agreement that included nearly $58 billion in defense funds and $15 billion for nondefense spending. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), one of the architects of the previous bipartisan budget agreement with Ryan , said arguing otherwise mischaracterizes the negotiation.

Moving forward parity isnt an issue, Murray said.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) said in a statement on Monday that he fully backs the defense increase and that it represents a clear break from previous policies

It is good that the defense needs in this measure do not appear to be tied to any other issue, Thornberry said. For too long, some in both parties have attempted to use our military as leverage to pursue other political objectives.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he was torn about voting for the spending bill over concerns about the war fund and worried it contains several unrelated measures, like a ban on using money to transfer detainees out of the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . Nonetheless, McCain said that he was pleased that GOP negotiators got some military spending increases.

There is more [defense] spending than just war funds, McCain said. Im upset about a lot of provisions.

Some appropriators dismissed concerns, arguing the bill is more conservative than similar legislation negotiated under President Barack Obama.

Appropriations Committee member Rep. Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) said the measure included some GOP concessions to win Senate approval, where Republicans have a slim 52 to 48 majority and must turn to Democrats to get the 60 votes necessary to pass most legislation.

Rooney said it could be difficult to get future defense spending increases through the Senate but that doesnt mean Republicans wont try.

I hate trying to figure out what the Senate is going to do, Rooney said. Its a fight between us and the Democrats and were in control of the committee.

Mick Mulvaney, Trumps director of the Office of Management and Budget, appeared in the White House briefing room early Tuesday afternoon, arguing that the GOP won plenty of victories in the spending bill

Mulvaney expressed frustration with Democrats in Congress, whom he accused of a spike the football celebration of the deal. In reality, Mulvaney said, Trump and the Republicans were very pleased with the measure.

Theyre walking around trying to make it look like they pulled one over fast on the president. I just wont stand for it, Mulvaney said, referring to the Democrats.

Despite a tweet earlier Tuesday from Trump suggesting a shutdown could be good for the government this fall, Mulvaney said it was Democrats who were pushing for a shutdown this time and, he asserted, Trump prevailed by not letting that happen.

Among the procedural wins, Mulvaney said, was a deal that broke an unwritten rule that Republicans could secure $1 in new defense spending for every $1 Democrats get in nondefense spending.

Mulvaney said the ratio in the spending measure was about $1 to 20 cents, favoring Trump.

We didnt go dollar-for-dollar, Mulvaney said. Thats a tremendous development for this president and a huge win from a negotiating standpoint.

Mulvaney said Trump also got a much better deal on border funding than most people realized. While its been widely reported there was no funding for the bricks and mortar of a wall on Mexicos border, the deal does allow the administration to replace existing fencing.

Not all Republicans were happy with the deal. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in an interview with CNN that despite the military increases, Democrats were able to stave off many GOP demands and exact new domestic spending in the process.

I think the Democrats cleaned our clock, Graham said in the interview. There are things in this bill that I just dont understand. This was not winning from the Republican point of view.

The conservative group Heritage Action also urged members to reject the spending bill over the concessions to Democrats, calling the measure a rebuke to President Trumps agenda.

While Trump fell short of his rhetoric, some analysts suggested the outcome was about what he reasonably could have expected.

This is what a bipartisan spending bill looks like, said Michael Steel, a former senior aide to former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). You have some wins on both sides.

Republicans say that the domestic spending increases are among those mutual wins. Democrats generally have been the ones demanding domestic spending in exchange for military increases. Republicans were also able to scale back Democrats requests in areas like funding to help Puerto Rico make up a shortfall in Medicaid payments.

In some cases, Mulvaney also argued, wins being touted by Democrats were actually triumphs for Trump, too. He cited health-care benefits for miners as an example.

While there has been grumbling about the spending deal from some conservatives, Mulvaney said they, too, will realize its a win upon closer inspection.

Id be happy to convince anybody on the right that this is a great deal, he said.

As part of the White Houses push to change the narrative over the spending bill, Trumps legislative affairs director, Marc Short, held a conference call with conservative media on Monday night to talk up the deal.

I hear that the budget will be regarded as very depressing news by many conservatives, one journalist said on the call. Im wondering because, well, from what Ive heard already, just chatter from friends.

Short sought to assure him that wasnt the case, saying there was certainly things in there that many conservatives were excited about.

Read more at PowerPost

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Republicans argue they won plenty in spending deal, too - Washington Post