The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, alleges the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which includes the National School Lunch Program, violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it issued a May 5 memorandum. The 22 states argue the school lunch decision also misinterpreted the 2020 Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which expanded the definition of sex in employment law to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
The directive by the Agriculture Department required school districts and states that wished to receive funds allocated for the National School Lunch Program to interpret Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational settings, to include gender identity and sexual orientation under the term “sex,” as was done by the Supreme Court in the Bostock decision.
The lawsuit says the department, in issuing the memorandum, as well as subsequently finalizing a similar regulation from the end of the Obama administration that was never enacted, failed to follow APA requirements that agencies publish a notice of rule-making and then provide for a period of public comment when making a regulatory change. It also claims that the department’s policies are “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law” and “are premised on a misreading and unwarranted extension of Bostock.”
“This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”
Jonathan Butcher, an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner last month that the change in the department’s policy immediately created a conflict with numerous state laws that require student athletes to compete based on their biological sex, a fact that was noted in the lawsuit.
“Enforcement of the USDA’s memoranda … could cause plaintiff states to lose significant federal funds from the USDA,” the lawsuit says.
Without funding from the USDA, students in the affected states would no longer be eligible for meals under the program, which almost exclusively serves low-income students.
“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a press release. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”
Almost 30 million students are currently eligible for meals under the program, which served 1.3 billion lunches in the 2021 fiscal year.
* Article from: The Washington Examiner
