Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Trump hosts a lunch with fellow Republican leaders – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (l) and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (r) – at the White House in Washington on March 1, 2017.

Republicans have a majority in both the House and Senate, and there’s a Republican in the White House. So why does it seem the GOP doesn’t fully control the levers of Washington power?

The party hasn’t been able to repeal Obamacare, after all. An upcoming tax package remains a work in progress. Beyond that, the legislative outlook is hazy. Maybe they’ll get around to an infrastructure bill. But that’s far from a sure thing.

Like many US chief executives before him, President Trump is discovering that partisan dominance isn’t a magic button. There are numerous impediments to a party working its will in national governance, even if it has a congressional majority and holds the executive branch.

One is the particular interplay of the president’s personality and congressional leaders. But perhaps the biggest is the very nature of the US political system. There are only two major parties, meaning that by definition both will have numerous factions. That guarantees lots of colorful internal disagreement.

“Presidents have learned the hard way they can’t always count on their parties supporting them,” says Brian Balogh, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and co-host of the podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”

Of course, as far as party leaders are concerned, unitary control is still a lot better than the alternative. House and Senate majorities, combined with the Oval Office, have produced some of the most productive periods in US history, as far as passage of major laws is concerned.

Passing bills is just plain hard

The New Deal began with a historic spate of legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first 100 days or so in 1933. A second New Deal in 1935 and 1936 produced major additions such as Social Security and rural electrification.

Lyndon Johnson used large Democratic majorities won in 1964 to enact his Great Society, including Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and other milestone bills.

With those events as context, it’s easy to believe that anytime one party bestrides Washington, big things should result. But that’s just not the case. History is also full of times when presidents and congresses of the same party just couldn’t get in synch.

“Unified control is not a silver bullet. There are a lot of barriers to a party working its will,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University, at a National Press Foundation seminar earlier this year.

One barrier is obvious to anyone who has spent time in D.C. – passing bills is just hard.

National legislation is complicated business. Big bills attract lots of attention and comment and lobbying and pressure from constituents. This can weigh against what party leaders want to do. At the least, it slows the process down.

“These things look very simple ... when you are looking in from the outside. As we know, being here, these are difficult things to get done,” says Sen. John Boozman (R) of Arkansas, interviewed on his way to an evening vote.

A second barrier is the variable nature of the relationship between Capitol Hill and the White House. Democrat Jimmy Carter famously had a difficult time working with a Democratic-controlled Congress, in part because Speaker Tip O’Neill and some top Carter staffers did not get along.

Republican Herbert Hoover had the same problem. He had little experience working with Congress, and the conservatives of his party viewed him as suspiciously progressive. Thus the GOP-controlled Congress paid their party’s president little heed.

Fault lines within the GOP

But perhaps the biggest reason that one-party control isn’t overwhelming is that the parties themselves aren’t homogeneous. In European democracies there are lots of parties for people of all political persuasions – Greens, Social Democrats, Conservatives, Radicals, etc. In the American democracy most of those groups cram into the two major parties around which the nation’s political life revolves.

Democrats and Republicans are coalitions. That creates fault lines and lots of opportunity for partisan infighting.

“These factions are what has done in the best intentions of presidents of both parties,” says Brian Balogh of the University of Virginia.

Southern conservative Democrats went along with the early stages of FDR’s New Deal, for instance, but by 1937 they weren’t happy with where the Democratic administration was going. They started to put a brake on things, legislatively speaking, infuriating the president.

As a result FDR in 1938 tried to purge such Southern conservatives as Sen. Millard Tydings (D) of Maryland and Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith (D) of South Carolina by directly supporting more liberal Democrats in primaries. The effort flopped. Of 10 conservatives targeted by FDR, only one lost.

“The others returned to Washington even more antagonistic toward the President. In addition, many other Democrats resented the President’s meddling in local affairs,” writes William Leuchtenburg, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina, in an essay on FDR for the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, entered the White House with a paper-thin GOP majority in both House and Senate. He needed votes from supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R) of Wisconsin, an inflammatory disrupter whose irresponsible allegations of Communist influence were tearing apart much of the US government.

Eisenhower hated Senator McCarthy but felt constrained from counterattacks due to the nature of his party coalition at the time.

“A lot of people believe Eisenhower should have spoken out more publicly against McCarthy ... but he didn’t do that precisely because he was worried about holding together his party,” says Balogh.

A thin GOP margin of control

Now it’s President Trump’s turn to discover the challenges of trying to deal with the army of cats that is a modern US political party.

That hasn’t gone fabulously so far. True, Senate Republicans stood behind new Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. But the attempt to repeal Obamacare was a disaster, as tea party conservatives and more moderate Republicans have entirely different visions of what a GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act should look like.

Looking forward, Trump and GOP congressional leaders need to keep in mind that their majority is thin – maybe not paper-thin, but not much thicker than an L.L. Bean catalog.

With a 52 to 46 edge in the Senate (two senators are Independents), the GOP has little room to maneuver on big bills. It needs to attract eight Democrats and/or Independents to pass legislation subject to filibuster, a daunting prospect given current levels of partisan animosity.

Perhaps with the artificial 100-day deadline passed, pressure for quick action will abate. A slower approach might result in more party unity.

“You’ve got to build a coalition and get stuff that you can actually get enacted," says Sen. John Thune (R) of South Dakota, the third ranking member of the Senate GOP leadership, interviewed Monday on his way into a party event. "I think the lesson coming out of a lot of this is that we want to make sure we get it right; it’s better than getting it fast."

Michael Sohn/AP

Stephanie Bschorr, president of the Association of German Female Entrepreneurs; Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser of US President Trump; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; and Dutch Queen Maxima, from left, arrive for the W20 Summit in Berlin April 25. The conference aims at building support for investment in women's economic empowerment programs.

Is the right way to build a female-friendly workplace really from the top down?

Headlines and corporate discussions about working women typically focus at the top: statistics about female CEOs, the number of women on Forbes’ billionaires list, profiles of individual icons like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg of “Lean In” fame and Ivanka Trump, whose “Women who Work” brand includes self-help books and a fashion line.

Individuals like Ms. Sandberg and Ms. Trump do bring greater visibility to the obstacles working women of all stripes face, says Julia Beck, a marketing strategist and founder of the It's Working Project. “This issue remaining in the headlines does move the dialogue forward, and both are presenting a level of optimism” that they can be solved, she says.

“But are either of them creating something realistic for a large swath of the population?" she asks. "We don’t want a place where most women don’t feel included in that conversation.”

On Tuesday, Trump joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the W20 Summit in Berlin, as part of a panel conversation on Women’s Empowerment and Leadership. She was booed for defending her father’s treatment of women. But aside from President Trump's past indecorous remarks, the event is in keeping with the theme of Ivanka Trump’s work within her father’s White House so far, and her personal brand before that: a conversation on women’s empowerment, held by and largely concerning women with a lot of power. The panel’s other participants included Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, Christine LaGarde of the International Monetary Fund, and Bank of America vice chairman Anne Finucane, among others.

Critics say the attention on the needs of women, and particularly mothers, who are already in the upper echelons of power ignores more serious problems faced by the vast majority of low- and middle-income working women. Announcements of increasingly generous parental leave policies for high-skilled employees at companies like Google and Etsy don’t trickle down to, say, the people working in warehouses for Amazon or on the floor at Wal-Mart. But a growing number of companies – from stalwarts such as Campbell Soup to start-ups like Birchbox – are taking a more comprehensive look at their policies.

“It’s important that good policies and practices aren’t reserved for professional staff,” says Dina Bakst, a women’s rights attorney and founder of A Better Balance, a legal advocacy organization based in New York.

There are women “who are one sick child away from losing their job, or one complicated pregnancy away from homelessness,” she says. “We want to improve corporate policies, yes, but we also need to address the barriers that hold all women back.”

That can’t be done by relying on a few high-profile CEOS to change conditions for all women. For one, a female CEO  and generous benefits do not automatically equal a family-friendly work culture, as employees at Yahoo can attest. Sandberg, who changed bereavement policies at Facebook after losing her spouse, has acknowledged that it took personal experience for her to more fully understand the challenges some of her employees were going through.

“There’s a famous story where Sheryl Sandberg went into her manager’s office at Facebook and demanded pregnancy parking,” Ms. Bakst says. “That’s great, but the reality is, we have pregnant clients who can’t carry a water bottle on the job and are hospitalized for dehydration, or are not allowed to take bathroom breaks.”

But the focus on elite professional women is not without its benefits, experts say. “The thinking is that getting women into top positions can’t be separated from making the workplace more welcoming to parents at all levels,” says Krista Carothers, the executive research director of Working Mother magazine, in an email. The publication curates an annual list of major companies with family-friendly policies. “They can't develop a pipeline of female talent to move into executive roles if their women employees drop out at mid-level or have to turn down challenging projects.”

Hollow values?

In addition to being limited, that kind of top-down corporate feminism can ring hollow when the image doesn’t match up with a company’s practices. In March, Mira Agrawal, the founder and CEO of underwear company Thinx, faced allegations of sexually harassing, underpaying, and offering scant benefits packages to female staffers, despite the company’s message of female empowerment and Ms. Agrawal’s fraught emergence as a feminist role model.

Trump’s company (from which she has given up a more active role and taken up an unpaid post in her father’s administration) does offer its corporate employees paid parental leave, but G-III, the company that licenses her fashion line, does not. Additionally, the maternity leave plan Ivanka Trump championed during the presidential election was roundly criticized: first, for being designed as an income tax credit for new mothers, meaning the burden of child care was placed squarely on women; and secondly, because there was no benefit for lower-income families who paid no income tax and were most likely to need financial help with child care.

“Ivanka Trump talks about ‘maternity leave,’ and that would be terrible,” Bakst says. “Mommy policies risk encouraging discrimination.” What’s better, she says, are policies are that apply neutrally to all parents, regardless of gender.

What’s being done

Some companies have tackled the challenge of keeping women of all economic levels attached to the workforce – making it easier for women with changes big and small like affordable childcare, flexible hours, and paid leave policies accessible to rank and file employees – not just those in the C-suite.

For example, some firms, including makeup subscription company Birchbox and eyeglasses startup Warby Parker, don’t allow meetings to start before 9:30 a.m. or after 4:30 p.m., so childcare pickup and drop-off schedules aren’t affected. More predictable scheduling practices for hourly workers, including the phasing out of so-called “on-call scheduling,” have been instituted at many retail and restaurant chains, prompted by legislative pressure from state and local governments.

Extending parental leave benefits to hourly employees is still rare (only 12 percent of private sector workers in the United States have access, according to the Department of Labor), but it’s gaining traction. Companies including IKEA, Netflix, and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group now do so. Some companies go even further, financially: Campbell Soup Company offers onsite, subsidized day care to employees at its headquarters in Camden, N.J., as well as emergency babysitting services.  

Even Trump’s approach has evolved in recent months. According to The New York Times, Trump administration officials are at least weighing a parental leave plan that could include all birth and adoptive parents, and a childcare tax credit that would be refundable for low-income workers – addressing two major criticisms of the Trump campaign’s initial plan.

The legislative piece of it is crucial, Bakst says, whether or not it comes from the White House. “Workers shouldn’t have to depend on hitting the [employer] jackpot,” she says. She applauds the expansion of paid sick-time laws in several states in recent years, as well as a New York state policy, taking effect in 2018, that extends 12 weeks of paid family leave to all workers.

“Our policies are stuck in a very different world,” she says. “When you allow the policies to catch up, then we can get to the conversation around quality of life” that is the focus of the Trumps and Sandbergs of the world. “Too many workers aren’t able even to get to that question.”

Hussein Malla/AP

A Hezbollah fighter holds an Iranian-made anti-aircraft missile, right, as he takes his position with his comrade, left, between orange trees, at the coastal border town of Naqoura, south Lebanon, Thursday, April 20, 2017. Hezbollah organized a media tour along the border with Israel meant to provide an insight into defensive measures established by the Israeli forces along the southern frontier in the past year in preparation for any future conflict.

The stated objective of the Hezbollah-coordinated press tour of southern Lebanon was to see new Israeli defensive installations on the border – indications, according to the powerful Shiite Lebanese militia, of Israeli fears of Hezbollah’s growing military might.

But as the convoy of vehicles carrying a large group of Lebanese and foreign reporters reached the outskirts of this village on the Mediterranean coast, around a dozen uniformed Hezbollah fighters came into view in an orange orchard on the side of the road. Clutching rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers, their faces streaked in black cream, the fighters stood still and silent, in a frozen tableau.

The unprecedented spectacle appeared to be a deliberate and calculated breach of a UN Security Council resolution that bans non-state forces from bearing arms in southern Lebanon, and it illustrated the unmatched sway Hezbollah wields, and the impunity it enjoys throughout the country. That is the culmination of more than a decade in which Iran's key ally amassed influence and power to defend its military priority against those who wish to see the group disarmed.

Viewing Hezbollah fighters in the field is rare enough, but this brief, subtly-delivered roadside display served to signal Hezbollah’s defiance and autonomy to multiple audiences. They included Israel, the Lebanese government, and UNIFIL, the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in south Lebanon, whose headquarters lay less than a mile away from the orchard.

The display of defiance was staged at a time of growing Hezbollah-Israel tensions. Hezbollah’s main strategic objective, analysts say, and one of its guiding principles in the complex arena of Lebanese politics, is to preserve its right to bear arms and its military prerogatives vis-à-vis Israel.

“Hezbollah wants to protect its right to fight Israel at a time of its choosing, and to secure its Shiite base’s political and economic rights in an antiquated sectarian political system,” says Randa Slim, a Hezbollah expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “To do the former, it needs a secure strategic depth in Syria, maintain and fully control its weapons arsenal in Lebanon, and a home-front that is not at war with itself.”

On the border

Opponents of Hezbollah say the border tour was another example of the party behaving above the law and holding the country hostage to its anti-Israel agenda.

“The tour … is considered an insult to the Lebanese state's standing and a new threat to Lebanon's relationship with the international community,” said Sami Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb Christian party.

UNIFIL was clearly unaware of the nature of the tour, although it acknowledged that shortly before it began, the Lebanese Army had informed it of a media visit to the border.

The reporters, many of them laden with cameras and video equipment, marched along a narrow path that weaved through an old Israeli minefield to reach within 100 yards of a large Israeli Army listening post bristling with antennas and containing giant golf-ball-shaped radars.

The location is usually out of bounds to the public, and the sight of dozens of reporters entering the area to film the Israeli outpost caught nearby Italian peacekeepers by surprise.

“No, no, no,” admonished an Italian UNIFIL officer, running up to the reporters with his finger wagging in the air. But a Lebanese Army officer accompanying the tour took him by the shoulder and walked him back down the path. More stony-faced Italian soldiers looked on as the reporters departed the scene shortly afterwards in their vehicles.

“This was an assault on UNIFIL’s credibility and ability to operate along the Blue Line,” says Aram Nerguizian, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, referring to the UN’s name for Lebanon’s southern border.

Overture to the UN

Stung by Hezbollah’s bold display, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri hurried to Naqoura the next day to meet with UNIFIL officials and reassure them that it is Lebanon’s government that controls the southern border, not Hezbollah.

“What happened yesterday is something that we, as a government, are not concerned with and do not accept. So I came here to emphasize that our role as a government is to preserve Resolution 1701,” Mr. Hariri told reporters, referring to the UN Security Council resolution that helped end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, in part by the ban on non-state weapons near the border.

Hariri, accompanied by the minister of defense and the commander of the Lebanese Army, added that his trip was intended “to tell the Lebanese armed forces that they and only they are the legitimate force in charge of defending our borders.”

The rare Hezbollah-arranged tour was held amid growing concerns in some quarters since January that a new war between Hezbollah and Israel may be imminent. The election of President Trump and his administration’s vow to roll back the influence of Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor, across the Middle East has given rise to feverish speculation that the Lebanese group, which has gained invaluable battle-field experience in Syria’s civil war and amassed thousands of new surface-to-surface missiles, could come under attack by Israel.

Furthermore, Israel has repeatedly warned that the growing influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon since the two-month 2006 war means that in the next conflict the Jewish state will treat Lebanon as the enemy, rather than limit its operations to Hezbollah alone. With that threat in mind, Hariri, while at UNIFIL headquarters, called on the UN to help turn the current cessation of hostilities with Israel into a permanent cease-fire to offset the chances of another highly destructive war.

Hezbollah's priorities

Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah parliamentarian, nevertheless dismissed “exaggerated interpretations” of the tour and insisted in a statement that “the resistance [Hezbollah] is in a defensive position and that it is seeking to consolidate … stability in the south based on the equation of deterrence with the Israeli enemy.”

Hezbollah’s opponents say the party controls the levers of power over the Lebanese state in order to safeguard its own interests. While that is generally true, such criticism can ring hollow in a country where politicians of all political persuasions are widely seen as routinely exploiting state resources either for personal enrichment or to fund patronage networks on which their popular support rests.

And while Hezbollah’s influence within the Lebanese state today reaches into political, economic, security, and judicial spheres, analysts say its principle motive is less the acquisition of power but to defend and sustain what it calls its resistance priority – the anti-Israeli military component that lies at the heart of the party’s ideology.

Still, Hezbollah’s determination to hold onto its formidable military assets and the attempts by its opponents to de-fang the party have caused more than a decade of political divisions between the Hezbollah-led March 8 parliamentary coalition, oriented toward Iran and Syria, and the rival, pro-Western March 14 coalition, headed by Hariri. Sectarian tensions have soared and on occasions the country has come close to collapse.

When Hezbollah spent the 1990s battling Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon, its armed status was sanctioned by successive Lebanese governments and guaranteed by neighboring Syria, then the dominant force in Lebanon. After Israel withdrew its troops in May 2000, Syria continued to provide cover for Hezbollah’s military wing despite growing calls in Lebanon for its disarmament.

String of domestic victories

But that fig leaf was removed with Syria’s political disengagement from Lebanon in April 2005, two months after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the current premier's father, for which Damascus was blamed by many.

With Syria gone, Hezbollah had to take a more proactive stance to defend its weapons even as its domestic enemies sniffed new opportunities to have it disarmed. Hezbollah struck alliances with Shiite and Christian parties, joined the government for the first time, and used its weight to block legislation that threatened its interests.

It even resorted to taboo-breaking violence in May 2008, storming the western half of Beirut in response to a government decision to shut down its private telecoms network. The action triggered several days of sectarian fighting that brought the country to the brink of civil war before the government was humiliatingly forced to rescind its earlier decision.

More recently, Hezbollah was able to secure the election of its Christian ally, Michel Aoun, as president. The previous incumbent left office in May 2014 and both sides submitted candidates. But Hezbollah and its allies refused to attend parliamentary sessions to elect a new president unless assured that Mr. Aoun would carry the vote. Hariri and his allies sought a compromise by dropping their own candidate and nominating another Christian ally of Hezbollah.

Still Hezbollah dug in its heels, insisting on Aoun. After a two-and-a-half-year deadlock, Hariri yielded to Hezbollah’s demand and Aoun was elected last November in a deal that saw Hariri appointed prime mininister. The result has effectively left the March 14 coalition shattered beyond repair, its leaders either marginalized or compelled into reluctant cooperation with Hezbollah.

That has left Hezbollah effectively the victor of the political battle that shaped post-2005 politics in Lebanon with no serious domestic challenge to its armed status.

“So far, Hezbollah’s assessment is that it can achieve its interests and the means to achieving them without ruling Lebanon – especially now that Michel Aoun is the president,” says Ms. Slim, the Hezbollah expert. “The moment any of these means are threatened, as we have seen in the case of [the anti-regime uprising in] Syria, Hezbollah will fight back.”

Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/Staff

As so-called lunch-shaming practices come under increasing scrutiny, public and private efforts to end it, led by New Mexico's first-in-the-nation law, have intensified.

Jaynelle Minor remembers the anguish on the faces of the school cafeteria workers. Under district policy, they were required to deny lunch to kids whose parents hadn't paid their school lunch bills.

Ms. Minor, the student nutrition supervisor for New Mexico’s Farmington Municipal School District, also remembers how some of those workers would sneak back into the cafeteria to get fruit or some other snack to stop the children from going hungry. What the kindness of those workers couldn’t stop, however, was a phenomenon known as “lunch shaming” – policies that required lunch workers to single out children whose parents have not paid their lunch fees.

To some observers, lunch shaming is a practice that has spiraled out of control in US public schools.

Some school districts deal with the problem by giving students whose parents have not paid lunch fees a bare-bones cold lunch, such as a sandwich consisting of two pieces of bread and one slice of cheese. But in some other districts, lunch shaming goes further: it may include dumping the hot lunches students had hoped to eat into the trash in front of them, making them do chores to pay off their lunch debt, requiring them to wear wristbands, or sending them home with stamps on their arms saying, “I need lunch money.”

In New Mexico it was Sen. Michael Padilla (D) – who said that as a hungry foster child he had experienced first-hand the pain of lunch shaming – who introduced the Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights. The bill was passed by the New Mexico state legislature last week. Other lawmakers nationwide have reached out to him for guidance on how they can end lunch shaming in their own states, Senator Padilla told NPR.

California and Texas have tabled similar bills, and by July 1, 2017, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will require every school district to have a written policy that clearly communicates to staff and parents how schools will deal with children whose parents have not paid their lunch bills.

In New Mexico, says Jennifer Ramo, the executive director of antipoverty group New Mexico Appleseed, politicians on both sides of the aisle were “horrified” by the lunch-shaming practices that have been coming to light.

And it's not just in New Mexico. Stories of lunch-shaming practices have made headlines at a number of schools across the United States. At a public school in Salt Lake City, up to 40 kids with overdue accounts had their meals thrown away in front of them. In the Canon-McMillan school district in Pennsylvania, a cafeteria worker quit her job after she was forced to deny a young boy a hot meal.

School districts have defended such actions by pointing out that unpaid lunch fees are not an insignificant problem. In 2014, data from the School Nutrition Association showed that more than 70 percent of US public school districts had some amount of meal debt, ranging from as little as $2 up to as high as $4.7 million for the largest districts.

Canon-McMillan superintendent Matthew Daniels told Action News 4 WTAE that school policies regarding unpaid lunch fees were simply intended to motivate parents to keep current on their child's lunch tab. Before denying hot lunches to students whose parents had not paid, the district was owed $60,000 and $100,000 by 300 families annually, he said. After adopting the policy, the debt was reduced to a total of $20,000 owed by 70 families.

In theory, there should never be a schoolchild in the US who goes hungry at lunchtime. Government-funded programs like The National Free Lunch Program offer free or reduced-cost lunches to millions of US students each year. But the families of many students who qualify opt not to take advantage of such programs – either because of stigma connected to the program or perhaps lack of understanding about how to connect with it.

Also, school officials say, it is not necessarily the parents whose kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (those whose annual household income falls between 130 percent and 185 percent of the 2017-18 federal poverty level) that most often fail to pay. Many times the households that don't pay for lunch are ones that – on paper, anyway – would appear to be able to do so.

Lunch shaming is not necessarily a new problem, but it's one that has increased in intensity in recent months.

“There are a lot of problems we’ve had with stigma and lunch-money status for a long, long time and this has bubbled up as the last war in this area,” says David Just, a professor of economics and psychology at Cornell University, whose research has focused on school lunch programs.

And as the problems have grown worse, the search for solutions – public and private – has become more focused as well.

New Mexico's new law will also require schools to ramp up communication with parents in an effort to boost registration for the free-and-reduced priced lunch, which has been slipping. Meanwhile, the number of students who qualify is on the rise in around 40 percent of school districts across the nation.

Ms. Ramos of New Mexico Appleseed says she believes the USDA's requirement that each school must have a policy will help, as well. The policies might still be "awful," she says, "but I think this is going to put a lot of heat on districts to come up with [something] somewhat humane."

In districts where at least 40 percent of children qualify for free lunch based on data from federal aid programs, schools can claim the Community Eligibility Provision, a status that allows the district to provide free lunch to all students, thus doing away with the lunch-shaming dilemma.

In some school districts, public citizens are coming to the rescue. There was the tweet by New York writer Ashley C. Ford that went viral late last year, and saw people all over the country contact their local schools and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. A motel owner in Burlington, Iowa, paid off the outstanding meal debts of 89 students.

Clarence Richardson and his wife, Anna, both attorneys who moved to Waltham, Mass. two years ago, wanted to give back to their community. Inspired by a Facebook post about some folks in Baltimore doing something similar, they started a GoFundMe page last year to see if they could make a dent in the district’s roughly $7,200 in meal debt.

By the time the campaign closed a month later, they had raised $6,042.

In Farmington, Minor says the district will be setting up an “angel fund” that will make it easy for businesses and individuals to donate.

Two years ago, Farmington had already introduced a kinder policy that allows students with a negative balance to get three more hot meals. After that, they're provided with a different "meal offering," which still meets federal nutrition guidelines and is packaged the same as other lunch options available to all kids.

But soon, under a new district law, the district will be required to soften its policy even further, and Minor says she understands.

“You don’t ever want to have to single a child out,” says Minor, who is mother of two children. “We want to feed them all, and treat them all equally, and give them the best opportunity to excel in school.”

César Hernández/CSIC

Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) researcher Federica Bertocchini with a specimen of a wax worm.

Despite living just six or seven weeks, they may be able to take down an enemy that lingers for centuries.

The lowly caterpillar Galleria mellonella, also known as the wax worm, can digest a type of plastic commonly found in packaging, according to a paper published Monday in Current Biology. The finding continues a string of recently discovered plastic-eating organisms that has some scientists hoping nature might share some of its tricks and help us rid the environment of the alien materials.

The discovery was a true eureka moment. When scientist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini found pesky caterpillars crawling over her homegrown honeycombs, she plucked them off and imprisoned them in the membrane of a plastic bag.

But a short while later she returned to a shocking scene. The worms had made a jailbreak, leaving behind nothing but holes in a shopping bag that could have otherwise far outlived both her and the critters.

"There was only one explanation: the worms had made the holes and had escaped. This project began there and then," explained the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) scientist in a press release.

A battery of tests confirmed Dr. Bertocchini’s assumption. The caterpillars were indeed digesting, not just tearing, the polyethylene, a batch of 100 gobbling up 92 milligrams of the stuff in half a day, “which really is very fast," according to Bertocchini.

César Hernández/CSIC

Plastic biodegraded by 10 worms in 30 minutes.

Collectively we produce hundreds of millions of tons of plastic yearly, of which polyethylene makes up about 40 percent. Perhaps 8 million of those tons end up in the ocean, where they break down into omnipresent shards now making their way as far as the Arctic. What large-scale effects this environmental newcomer could have is completely unknown.

“We don’t know what the damages are of having pieces of plastic in the ocean. I think it’s an uninvited guest,” says Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution senior scientist and ocean pollution researcher Christopher Reddy, who was not involved in the research.

While plastics belong to the same class of large molecules as cotton, fingernails, and wood, their durability makes them tough targets for the little organisms who break down everything else. After all, no one wants a pen that rots.

“We’re designing chemicals and we’re designing products because of their stability. We’re a victim of our own success,” says Dr. Reddy in a phone interview.

But most plastics are made from carbon-rich fossil fuels, a potent source of energy, and one that the wax worm can handle. The adult moth lays eggs in beeswax, which features carbon-carbon bonds much like those found in polyethylene. Bertocchini’s team speculates that the pupae’s plastic-chomping superpower may spring from their ability to digest the wax as they develop.

With this discovery, the caterpillars join a roster of plastic-fighting organisms including last year’s Ideonella sakaiensis bacteria and 2011’s Amazonian fungus, bolstering hopes that nature will show us efficient ways to get rid of our waste.

“Given the fast rate of biodegradation reported here, these findings have potential for significant biotechnological applications,“ the team wrote in their paper.

But real hurdles stand between these iron-gutted organisms and a plastic-free planet, not the least of which is getting them to do our bidding and pick plastic over other, possibly tastier, foods.

“When it comes to microbial breakdown, it’s like asking teenagers to clean their rooms on the weekend,” explains Reddy. “They may do it, they may not do it. They may do a little. They may do the easiest way first.”

Nature tends to takes the path of least resistance, which might lead a handful of very hungry caterpillars to chew their way to freedom. However, scaling up that lab-bench behavior into a plastic processing factory poses many challenges.

“You have to then start thinking about how quickly can you grow a biomass of fungi that could do this. How do you manage bioreactors? How do you corral a bunch of worms to go and eat the plastic?” Reddy wonders.

Even at the “fast rate” of 184 milligrams per day, it would take the 100-worm posse nearly 15 years to dispose of one kilogram of plastic. And we dump about eight billion kilograms into the oceans each year.

Although assembling a bio-army of caterpillars, fungi, and bacteria to munch down our plastic surplus directly may not be a likely solution, scientists suggest we could borrow some inspiration from our creepy-crawly friends.

“If you can recognize that these worms have a tool in their toolbox... perhaps we can insert it into another organism that could be more manageable,” says Reddy.

Bertocchini suspects that tool might be a powerful enzyme, a large molecule that helps along chemical reactions. "We still don’t know the details of how this biodegradation occurs, but there is a possibility that an enzyme is responsible. The next step is to detect, isolate, and produce this enzyme in vitro on an industrial scale," she said.

As for how bio-engineers could pull off that production, paper co-author Paolo Bombelli has an idea. "If we express the enzyme (or enzymes) in E. coli we might be able to produce them in large quantities for a reasonably low cost," he writes in an email, describing a process similar to the one used to manufacture insulin. 

The team of Japanese researchers who isolated the I. sakaiensis bacteria last year took a similar tack, finding two enzymes (which they dubbed PETase and MHETase) capable of breaking up the long chains of plastic molecules found in water bottles. Next they aim to ”enhance the activity level and stability of these newly discovered microbial enzymes.”

Dr. Bombelli, a plant biochemistry professor at Cambridge University, suspects studying the wax worm will yield a new plastic-attacking enzyme.  

Even if application proves impractical, Reddy welcomes the chance to learn from the ultimate professor, at least on the level of pure research.

“Frankly, it’s exciting science,” says Reddy. “Nature is the best chemist, and we have to celebrate that.”