WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) – Wisconsin dairy farmers woke up to a big win on Wednesday morning after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass Rep. Tom Tiffany’s bipartisan chocolate milk bill on Tuesday night.
Tiffany’s amendment would ensure that no money from the proposed Agriculture Appropriations Act would be used to implement a rule that would ban sweetened milk in schools. The Biden administration submitted a rule back in February that would establish new nutrition guidelines for school meals. If approved, the proposed new regulations could limit the amount of flavored milk in high schools, such as chocolate and strawberry, while students in elementary and middle schools would be limited to a selection of unflavored milk.
In a press release, Tiffany stated, “When you have a federal government that believes that they need to regulate the milk that is served in our kids’ schools across America, you have a federal government that is out of control. When you have a federal government that has become a borderless country; when our federal government has become perhaps the largest human trafficking operation in the history of the world; when you have a federal government that will not take us back to energy independence, where gasoline is now back up to $4 a gallon where I live in northern Wisconsin; when you have a federal government that has fueled inflation, like we haven’t seen for 40 years, what in the world are they doing? What in the world are they doing trying to regulate what milk is served in our kids’ schools?”
The bill was co-sponsored by fellow Wisconsin lawmakers Rep. Derrick Van Orden, Rep. Glenn Grothman, and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. It will now move on to the U.S. Senate, where it is expected to continue to see bipartisan support.
