The Biden Administration is about to steal the lunch money of millions of students, if school districts don’t allow boys to be girls and girls to be boys.

Last month, 26 attorneys general, including Alaska’s Attorney General Treg Taylor, wrote to President Biden expressing concern over a new interpretation of the gender terms of Title IX, the federal legislation that protects girls and women’s athletics in schools. The Biden Administration has widened the definitions of what it means to be female so that any school that does not adapt to leftist gender ideology will be starved of school lunch funding.

Now, 22 states, including Alaska, are suing the Biden Administration over the demands that schools adopt the leftist transgender policies in order to qualify for assistance through the Department of Agriculture. The lawsuit is being led by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rosita and Tennessee AG Herbert H. Slattery III. Lawsuits such as these are generally filed in jurisdictions that have more conservative courts, unlike the West Coast’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana’s Attorney General Rokita said. “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.”

The lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Agriculture as defendant, after the department’s Food and Nutrition Services issued guidance to states, announcing that discrimination on the basis of sex in Title IX and the Food and Nutrition Act includes discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity.” That means schools have to let boys compete with girls in girls’ divisions and use girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms.

This new guidance has jeopardized states’ Title IX and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) school lunch funding.

In the lawsuit, the states argue the USDA’s guidance is unlawful for several reasons, including that it is based on a misapplication of U.S. Supreme Court precedents.

The Biden administration’s actions will inevitably result in regulatory chaos that threatens essential nutritional services to children from low-income homes, the lawsuit says.

The National School Lunch Program services nearly 30 million schoolchildren each day, many who rely on it for breakfast, lunch, or both. Approximately 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions receive federal funding to provide subsidized free or reduced-price meals for qualifying children.

Attorney General Rokita recently won a legal battle over neo-gender ideology, when a U.S. district court barred the Biden administration from enforcing federal “guidance” to coerce schools and employers to kowtow to transgender extremism.

The latest lawsuit is linked here.

The Anchorage Assembly has assigned over $10 million more in public funds to meet the needs of the homeless in Alaska’s largest city. This, in addition to a $2.8 million override of the mayor’s veto of a homeless appropriation the Assembly hopes will be reimbursed by FEMA, but will probably be billed to Anchorage property owners.

The total of $12.8 million means $30,000 will be spent on behalf of every one of the 350 people that the Assembly says are homeless in Anchorage. This, of course, is a fraction of the expenditures, since untold millions are already granted to nonprofit providers in Anchorage that serve the homeless in varying capacities.

For that amount, the Assembly could have simply rented a luxury apartment for each of the homeless persons, and given them a gift card to Walmart for all their food and sundry needs.

Instead, yet more commercial buildings will be taken off the property tax roles and converted into nonprofit use.

The appropriations for sheltering will come from federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money and from the relatively new alcohol tax in Anchorage.

One of the biggest expenditures is $4.2 million from the alcohol tax to remodel rental units that can be used to house the homeless. During the first year of collection of the new 5% alcohol tax, Anchorage raised nearly $14 million.

Another $3.4 million was made as a grant to the First Presbyterian Church in Anchorage to help the church buy the downtown Guest House hotel, which the Assembly wants to be turned into a shelter.

First Presbyterian Church, a downtown entity that is often politically involved with social justice causes, has no relevant experience in the shelter services arena and has not even filled out an application for the grant that it was awarded last night by the Assembly. But under the leadership of Pastor Matt Schultz, it is politically aligned with the leftist Assembly majority.

The price for the Guest House is $7.7 million, and the municipality won’t be assigned a second spot on the mortgage, under the terms of the grant. In addition, the Guesthouse is zoned for hotels, not as a homeless shelter, and it’s uncertain how quickly the hotel can be converted for the use of homeless people, since First Presbyterian is new in the homelessness business. The sideboards on the grant are weak.

The appropriations also included:

• $500,000 for the United Way to re-grant to another organization to remodel 60 units somewhere in Anchorage. The terms are vague but the program will take 60 units off of the existing rental market, putting further pressure on working class renters and driving up rental prices in Anchorage.
• $433,000 grant for the Brother Francis shelter, run by Catholic Social Services, to expand its bed capacity from 75 to 120.
• $350,000 grant to Christian Health Associates for a shelter for families.
• $1.7 million grant for the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness, which has recently refused to help the homeless at the Centennial Campground because its the coalition’s director, Anchorage Assemblywoman Meg Zaletel, does not approve of the campground as a temporary solution. The coalition is a homelessness industrial complex that provides few solutions, has no solid accomplishments, but skims public money and has lots of meetings.
• $1.2 million for the Anchorage Health Department to re-award via competitive bid to an organization that provides adult emergency shelter. The health department will be required to develop an emergency shelter plan and have it approved by the Assembly.

Already, the Assembly has authorized purchase of other buildings, such as the still-vacant Golden Lion hotel on 36th Ave., which the Bronson Administration has not wanted to use for the drug rehabilitation center that the Ethan Berkowitz Administration had purchased it for, and the Sockeye Inn on C Street, which is being used as a shelter and is completely full of homeless people.