WASHINGTON, D.C. – Federal lawmakers are reviving talks of temporarily relaxing lunch restrictions championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as an increasing number of schools are dropping out of the National School Lunch Program.

House Republicans last summer pushed for a one-year waiver from federal restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium and other aspects of school food implemented in 2012 as part of the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act, but aggressive lobbying by Michelle Obama and her husband’s promise to veto the legislation essentially killed its momentum.

The waivers, which would allow schools that have lost money on their meal programs over the last six months to opt out of the standards, are now part of negotiations over “a catchall spending bill to keep government programs running,” the Associated Press reports.

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“All these things are part of a negotiation,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told the news service. “I think we’ll get something, but we’ll have to see where it ends up.”

The waivers could provide much needed relief from what many food service directors describe as unnecessarily tight restrictions that have led to a massive student exodus from school lunch rolls. Well over a million students have stopped buying lunch at schools across the country, according to GAO report.

The school food regulations have also led to over $1 billion in food waste because of provisions that mandate each student take a fruit or vegetable, whether they want it or not. The waste, combined with the lost lunch revenues, have convinced hundreds of school districts – from Wyoming to New York – to ditch the National School Lunch Program and the federal subsidies that come with it to serve students healthy foods they want to eat and to salvage their self-sustaining programs.

In Wyoming’s Sheridan County District One, for example, business manager Jeremy Smith told Wyoming Public Media “there were just too many complaints” about foods prepared within the federal restrictions to continue with the National School Lunch Program.

The district witnessed a 20 percent surge in lunch sales this year after dropping out, Smith said.

“Universally, it was, ‘We are starving. We are hungry. This isn’t enough food for us.’ But we couldn’t blame them, because I looked at that school lunch and said, ‘I wouldn’t eat it either,’” Smith told the news site.

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“A one-size-fits-all program doesn’t work everywhere,” the district’s food service director, Dennis Decker, told WPM.

“And I also think that food is a little too personal to make a law. You can tell someone they can’t speed, but I don’t think you can tell everybody what they have to eat every day,” he said.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., doesn’t seem to agree.

Last Friday, Pelosi included “lowering standards for school lunches for our children” as one of a handful of “very destructive riders” that Democrats would be unwilling to accept in current negotiations, the AP reports.

Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said the day prior that the waiver was part of ongoing negotiations between the House and Senate.

Alabama Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt has led the charge to include the waivers in the encompassing spending bill, according to the news service.